KXStudio : News

> Ildaeil v1.0 released
On 2022-02-21 by falkTX

Hello everyone, another release is here, this time it is Ildaeil.
Something that was initially done as a test for Carla and ImGui usage within DPF, but turns out to be actually quite useful!
To those that are not up to date on KXStudio developments, let's recap this little new project...

Ildaeil is mini-plugin host working as a plugin allowing one-to-one plugin format reusage.
The idea is to load it as a plugin inside your DAW and then the other "real" plugin inside Ildaeil.
This allows, for example, a VST3 host to load LV2 plugins.

For the more technically-minded people, this is basically a combination of Carla, DPF and DPF-Widgets.
There is some small code of its own for handling the drawing of the plugin list, generic GUI and offset the embed GUIs, but everything else is done by these other projects.
Nothing that Ildaeil does is special, that Carla can't do, but using Carla means always having to deal with an extra window.
When wanting to load a single LV2 plugin on a non-LV2 supported host for example, this becomes quite cumbersome.
With a little bit of glue code to tie up Carla, DPF and a little GUI, this project becomes possible.

Example

Here is an example, loading the LV2-specific plugin Aether inside Renoise, which does not support LV2 plugins.

You can see more of these screenshots here.

Details

The Ildaeil name comes from the korean 일대일, which means "one to one".
It is one plugin exposed to the host (Ildaeil itself) and one plugin loaded inside Ildaeil.

When open, Ildaeil will show a list of plugins to pick from or the plugin editor if one is already selected.
If the plugin provides an embedable UI, Ildaeil show will that by default, otherwise it shows a generic parameter list.
Toggling between generic vs custom/embed view is possible.
In the case of a plugin providing a custom UI that is not embedable, Ildaeil will show the generic view by default.
You can press "Show Custom GUI" to open the plugin UI in an external window.

For version 1.0, this is what we have:

• Available as JACK/Standalone, LV2, VST2 and VST3 (with VST3 being experimental)
• Can load internal (from Carla) and LV2 plugins
• Comes in Synth, FX and MIDI variants
• LV2 plugins can run in-process or bridged
• Works on macOS, Windows and Linux/X11 systems

And these are the current limitations:

• Plugin parameters are not exposed to the host
• UI is not resizable by the host

Later on, in theory, it should be able to load the other plugin formats supported by Carla (that being LADSPA, DSSI, VST2, VST3 and AU).
There are some technical limitations that prevent this from happening right now, Carla will need some backend changes before this can happen.

Note that exposing the parameters to the host is not in the immediate plans.

Downloads

There are pre-compiled binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows which can downloaded at https://github.com/DISTRHO/Ildaeil/releases/tag/v1.0.
You can also find it in the KXStudio repositories as ildaeil package.

Have fun!