[gmpi] Re: Out-of-Band: suggestion for rethink

On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Marc Poirier wrote:

> With respect to Angus' comments about VST, well, I'm not really sure what
> you're proposing.  Using VST as a basis is not an option, Steinberg has
> already clearly stated that.

Absolutely. But following the basic, brute-simple design concept is one of
the many paths GMPI can take.

> The owners of DX and AU are open to that
> sort of thing, though, so those are more viable.  But even if we could
> start from VST, what is it that you want to get from that?  I know that
> you know (you acknowlege it) that there are a few critical flaws and a
> bunch of more minor flaws that we'd need to address.  After doing that, I
> can't imagine that we'd have something backwards compatible with today's
> VST.  So we don't ease adoption that way anyway.  Which I think is what
> you see as the big advantage of VST, but so far as I see, we would lose
> that, so I'm not sure what you're trying to propose or why.

No, I'm not at all looking for backwards compatibility. Some of the flaws
are too glaring to address whilst maintaining that.

> Also, I really disagree with this comment from Angus:
>
> > Other SDKs have some "nice" features missing in VST, but so far the
> > level of adoption of those features by hosts and plugins is virtually
> > zero and there just doesn't seem to be customer demand for it.
>
> I think that developers maybe get used to VST and its shortcomings and
> stop thinking about them so much, but I certainly do think that customers
> want them addressed.  For years, I have gotten emails regularly (every few
> days) either complaining about something or reporting a "bug" with various
> plugins that I've worked on, problems that all result from some
> shortcomings in VST, ones that are addressed by some other APIs.

OK, then you should definitely submit a review of VST, because I honestly
have not seen those flaws. Like I say there are annoyances that should be
fixed, but by and large it's a case of functionality that's implemented in
an annoying or clumsy way rather than "vital" things that aren't there at
all.

> I think that it's just
> developer complacency, begrudgingly just accepting the terms of VST, not
> that everyone is happy with it and doesn't care about the improvements
> that other APIs have brought, that's completely contrary to my experiences
> with tons of users.

Are you talking about developers or users? Honestly as a plugin developer
I've never wanted anything that a well-implemented VST host can't deliver
(let's not talk about all the ways it's possible to implement VST badly!),
and as a developer of medium-complexity hosts, I find well-implemented VST
plugins to be, by and large, an adequate system. And yes, I've written
both DX and AU plugins and hosts. Without getting in to specifics, DX is
all-round painful, and AU's absolute beauty as a platform for very simple
hosts evaporates pretty quick once you're doing something more complex..
or rather, the fact that VST is 5x more complicated to host than AU,
which is ridiculously easy, is not that important in the big picture of
host complexity... YES, it does take a 500-1,000 line class to
encapsulate VST nicely for a host, but it only has to be written once and
a "VST-like" GMPI standard could provide that.

Anyway, I'll save the rest for my review... Marc, perhaps you could mail
me on or off list with your view of VST's worst shortcomings, I'd like to
analyse that as part of my review.

Regards,
        Angus.


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