[gmpi] Re: High level milestone plan (long message)

Ron.
The challenge is we assume that we will be able to easily wrap GMPI parameters within a VST, AU or DirectX wrapper.

Hi Ron,
The SynthEdit plugin API is broadly similar to GMPI. Parameter updates are sample-accurate events. SynthEdit also specifies that the plugin DSP need not be re-entrant.
Wrapping that in VST proved difficult, but not impossible. VST's setParameter() for example is called from multiple threads. So it's pretty challenging getting it all working smoothly.

But I'm pretty confidant we can provide good wrappers. There's people here who have written excellent VST-DXi wrappers too (Angus I believe?).

Backward compatibility is very important, but I hope the focus of GMPI is not only as a wrapper.
Acceptance of GMPI may be a gradual process, but I do see a good future for an independent plugin standard, especialy one supported by well respected body such as the MMA and a major sequencer vendor such as Cakewalk.

Best Regards,
Jeff McClintock


The opportunity is, there may be some interest in the MMA hardware community for a parameter discovery and control mechanism such as the one we are planning for GMPI. It might really help our efforts to get input from the hardware vendors on this slice of the GMPI protocol. IMO it would be a huge design win if something like Chris Grigg's proposed message format could be massaged into something that hardware vendors would like to use, too. Maybe nailing down the final ultimate parameter mechanism needs to be another milestone?


Based on these musings, I suggest we phase GMPI implementation using in the following milestones.

M1: Establish coding standards, create basic skeleton modules for Win, Mac and *nix. (Currently underway.)

M2: Define base C interface to the GMPI core object. This interface will not initially address packaging, registration, meta-data or UI.

M3: Create a simple volume control plugin (headless) using the base C interface, plus command line test harness.

M4: Implement wrappers for VST (PC), VST (Mac), Audio Units and DirectX. These wrappers will be constructed as projects in the IDE of choice (TBD) for each platform. These wrappers will be headless. The projects will statically link to the simple volume control plugin.

M5: Create a simple sine wave synthesizer using the base C interface, plus command line harness. This synth will be MIDI controllable only.

M6: Update the wrappers that were created in M4 so that they support a MIDI controllable software synthesizer.

(***) Note that M1-M6 do not require involvement in the MMA. By the end of M6 we wil have created something very close to a universal plugin wrapper, and that will be significant achievement onto itself.


Thoughts?



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