AU2 - manufacturer names and subfolders
AU2 - manufacturer names and subfolders
- Subject: AU2 - manufacturer names and subfolders
- From: Marc Poirier <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 14:18:54 -0400
Hi. It appears to me that in Audio Unit 2.0, manufacturer name and
plugin name are still stored together in a single resource, with
"Manufactuer: Plugin" still the recommended convention. I remember
posting about this a few months ago and being told that it would be
better in AU2, so maybe I'm missing something, but if not I just want
to say again that I think it would be much better to have 2 separate
resources: one for plugin name and one for manufacturer name. Or if
that's not possible with Component Managerness, maybe add a
manufacturer name AudioUnitProperty. I realize that there are
distinct manufacture IDs, but it's not possible to derive a name from
those (at least not without each host app maintaining a database), so
they do not help much.
Among other problems with this approach, consider manufacturer names
that have colons in them, like, oh, for example Smart Electron:x.
;) And this approach also requires that hosts all know that they
should parse the plugin names to extract the manufacturer name, which
is a weird thing as it is and I can see myself contacting all these
AU hosts soon telling them that this is how they should do it,
because invariably hosts won't be doing this at first. Basically I
think it's just a bad, kludgy way of handling the two distinct names.
It's also important that manufacturer names exist as a means for
categorizing plugins into submenus of menu hierarchies and such
things, since subfolders cannot currently be made in
Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/. Actually, that's another
problem. If you take a look into the average 2002 computer
musician's VST plugins folder, you're likely to find 100-200 plugins
in there. And these people want to create some sort of organization,
so they use subfolders. The fact that the Component Manager won't
find AUs that are in subfolders is a problem. Oh, I already dread
the flood of emails from folks, "Your plugins aren't showing up!" all
because they are stuffing Audio Units into subfolders...
Marc
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