UI-bound and session-persistent DSP services? Options

[Yegor]

I develop a VST adapter which tries hard in providing native experience, which includes DSP chain preset support, following Foobar2000 UI and ability to work in the conversion mode. Although there is some success with this, I'm stuck now due to substantial differences between two APIs.

While VST prescribes its effect instances to be active as long as they're used and to have user interaction handled within those instances, the Foobar2000 DSP API proposes a whole different approach. By contrast, Foobar2000 re-instantiates its DSP services whenever a playback control even occurs, i.e. restart or track change. At the same time it separates the DSP configuration UI from the actual DSP service instances, passing only serialized preset data between the two. This separation makes it challenging to identify which instance of a VST plug-in is to be dealt with.

I worked around some of the difficulties by abusing current Foobar2000 behavior. But it's not a reliable solution to do so and it does fail in certain situations. To reach goals I set, I need some VST-style API in the SDK, i.e. having non-static methods to show config UI and an option to keep the DSP service instantiated as long as possible and/or feasible. I do understand that in general it implies significant changes to the DSP subsystem, but I'm also pretty sure the result is worth it.

Best regards,
Yegor Petrov