Re: [Audacity-devel] Current feelings on plugins?

[Leland <aud...@ho...>]

On 11/21/06 3:40 AM, "Markus Meyer" <me...@me...> wrote:

> Leland,
> 
> awesome! If you make the plugin interface (header files) use a less
> restrictive license (like BSD) then this could allow us all sorts of
> nice things license-wise, like the VST Enabler does. Or not? Dominic?
> 
BSD it is or whatever is deemed appropriate.  Makes no difference to me as
long as Audacity can use 'em. :-)

> On a related note, what is the current opinion on DirectX/DirectSound
> support? I see that DirectSound support has not been included into the
> 1.3.2 Windows installer. I distantly remember that Dominic once wanted
> to support DirectX plugins and said that this would be compatible with
> the GPL because DirectX (sort-of) comes with Windows. At least my copies
> of Windows 2000, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows XP did ship with
> DirectX. Also, some other GPL projects (mostly games) also use DirectX
> and I'm not aware of any license problems yet. So what was the rationale
> behind not including Portaudio v19's DirectSound support into the 1.3.2
> Windows installer? I'm asking this not because I'm so interested in
> DirectSound, but because Portaudio v19 also provides a host api for
> WDM_KS (that uses DirectSound headers) which would allow us to natively
> support low-latency multichannel sound recording on Windows.
> 
There was a thread before release about it without a firm resolution.  I
believe the concern was that when building, you still have to include
DirectSound headers and link against the dsound.lib.  But, I'm not sure this
is a real problem since the actual libraries are dynamically loaded at
runtime.

The WDM_KS API doesn't work as-is.  It is currently disabled, but I hacked
it up just to see if I could get it to work and was "successful" at playback
and capture.  It was a complete hack job as I didn't really take the time to
understand the portaudio internals, but it did work.

If the PA folks are soliciting maintainers for "abandoned" APIs (and Ross
doesn't want to do it), then I may take up the task.

Leland