O’Reilly Network: Linux Audio Plug-Ins: A Look Into LADSPA

“As users, we choose specific applications because their
features suit our purposes. As we become more familiar with a
program, we want more features added to it, and of course we want
it to run faster and smoother. Developers want to serve the needs
of end-users, but increasing the internal complexity of an
application is not necessarily a good thing, and programmers and
users alike recognize the undesirability of feature creep and code
bloat.”

“Nevertheless, we all want more cool and useful features in our
software, giving rise to a dilemma: How do we balance the number
and complexity of features against the complexity and manageability
of the larger-scale program design?”

“A flexible architecture that allows plug-ins is an elegant
solution to this problem, presenting the end-user with a mechanism
to control at least some aspects of a program’s feature set while
giving program developers the opportunity to focus their energy
toward creating flexible core engines and program frameworks. In
addition, designers of plug-ins can work on developing their
processing algorithms without the distraction of resolving
interface or operating system dependencies. Everyone wins with
plug-ins.”

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