KXStudio : News

> KXStudio Monthly Report (October 2021)
On 2021-10-31 by falkTX

Hello all, another one of those monthly reports about the KXStudio project is here.
As you might have seen a few days ago we had v2.4.1 Carla release.
I was hoping to do a JACK2 release as well, but was busy with other things and did not have it ready on time. Next time then.

DPF + VST3 on pause

While VST3 support in DPF has advanced enough to load already in quite a few hosts, I got personally annoyed with it after finding out the way I did the UI/DSP separation is just completely wrong. :(
Working with the internals of VST3 has been quite frustrating, so just taking a little break from it.
Currently still going with the target of finalizing VST3 support in DPF (at least in beta-like status) by the end of the year.

I want to say, dealing with VST3 internals has made me appreciate LV2 even more.
VST3 has some good design choices and ideas, but parts of it are also just awful and nonsensical.
Hopefully after the initial implementation is done we do not have to change it much.

ImGui rendering issues fixed

Last month I reported about Dear ImGui being integrated as a DPF widget, with only some high-dpi rendering issues remaining.
Happy to report that this is finalized and tested to work on a couple of different configurations.
I might do a quick plugin set from porting existing audio software to DPF, as a way to 100% verify ImGui in DPF.
But for now Ildaeil (more on that below) has served as a nice test-case.

JSFX as plugin type in Carla

Jean Pierre Cimalando has started work on adding JSFX "plugin" support for Carla.
JSFX has nothing to do with JavaScript, but rather it originally comes from REAPER's extended audio processing capabilities.
They have defined a format for writing audio plugins that can be written and compiled on the fly.
This work from Jean is not yet complete, but great progress has already been made.
It is likely to end up on the next Carla release.

A little new test-project: Ildaeil

One crucial point for me accepting JSFX support in Carla was that it couldn't be limited to just Carla.
But this support being added directly in Carla doesn't help with that.. or does it?

Announcing Ildaeil! (sorta.. read on)
In case you do not know, Zrythm is using Carla as backend to deal with non-LV2 plugins.
Some of the things it uses were never properly tested in Carla or any other software, making it hard to fix bugs.
This combined with wanting JSFX on more hosts than just Carla and ImGui now fully working in DPF has given me enough motivation to try out a new project that would just combine everything into one.
This project is called "Ildaeil".

Ildaeil is basically Carla as a minified plugin, where instead of running the full GUI you have a super minimal GUI and set of features.
It uses DPF for the plugin-side (that is, to be an LV2, VST2 and VST3 plugin) and then Carla for the plugin hosting side. A bridge between the 2 worlds, basically.
For now I made it so that it lists the available LV2 plugins on the system and allows to load 1 from the list, embedding its custom GUI if possible.

This is not really an announcement because I have not yet decided the full scope of the project.
There are a LOT of things it could do, but then it becomes quite the work to maintain.
If you want to give it a try, feel free. But reports are welcome, feature requests are not (at this point).

Separating JACK tools from JACK1 and JACK2

For a very long time I have been meaning to merge back the changes done in JACK examples and tools from JACK2 back to JACK1.
Back in JACK2 v1.9.15 release I stated that help on this would be appreciated, but not much has happened since then.
Now that PipeWire is slowly becoming a thing, this is becoming crucial.

For distributions like Arch that do not typically split packages (hypothetically) installing pipewire-jack would remove jack2 and replace it with PipeWire's version.
But the tools like jack_connect, jack_wait, etc are part of the jack2 package, not pipewire-jack.
Installing pipewire-jack would (hypothetically) remove these tools.
There are quite a few set ups out there that rely on them, so a solution is needed here.

David Runge has started the effort of splitting these tools from the JACK repositories into a new one.
The idea is that JACK will no longer ship with them, and they become an extra set of tools to install separately.
This allows to switch between JACK versions (JACK1, JACK2 or PipeWire) and keep the same exact set of tools.

We will need to have new JACK1 and JACK2 versions that remove these tools before the new project can be officially tagged and released.
More news on this soon.

 

That is all for now.
There were a couple of other things done in DPF and a few other projects, but something I will cover in upcoming months.
If you appreciate the kind of work I do, please consider a donation.
Thank you in advance for your support, and stay safe out there!