I'm trying to use LADSPA plugins with PD on windows... I've got the most recent pd-extended package installed, Pd version 0.38.4-extended-RC8.

I figure I need to tell it the path to the ladspa dlls (I'm using ones that came with Audacity for now), and give it the correct parameters. I copied a plugin (sc4.dll) to the pd bin folder and the extras folder, as I expect pd/plugin~ looks in those places..

I'm afraid it's not as simple as that. [plugin~] doesn't know anything about Pd's search path. It uses the environment variable LADSPA_PATH to search for the DLL. Depending on how portable getenv() is, you might just be able to set the LADPSA_PATH on windows to the directory that contains your plugins, and then use the external exactly as you describe below.

E.g. would "plugin~ sc4 sc4.dll" be the correct thing to type to get it to load the sc4 compressor plugin?

If that doesn't work, you should try giving the absolute path to the dll, e.g.

[plugin~ sc4 c:\my\plugin\path\sc4.dll]

I'm not exactly sure of the path spec that dlopen() expects on Windows, so you might need to experiment with e.g using forward slashes:

c:/my/plugin/path ??

Is it possible to use LADSPA plugins on windows? If so, I'd really appreciate someone telling me how... if I get this working maybe I'll update the pure-data.info wiki with the details..

It's definitely possible as evindenced by Audacity's LADSPA support. It's just a case of getting plugin~ to find and load the plugins.

Jamie

-- www.postlude.co.uk