Re: Web Audio and Pro Sample Libraries

On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 8:15 PM, Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org> wrote:

> Hello Chris,
>
> Friday, September 27, 2013, 11:09:37 AM, you wrote:
>
> >  If the license
> > of the VST plugin you have purchases allows the re-use of the samples
> > themselves, then it might be possible to use them in something like
> > this?
>
> To me that is the more important question - the libraries themselves,
> not the VSTi that uses them.
>
> If the license allows reuse, then it should be possible to use these
> libraries via WebAudio API.
>

At ofmlabs, we had a VST -> Web Audio bridge on our roadmap, but it
would've been too big a task to undertake with such a small team. VST is a
complicated case because while you might be able to get something working
if you had a x86 emulator running and reverse-engineered VST API, you'd
still probably only get a very small portion of VSTs out there working.
Most of them unfortunately use other OS stuff as well. Even at that point,
you will have a massive effort just to get sub-par performance out of a few
very simple VSTs. If, like Marcus said, you would go all the way and make a
proper Windows emulator such as wine, it would be a massive undertaking,
and while such a thing would probably have other uses in the future as
well, it's probably not worth it for this use case since even with wine or
other similar options the road is bumpy. IIRC I've actually managed to get
only two VSTs (and neither had UI) running on Linux, and I've been trying a
lot.

Coming to what Chris just said here, I agree and I think it will be less
work to write a general purpose sample library player and get licenses and
for all the raw data of the pro sample libraries out there than to try to
port VST to web, unfortunately... :D

Cheers,
Jussi


> --
> Best regards,
>  Chris                            mailto:chris@w3.org
>
>
>