Now that Manage... is at the top, there is less reason to shorten the menu. Forum team were strongly in favour of more rather than fewer effects being enabled by default.
As usual, I started out intending to do as little as possible
to this to get it working and wound up going overboard.
However, I believe it does allow easy management of the effects
and this will provide a basis for the full blown plugin manager
dialog.
This brings the builtin, LV2, and VAMP effects inline with the
Audio Units, LADSPA, and VST effects. All effects now share
a common UI.
This gives all effects (though not implemented for all):
User and factory preset capability
Preset import/export capability
Shared or private configuration options
Builtin effects can now be migrated to RTP, depending on algorithm.
LV2 effects now support graphical interfaces if the plugin supplies one.
Nyquist prompt enhanced to provide some features of the Nyquist Workbench.
It may not look like it, but this was a LOT of work, so trust me, there
WILL be problems and everything effect related should be suspect. Keep
a sharp eye (or two) open.
They now work on Yosemite.
AudioUnits with a custom Cocoa UI now display graphically
instead of reverting to the generic view
The Cocoa version of the generic view is now used when
needed...instead of the Carbon version.
The order of UI preference is Cocoa, Carbon, Generic,
unless force to Generic view user setting.
They now support realtime preview.
They also support dialog resizing as I found many that
scaled nicely (mostly Apple's).
Uses the new Effect format so now supports user and
factory presets.
NOTE: Be VERY critical when testing this as I've
never written Objective-C or Cocoa code
before!
I've added some of the new plugin stuff to LV2, Nyquist, and
Vamp so that they play better in the new system. They no
longer get bunched in with the Audacity effects when sorting
or grouping the menus. They have not been fully converted
but they should be good for 2.1.0.
Nyquist plugins now include ";author" and ";copyright"
statements.
Added the 4 new Nyquist plugins to the Windows build.
Audiounits are still coming...had to push them to the back
burner to get this other stuff out of the way.
Scanning for new plugins has been improved so that newly
discovered ones will be shown to the user when Audacity starts.
Effects menu sorting has been fixed and improved.
Disabling effect types in Preferences works again and you
no longer have to restart Audacity for them the change to work.
Effect usage in chains works again.
Plugin registration dialog code simplified a bit.
Group names in the pluginregistry are now base64 encoded. I
never really thought about it, but wxFileConfig group names
are case insensitive and since I was using the group name as
the plugin ID, I ran into a conflict on Linux where there
were two plugins with the same name, just different case. (And
they were different plugins.) Hoping all of this will change
when/if the config file gets converted to XML. (wx3 if finally
including XML support)
A fair amount of cleanup of this new code has been done and
will continue as more stuff is converted.
This also (hopefully) corrects some additional problems in general
realtime support. Particular focus should be given to the handling
of various combinations of stereo, left channel mono, right channel
mono, and true mono as this has been a particularly troublesome
area.
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. ;-))