Hi!
Airwindows Consolidated is a new plugin with nearly 400 stereo effects in a single plugin, which builds as an LV2. Haven’t tested on a PI but no reason to think it won’t build. May be of interest to your project here, or may also be of interest to your more traditional DAW based projects.
https://www.airwindows.com/consolidated/
Just letting you know in case its of interest
Hi @baconpaul 
Thanks for this, I will check it out. It sure looks very interesting!
Thanks @baconpaul!
I have compiled the LV2 (and all the other stuff which took ages… - I really must figure out how to limit the build and to reuse exsiting instances of juceaid). It appears in the “Other” category and can be loaded in Zynthian and the GUI loads in VNC. It consumes about 3% JACK CPU in idle but it has exposed an error in Zynthian UI that I need to fix before proceeding with my testing.
Great. I don’t think I do anything special but if there’s changes you need please feel free to open GitHub issues
The effect type is not a param but it is a preset. The params will dynamically change their name and display methodology which I know works fine in clap au and vst3 but which I haven’t tested in lv2 although it’s just plain juce here nothing special
Hope it’s useful!
Actually - after adding the presets the bug in Zynthian is masked. (I must remember to look into it though.) It runs well and the presets allow us to use it despite the Zynthian shortcoming of not being able to access any JUCE based plugin parameters. (We will fix that…) You can access the GUI vie VNC to drive it. I will have more of a play later. Thanks @baconpaul!
Wonderful
I am loving reading the great, informal but informative descriptions of each effect. These are shown in the GUI and have distracted me from actually listening to any of them yet. (I am accessing remotely so not next to the sound source.) It is super cool that there is so much information provided. I look forward to hearing these later.
One thing I noticed when I compiled the plugin is that it automatically installed (to ~/.lv2). I would expect to be able to build and install seperately.
How can I install it?
The slow way - follow the instructions on the github site.
The easy way - wait until we add to Zynthian distribution - I want to validate they fit okay first and am aware that Zynthian does not currently support adjusting the parameters so the plugin kinda disappears when added to an instrument chain. (You can’t even see its preset list which is likely a Zynthian bug.)
Or you could unzip this file to /usr/local/lib/lv2/ then in webconf “Search for Engines” and “Search for Presets”.
airwindows.zip (5.3 MB)
Oh shoot did I leave copy after build on! I’m sorry I can toggle that to off and make it a cmake option today
Or you could unzip this file to
/usr/local/lib/lv2/then in webconf “Search for Engines” and “Search for Presets”.
airwindows.zip (5.3 MB)
done, thanks
I read [baconpaul] updated the plugin: it is enough to replace
the old Airwindows Consolidated.lv2 with the new ones?
Copy after build is now off by default - thanks for flagging it
So one thing which is a real bummer which may make this non-tenable for zynthian
The plugin when effects type changes invalidates the parameter names. In the VST3 CLAP and AU this works fine.
I got a report in the LV2 in Ardor that this doesn’t work, and noticed that JUCE has no code at all to respond to the request to rename a param in the LV2 implementation. I also note the build time param names are printed into the ttl thing that’s part of the bundle.
I know the TTL contains a snapshot of a moment in time configuration of params, but does LV2 support changing parameter names after a plugin is instantiated? And if so, I think someone would need to help the JUCE team write that bit of code!
If not, the controls will be labeled wrongly even after you modify the zynthian software to use the ‘other’ form of LV2 params (which honestly I don’t understand)
And as always sorry if this is a strange message. I really don’t understand LV2.
It may all be a bit of a mute point at the moment. Zynthian uses JALV as its LV2 host. JALV only supports Control Ports which are ports that can be connected to and used to make control (parameter) adjustments. JUCE does not use control ports but instead (and probably rightly) uses “Parameters” which are application level control of parameters, i.e. you can’t connect a signal to these controls so they are only controlled by the host’s UI. This means that Zynthian does not currently have a way to access parameters which renders many JUCE plugins suboptimal. We can still add them and control them from their nativie GUI via VNC but this is not how Zynthian is supposed to work by default.
I am not sure whether LV2 parameters can be dynamically renamed but I would expect they should. LV2 expects a unique symbol for each parameter which is used to identify and control it but also has various metadata including text labels, data type, range, etc. I am fairly sure we have seen dynamic adjustment of these in the past (but that could just be whistful thinking). It certainly feels like it should be possible. But like I say, it isn’t available to Zynthian at the moment.
If this plugin fails in Ardour we may infer there is some issue. Ardour tends to work quite well. We here at Zynthian are eager to develop a better LV2 host that supports parameters but have not yet found the time to do so. Hence there is a limit to how helpful we can be on this subject - sorry!
Well I can’t help you there it sounds like! But if you ever want to start hosting clap plugins happy to chat about that.
Thank you for the params vs controls explanation it’s the first time someone has clearly explained it to me
I started to look at that but was put off by a comment from Robin Gareus where he says Ardour is unlikely to support CLAP due to it offering little compared to existing protocols. I concur that we should avoid exherting effort chasing new implementations that appear to offer little or no benefit. I would prefer to get the LV2 hosting working properly and that may give us the tools to support other plugin standards if we desired.
Yup wasn’t evangelizing just offering to help if you decide to go that route