Re: [Audacity-devel] A few questions after long absence from Audacity & writing Nyquist plugs

[David R. S. <dav...@sh...>]

Hi Gale,

Thanks very much for answering my questions.

David: 
> ;version 1 Nyquist plug-ins started in Audacity 1.1.1; 
> ;version 2 plug-ins started in 1.2.4; and, 
> ;version 3 plug-ins started in 1.3.4 beta.

I was still rather asleep at the Nyquist wheel when I asked the
question - I just confirmed for myself that I'd written a Nyquist
help page at

http://www.shellworld.net/~davidsky/ny-help.htm

;version 1 and ;version 3 Nyquist start times (in which Audacity
version) are correct, I've written Audacity 1.2.? for ;version 2
plugs, so I'm still unsure about this. And I just realized: it
wouldn't take much for me to check for myself once my Windows
computer is back which Audacity version first accepted a ;version
2 plug.

Re ability to save Nyquist plug-in settings somewhere so user-
defined settings could be saved for future use:

Gale: 
> DS hypothesises it is code missing in 'the bridge', whatever that
> is.

David: 
I saw this somewhere long ago: the bridge is code which connects
Nyquist with Audacity so that Nyquist plugs would be recognized and
understood (made useable) by Audacity.

I've been thinking further about this, and it does seem to me the
possibility of file-destructive behavior(s) could be opened by
allowing code-writing as I've suggested. And I've come up with a
compromise, although someone with much more programming experience
than I would need to implement this into Audacity itself:

a ;version 4 plug which would have an additional button which would
add to the 'cancel' and 'run' buttons, eg. 'save setting'. So that
after a user setting was selected to be saved by the user, Audacity
would save the settings which would be accessible as a plug-in
setting at a later use of the same plug.

The original version of the plug-in would be called 'Default', and
subsequent additions could be named by the user.

Now that I've worked this out, I can see this would take a lot of
additional code work which I am completely unknowledgeable about at
this point.

Gale:
> The Wiki page never got fully finished due to higher priorities
> (and probably we should not have tried to go listing all the 
> plug-in parameters and what they meant)

David:
In that case I could add code to each new plug which would allow
the user to select which setting to be explained, as I did with
either my most recent sequencer or chorus/flanger, at least one of
these was unfinished last November when I started my break.

So the explanatory information would be available to anyone who
chose to download and install said plug-in. Just a simple brief
explanation about each plug in general would reduce the amount of
'clutter' on the Nyquist download page. It would take a lot of work
for me to update all my presently-working plug-ins to this format,
but once I've worked out a comfortable way of doing this the
simplification/conversion process would go faster.

Gale:
> Clipfix is very popular and there was a big Forum discussion if
> it could be modified to handle "inverted" clipping, and to 
> process faster:

David:
I forget who wrote Clipfix, I wonder if Nyquist author Roger
Dannenberg could streamline it to address such issues? - the author
to my understanding wrote it up as an 'overnight'  personal
chalenge.

Gale:
> From users' perspective, I think the most popular ones we could
> add to Audacity might be sequencer, flanger/chorus (this seemed
> to have problems when I had a quick look at it), and Binaural 
> Tones with Surf 2 (already very functional?)

David:
I first need to get my computer back, then install Audacity 1.2.4
and 1.3.5 beta, install said plug-ins and check whether and how
they are working.

Gale:
> I assume that when 1.4 finally comes out, we would drop version
> 1 or 2 plug-ins where there is something better in Version 3?

David:
;version 1 & 2 plugs work just fine 'as is', it's more the type of
user interface which requires different versions, such as
alphanumeric (as opposed to just numeric) inputs which was
introduced in ;version 2 plugs.

Thanks

David

-- 
David R. Sky
http://www.shellworld.net/~davidsky/