I've made it where you can enable and disable via experimentals:
EXPERIMENTAL_REALTIME_EFFECTS
EXPERIMENTAL_EFFECTS_RACK
You will notice that, as of now, the only effects currently set up for
realtime are VSTs. Now that this is in, I will start converting the
rest.
As I start to convert the effects, the astute of you may notice that
they no longer directly access tracks or any "internal" Audacity
objects. This isolates the effects from changes in Audacity and makes
it much easier to add new ones.
Anyway, all 3 platforms can now display VST effects in graphical mode.
Yes, that means Linux too. There are quite a few VSTs for Linux if
you search for them.
The so-called "rack" definitely needs some discussion, work, and attention
from someone much better at graphics than me. I'm not really sure it should
stay in as-is. I'd originally planned for it to be simply a utility window
where you can store your (preconfigured) favorite effects. It should probably
revert back to that idea.
You may notice that this DOES include the API work I did. The realtime effects
were too tied to it and I didn't want to redo the whole thing. As I mentioned
elsewhere, the API stuff may or may not be very future proof.
So, let the critter complaints commence. I absolute KNOW there will be some.
(I know I'll be hearing from the Linux peeps pretty darn quickly. ;-))
We can't go to 3.0.1 yet as there are still build issues on
Linux and OSX. You can get Windows to build, but there's
still some display issues.
These changes should work with wxWidgets 2.8.12 as well, so
we can take our time to get things working properly before
switching over.
I can't believe two things...
I can't believe I didn't test the textual display! I'm really ashamed about that.
And I can't believe that we've never had anyone report a crash when attempting to
using the textual display with plugins that do not supply textual parameters. Some
examples are the ones from BBE Sound.
I went back to Audacity 2.0 and they would crash there as well. I'd wager they
probably always caused Audacity to crash.
Not much can be done except to fall back to the graphical display.
Bugs fixed:
1) When scanning for VSTs on Mac, bogus lines could show up in the list if the .vst
file had more than one Info.plist in the bungle. GRM and TAL plugins exhibited
this issue.
2) When scanning for VSTs on Mac, reuse of a variable caused the plugin to be
accepted even though it was a synth. So it would show up in the Generate menu.
3) I recently disabled the the plugin list dialog once the OK button was clicked
to prevent clicking it again. This was overkill and prevented clicking Cancel
while the scan was running. So, changed it to only disable the OK button.
4) The new Settings dialog would save the settings even if you clicked Cancel.
5) Detecing the overlay window on Mac didn't work in all cases. Did more research
and I believe the revised method is correct. (Window list is z-order sorted)
6) When changing the preset from the top combo, the return value from the
plugin was not check when getting the current preset (program). It assumed
that there was always an active program. This is not at all correct.
Most of the new additions are an attempt to be more compatible with more plugins.
I have not found any plugins that crash Audacity anymore, so I'm not sure how to
really give these changes a good workout. However, Guitar Rig 5 and Reaktor 5
are now quite usable since one of the additions was window resizing.
1) Refreshed the aeffectx.h header from the LMSS project and merged in some
additional changes from Ardour.
2) Changed the method prototypes to reflect the new aeffectx.h header.
3) Plugin scan dialog now has a "Select All" and "Clear All" buttons. (On a
personal note, this was a major boon while testing...way easier to include
a single VST.)
4) Uses a timer now instead of the wxIdleEvent to send effIdle messages to the
plugin. Idle could be all many times more than was necessary.
5) Process level is now reported when requested by the plugin. Don't know how
useful it is, but many plugins request it.
6) Two new events are sent to the dialog from the audioMaster callback to support
window updating and resizing. Figured it was safer this way since the callback
"might" be called from a different thread (as far as I could figure out anyway).
7) Current sample rate is now returned to the plugin when requested.
8) The dialog now resizes when the plugin informs us of a size change to its window.
This was one of the major drawbacks to using Guitar Rig and Reaktor as their
window would resize and pretty much be useless since the dialog didn't adjust to
the new size. Kontakt was another that even includes a draggable resizer in the
bottom right corner which the dialog supports just fine now. (Not that Kontakt
is actually supported though.)
9) The preset bar is now updated when the plugin informs us of "major" changes with
the UpdateDisplay opcode. I noticed that when changing presets within Guitar
Rig, the preset bar didn't change.
Discovered limitation:
Guitar Rig and, it seems, other plugins will only report a maximum of 128 presets (or
rather programs) even if they support more. I'd figure out a way to populate the
combo with all of the presets via some major hackage, but it didn't do any good since
Guitar Rig simply refused to set any program number above 128.
Not much can be done about this...just a heads up.
The buffer delay compensation resolves the issue where an effect
may add a delay to the output. This would cause the output to shift
and the final samples to get chopped off.
The settings (click Settings on any VST dialog) dialog allows the user
to enable/disable the BDC and to set their desired buffer size (within
reason) to help improve performance.
In addition it fixes a bug in the plugin scan list were you could click
OK twice and have two scans going, eventually asserting.
1) Following request from Gale scanning for VSTs will be prompted for every time you start, until it completes successfully OR you ask for it not to happen in preferences. Also it will happen if the plugns.cfg is empty.
2) UP and DOWN no longer toggle the checkmark too. SPACE does.
