KXStudio : News

> Another DISTRHO-Ports update
On 2020-12-28 by falkTX

Hello again, another release of the DISTRHO-Ports project is here.
DISTRHO is an open-source project with the goal of making cross-platform audio plugins and GNU/Linux + LV2 ports.
This release relates to the GNU/Linux and LV2 ports.

Just like last time, this is yet again a more packager-focused release rather than user-focused.
The biggest changes this time relate to bringing DISTRHO's JUCE fork up to date with upstream, together with updating the LV2 wrapper.
Additionally, macOS and Windows support was fixed and tested to work, at least for LV2 plugins.
(most of these plugins already have VST2 or AU for those 2 platforms, so the focus in on LV2 here)

A new plugin was added, CHOW, but mostly only because I required a fresh plugin to test the new JUCE codebase.
Do note that new plugins can now build as LV2, VST2 and VST3 for GNU/Linux, which is nice to see.
I want to create a little article/tutorial explaining how to port existing plugins into this project, but that will come at a later date.

For now, the intention is to have all the ground-work needed for fresh plugins and LV2 ports.
This ties up nicely with the upcoming PawPaw project, as we will soon have all these ports working as LV2 in macOS and Windows.

Here is a quick screenshot I just took on macOS, Ardour loading a couple LV2 versions of DISTRHO-Ports.
PS: This is a arm64/M1 build.

Because everyone loves changelogs, here it is for the full changes since last release 5 months ago:

• Add CHOW plugin (used to test updated JUCE)
• Include new and legacy JUCE in source code (legacy JUCE will only receive bug-fixes)
• Rebase DISTRHO-Ports patches against JUCE6 codebase, available in libs/juce-current/patches
• Fix LV2 wrapper to build against latest JUCE
• Fix build for macOS, including universal builds
• Fix build for Windows (using mingw)
• General cleanup to build system

There are no pre-compiled binaries for this release, though the plugins are fully up-to-date in the KXStudio repositories.
You can find this 2020-12-27 release at github.com/DISTRHO/DISTRHO-Ports/releases.