[Ardour-Dev] VST state support

[Олег Шаронов]

> > There are a couple of issues with this patch:
> >
> > - Ardour doesn't know when a plugin state has changed and therefore
> > doesn't ask wether to save the project on exit.
> 
> 
> i'll think about this. i think it would be better to encode the chunk state
> and put it into the session file. VST (unlike AU) has no real standard for
> sharing presets/settings across DAWs.

I think you are wrong. FXP/FXB formats are included in VST SDK as I remember, 
and widely used by DAWs and some VST plug-ins themselves. You can check at
kvraudio, many vst presets are distributed in FXP/FXB format.
I hope that this format will be supported by Ardour in the future for 
managing VST presets and banks. The format is quite primitive and no
SDK required to code support for it.

But about including VST chunk in project file, I think this would be better,
cause having multiple versions of session will lead to huge amount of separate
files of plug-in settings, which will be hard to maintain and not really 
needed to access them separately. Some of samplers (like short circuit 2 for
example) even store samples inside the preset chunk, so session file can be
30mb big, but I don't think this is really a problem.
Also, when saving the session file, host should store the whole patch bank of 
VST, not only single patch, otherwise it will lead to bugs with some of VST
plug-ins. You probably know this.

Another thing I'd like to draw attention to is missing plug-ins stubbing.
When you load a project and some VST plug-in is missing, it's settings
shouldn't be thrown away. This is very important when working on same project
on different computers. For example you can give your project for editing,
where plug-ins don't really matter, and when you get your edited project back,
it will be opened with the same effects and settings as it was before editing.

Maybe that's too many requests, but they really matter in the a workflow.
Thanks.