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@drobilla

David Robillard

drobilla
Ontario, Canada

I work mostly on free audio software, particularly as the maintainer and primary author of LV2. I also have a few audio-related programs that haven't seen much love lately, but I hope to whip into shape and start properly releasing (Patchage, Ingen, and Machina). Outside of that realm, my library Serd is also used for working with linked data in high performance or resource-constrained contexts.

Not everything I do is related to audio or linked data, but LV2 is currently my main focus. A lot of projects in the free audio software world depend on it, but the specification itself and its support libraries are in dire need of more active maintenance and development. That is a lot of work, though, which is hard to justify when you've got bills to pay. Sponsorship would help me dedicate more of my focus to this, and audio infrastructure projects in general.

Specifically, I am working on new major versions of the "official" host libraries, and combining them into a single "LV2Kit" which will serve as an easy-to-use portable SDK for developing LV2 plugins and applications. The broad goal is to make incorporating LV2 into new projects as simple as possible, while reducing the maintenance burden of LV2 itself as much as possible. My concrete goals there are:

  • New major versions of all libraries, with refined and simplified stable APIs.
  • High-quality bindings for C++ and Python (where they make sense).
  • Overhauled website, with a focus on readable prose-first written documentation.
  • High-quality example plugins to use as templates, and for testing hosts.
  • Better tooling for plugin (and perhaps host) validation.
  • Simple deployment and integration, both for OS distributions and projects that "vendor" the SDK.
  • Unified build system using Meson, including support for Visual Studio and XCode integration.
  • Reduce the "bus factor" by simplifying maintenance and bringing more projects under the umbrella of the LV2 organization.
  • "Finish" Pugl and include it in LV2Kit so there is a standard way to do portable UIs and we can get away from the problems associated with most toolkits.
  • Make LV2 less confusing and more welcoming to newcomers.

In the longer term, I would like to make more dramatic improvements to the LV2 specification itself, but I think it is important to first clean up everything we have and get the necessary quality infrastructure in place to support more grandiose changes.

1 sponsor has funded drobilla’s work.

@drobilla

Cover my basic living expenses. This would really take the pressure off and allow me to focus on the projects that I'm passionate about and support others who are using them.

@eliasdorneles

Featured work

  1. lv2/lv2

    The LV2 audio plugin specification

  2. lv2/pugl

    A minimal portable API for embeddable GUIs

  3. drobilla/serd

    A lightweight C library for RDF syntax

  4. drobilla/ingen

    A realtime modular synthesizer and/or effects processor

    C++ 30

1% towards $2,000 per month goal

@eliasdorneles

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Buy me a coffee. A programmer is a device for turning coffee into code, after all.

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Buy me several coffees. Maybe even a sandwich!

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Pay the bulk of my rent because you're a superstar.

Reward: acknowledgement as a supporter in the main README of a project, visible on the Github page.