LV2 1.0 released, what’s next? (Libre Graphics World) [LWN.net]

Here's an article in Libre Graphics World on the LV2 audio plugin mechanism (which just had its 1.0 release) and where things are going from here. "I am, on one hand, amazed when I see time stamps on LV2 stuff from over 5 years again. It doesn't seem like we've come very far for that long. On the other hand, when I first got in to audio development, all we had was LADSPA. Now, I have a plug-in interface with which (for example) I can build a modular synth that uses exclusively standard plug-ins to process any kind of data, and the modular synth itself can be one of those plug-ins, where the UI communicates with the engine entirely through the plug-in API which is network transparent."

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LV2 1.0 released, what’s next? (Libre Graphics World)

Posted Apr 24, 2012 13:37 UTC (Tue) by navaati (subscriber, #82114) [Link]

You can have networks with very low latency.

The kernel has been patched for real-time scheduling, that is (very roughly) "prioritizing the right thing", which is a mean to achieve a constant latency. It's orthogonal to pure latency performances.

LV2 1.0 released, what’s next? (Libre Graphics World)

Posted Apr 25, 2012 7:54 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (subscriber, #51848) [Link]

> prioritizing the right thing

Ah, right, of course. It's about guaranteeing a certain latency, not just making stuff insanely quick.

Thanks for putting me right :)

LV2 1.0 released, what’s next? (Libre Graphics World)

Posted Apr 25, 2012 17:52 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Yeah, live musicians often learn to live with significant hard latency. It's not ideal, but it's a reality even without electric amplification (let alone electronic instruments or an actual computer). An ordinary piano incurs a tiny but just noticeable latency between the moment you press a key and the moment that the sound is emitted to an audience. Musicians adjust to it.

But random fluctuations in latency are just horrible, you can't learn to cope with that. So that's what the Real Time Audio people beat out of a system to make it usable for live performance.

Sub-millisecond latency is quite possible on a LAN, so replacing poor old MIDI and thick audio cables with a bunch of Ethernet is theoretically just fine, so long as you can get the software to be reliable enough.

LV2 1.0 released, what’s next? (Libre Graphics World)

Posted Apr 26, 2012 3:56 UTC (Thu) by naptastic (subscriber, #60139) [Link]

Sorry if I derail the conversation here, but actually, the latency being mentioned here is between when you (for example) turn a knob on your synth plugin UI and when it starts affecting the plugin. This is distinct from the latency between your instrument and your ear, or between the soundcard input and output.

UI latency doesn't matter nearly as much as the other kinds. If it takes 50ms for the twist of an EQ knob to change your sound, you're not going to notice. So having that be completely network-transparent is a really good thing, and is unlikely to cause any problems even if the network it's running over is less than optimal.