Parity and future of Carla in relation to mod-*

[mxmilkiib]

I'm wondering about the current differences between what Carla can do vs. what mod-host/mod-desktop can do. Both in terms of LV2 support, and in future direction.

A lot more development has gone into the latter in the last few years, and looking at mod-audio/mod-desktop#58 at spears that there is a further "turning off the wheel", so to say, happening.

I might be wrong, but is mod-host the "core" of mod-desktop?

For a long time now the mod-host system has saved its graph (pedalboard) as an ingen: namespace powered save file, and can save a preset of its graph (snapshot). Am I using these items correctly?

Afaiu/iirc, 'subgraphs'(/rooms?) work better under mod- because there can be more than two channels for input and output(?)

Now mod- is becoming an LV2 plugin, is will become, arguably, the most LV2 host there is; essentially fulfilling, imho, the big "promises" of LV2 system; e.g. presets as bundles, and graphs as bundles (with graph-wide presets), alternative UIs, (though not networked separation of DSP/etc. and UI, unless I've missed something).

This aside from the web view (using the alternative UI principal) which has always been a prime feature, plus the newer moves to, one might say, "pivot" or "fill-out" the Store concept , with it's web-based user-save sharing and commercial aspects, to a streamlined form to make the entire system/ecosystem multiplatform, for open portabilities sake.

(And did I hallucinate seeing the suggestion of mod- specifically adding a channel system, thus overcoming the lack of bypass and MIDI addressing Carla Rack has?)

Can I please ask your comments about the distinctions and paths you see both projects taking?

Personally/selfishly, I would love to see the compact graph/dialog/rack and non-skeuomorphic Carla having the same level of LV2 host/plugin/graph/subgraph/preset/user-sharing functionality, but that's not going to happen in the next decade, prolly(?).

I'm trying, essentially, to better figure the cost-benefit of giving up on investing my time etc. in Carla when, with mod-, my plugin preset saves, graph saves, and graph preset saves will be portable between apps (theoretically to start with, re support ingen:). This being important to be because I highly believe that Data Portability is a most ethical principal/approach to software, e.g. all forms of save are truly sharable between app.

*I'm sure there are many practical caveats and hurdles to this, but it's a journey!

[falkTX]

This is a very good question that I want to answer, but there are deals behind the scenes that prevent me to disclose information in a proper way, and also makes it tricky to make plans for the MOD side.

Writing this here as a reminder to come back to this topic once things settle down, it has been very frustrating having to keep secrecy. Hopefully just a few more days now.

But as a super short info I can say Carla got sidetracked a lot because of Cardinal, I failed to realize how much time that would take to maintain, so very soon I am putting it in feature freeze mode. DPF will be similar too once I finalize 2 more features. Soon we have Qt5 being removed from ubuntu which forces me to do a bunch of work for "nothing", errrr
Plus I still need to actually find a home/place for myself, last few years have been a whole mess..

Lets go one step at a time, once the MOD stuff has a clear path I can write extensively about it.