[ardour-dev] plugin presets

[fons adriaensen]

On Sun, Jun 05, 2005 at 04:37:53PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:

> find the preset label in a line containing hasLabel. look on the left
> and read the genid. remove all lines for that genid.

Thanks. There's just one small problem. There are several plugins
having the same preset name, and I do not want to remove them all.
How do I find the right plugin (the names are not in the file AFAICS) ?
 
> i don't like this
> syntax, its grotesque and ugly and complex. but it has properties that
> cannot easily be obtained from the "standard text format" typicall
> used by unix programs.

I'm sure there are some such properties, but do they matter ?
I can see the purpose for an application that has to make sense
of whatever information is thrown at it, e.g. a web browser. 
But for an audio app ? The presets file is meaningless unless
you know what a LADSPA plugin is in the first place. And if we
assume you know, and this knowledge will be encoded in the app,
it can be much simpler.

> what is required here is not a new format, but
> an easy way to do the deletion (or rename, or whatever) from within
> ardour.

Agreed. While I'm here, there are some other oddities:

- When you add outputs to the 'auditioner' strip, these are
  not saved in the session.

Maybe it doesn't make sense at all to do this. How is the
routing/panning from tracks to auditioner outputs done ?
It looks simple when you use only mono and stereo. For formats
like Ambisonics, it gets more complicated. How to route a B-format
track to a stereo monitor ? Or how a stereo track to a six-speaker
monitoring system ? Normally this is taken care of by the routing
and panning in the mixer strips, but the whole point about the
auditioner is that these ar bypassed.

There are some other things that get lost when a session is 
saved/restored:

- The option 'auto connect new tracks' (always on)
- The option 'use plugins while recording' (always off)

Concerning the latter, why should this ever be 'off' ?
The plugins are never in the recording path of a track,
unless you mix some tracks to a new one, and then you
probably want them there.

-- 
FA