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Welcome to the lv2-plugins wiki!

The purpose of this repository is to play with the creation of audio plugins for Linux audio productions, with focus on signal processing part.

Common audio plugin types for Linux are:

LADSPA: Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API.
LV2
linux VST2.x the VST2-sdk is included in the VST3-sdk download

We will first focus on LV2, since it is the second version of LADSPA, from the homepage: The "core" API of LV2, lv2.h, is essentially ladspa.h with extensibility hooks added. It is a simple C header with the basic methods typical to audio plugins.

Some more important glossary for linux audio:

ALSA: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture]
JACK: JACK Audio Connection Kit (or JACK; a recursive acronym) is a professional sound server daemon that provides real-time, low-latency connections for both audio and MIDI data between applications that use its API. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JACK_Audio_Connection_Kit]
Pulse Audio: PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project.

Usually we want to use ALSA with JACK and not Pulse Audio because it crashes with the low latency of JACK, however it is possible to have them running aside.

Frameworks options to implement plugins:

LV2 create only LV2 plugins based on core library
DPF use DPF and convert to all type of plugins: LDASP, LV2, VST, AU (mac) and not C or C++:
Faust language using faust-lv2 for conversion
D using Dplug creating LDASP, LV2, VST, AU

We need to decide what to use, maybe for the first LV2 is simplest? There is also a conversion toolkit from LV2 to VST: https://github.com/x42/lv2vst

Test and running of plugins

LV2 plugins can be testes within a plugin host. For example using Ardour can also be installed with apt. Another option is plugin host and patch bay Carla, here real time audio can be tested (works also under MacOs).

plugins can also be started with command line host jalv which also offer a simple gui interpretation

LV2 plugin git

http://lv2plug.in/git/cgit.cgi/lv2.git/about/

Installation of plugins

LV2-plugins are folders/directories. They need to be installed in either /usr/lib/lv2, /usr/local/lib/lv2 or a directory mentioned in the local LV2_PATH environment variable.