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by Elv13 1737 days ago
> you can't provide a dedicated GUI for them

You could expose enough GTK bits to expose an event loop to the LGI lua library. It's gobject-introspection for Lua. Since you already use these libs, it would not make Ardour any bigger.

I am not saying it's a great idea to mix GUI and a realtime DSP in the same thread, but it would be supported in you see some demand there.
1 comments
PaulDavisThe1st 1737 days ago
I've previously written a long-ish article about the role of Lua/scripting in general in the context of a libre & open-source DAW before:

https://discourse.ardour.org/t/is-open-source-a-diversion-fr...

There's really no technological reason for not allowing Lua to create GUIs within Ardour. It's more a question of whether or not we actually want to. Either way, you would not be mixing GUI and realtime code - the architecture of Ardour doesn't allow that.

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diskzero 1737 days ago
Nice article Paul. It is motivating me to take another look at Ardour. I have also worked on some very large audio/video authoring tools. When we made the new lighting tools at Dreamworks, you could only create the UI using the scripting system. I am not sure if that discipline is still observed, but it was a good way to make sure that there wasn't a 2nd class citizen status given to extending the UI.
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PaulDavisThe1st 1737 days ago
Thanks. Thing is, in an open source system, there are no 2nd class citizens caused by the "eat your own dogfood" rules (or lack thereof). You want to change the GUI in Ardour? The code is all right there.

The question I was raising (which I think you understand) is whether most users care that this is possible if it can't be done without a rebuild (compiling).

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diskzero 1737 days ago
Right. In the case of the studio tools, artists could extend the application but not touch the core. Much like Ardour, having to build the application from source was more complex and who wants to make their users do that?
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jacquesm 1737 days ago
I've been reading all of your comments in this thread and the links provided carefully, thank you for all the great work on Ardour and the degree of forethought that goes into it, it really shows in the final product.
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