About

NASPRO (recursive acronym for NASPRO Architecture for Sound PROcessing), is meant to be a cross-platform sound processing architecture built around the LV2 plugin standard.

As of now (development version) it offers a set of bridges from other plugin standards (LADSPA, DSSI, more to come) to LV2, but the goal for the next release (0.2.0) is to also include a compiler for an ad-hoc stream-oriented audio programming language which generates C and RDF/Turtle code implementing LV2 plugins (see Development).

The final goal is to develop a series of tools to make it easy and convenient to use LV2 for sound processing on any (relevant) platform and for everybody: users, host developers, plugin developers and distributors.

Rationale

The market of sound processing plugins is dominated by proprietary formats with nasty licensing terms, lacking in extensibility and usually tied to a restricted set of platforms; anyway, one of the most promising competitors in this area is LV2, which is a free, open source, extensible, decentralized and platform neutral standard.

Although it's been years since LV2 first came around, it's still far from reaching serious adoption levels even in the free software/open source community.

We think that by developing tools and extensions, as well as helping people willing to implement support for it in their projects, it's possible to make it become a viable option and eventually fill the gap with other plugin formats.

History

The project started in 2007 as a generic plugin API wrapping framework (any API-to-any API) and it had two releases (0.1.0 and 0.1.1) as such in 2008; it supported LADSPA, Audacious' EffectPlugin API and a custom interpreted textual effect description format called NDF.

Always in 2008, we joined the atheme.org development community and partecipated to the Google Summer of Code 2008 programme with a project on NDF.

The first half of 2009 has been a troubled period where the future of the project was somewhat uncertain and only little useful code was written, yet the big decision of switching to LV2 was taken and some experiments on package building, distribution and alternative platforms took place.

Then, the project restarted from scratch in May 2009 and we partecipated to the Google Summer of Code 2009 programme with a project consisting in the development of a simple LV2 host to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of this plugin format.

Since July 2009 LADSPA 1.1, including LRDF data, is fully supported, while DSSI support is in place since September 2009 (with some limitations, though).

License

The code is available under the following BSD-style (non-copyleft, yet free software and open source) license:

Copyright (C) 2007-2010 Stefano D'Angelo <zanga.mail@gmail.com>
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
are met:
  1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
  2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
     notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
     documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
  3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products
     derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT,
INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT
NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE,
DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY
THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF
THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

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