Longish post inspired by the recent discussion about 'Pd as a VST plugin'.

TL:DR: better use a modular JACK (freewheel) approach compared to more
'static' Pd as a plugin approach.

I think that on systems with JACK Audio [1] (Linux mostly, but available
on other platforms, albeit maybe not so common nor supported), it would
be great to have solid JACK Freewheel [2] support instead of trying to
embed Pd as a plugin in rather cumbersome, diverse and (probably)
unstable, ways.

Actually JACK freewheel *does* work with Pd on Linux (audio only) with
the [jackclock] external by Nicolas Bouillot [3] also used to interact
with jack transport, although currently a bit cumbersome if interacting
with other applications. What's the big deal? Freewheel is 'faster than
realtime', meaning that when activated audio will be generated as fast
as the CPU can. The key use case is generating audio to a file at the
same time avoiding things such as xruns or other problems due to
real-time operation. If you've ever used Ardour  [4] and exported audio,
it is using JACK freewheel (and in fact you see the playhead moving
forward faster than realtime as it processes audio...).

Now imagine instead of having Pd as an LV2, VST or whatever plugin in
Ardour, you have your patch(es) open in usual Pd, connect tracks or
busses to Pd, reconnect [dac~] to Arour's master et voilà :) - when you
need to export you just run with freewhel mode.

Indeed, I _was_ already able to connect through JACK an Ardour audio
output to Pd with some simple audio processing, and then, after
activating freewheel mode with [jackclock], 'record' the output to a
.wav file through both jack_capture and [writesf~] internally (the
former more interesting for this use case).

So, just to shift points of view, IMHO strong JACK (maybe including JACK
midi) and JACK freewheel support is somewhat more desirable in Pd
compared to support for the many plugin types and platforms. If one
thinks about it this is more in line with Pd's modular and dataflow
approach, also in the long run might be more resilient to plugin format
changes, license changes (see VST problems), as well as updates in Pd
itself.


Lorenzo.
PS. Disclosure: this is not my first post advocating a freewheel
approach in the (Linux) audio ecosystem compared to monolithic do-it-all
audio software, but just as a user :) [5].

[1] Jack Audio
[2] Jack Freewheel in the JACK API:
http://jackaudio.org/api/group__ClientCallbacks.html#gae797e2cde20faecb9be510c8873fbdd6
See also this interesting section in Louigi Verona's 'Linux Audio
workshop':
https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&a=philosophy_linuxaudio#2
[3] https://github.com/nicobou/pd-jackclock
[4] https://ardour.org/
[5] See e.g
http://linux-audio.4202.n7.nabble.com/JACK-Freewheel-mode-thoughts-td102077.html
and
https://www.mail-archive.com/rosegarden-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02632.html



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