[ANN] Ardour5 Lua integration -- was: Article (in german) about Lua in Ardour 5.0

[Robin Gareus <robin@...>]

On 08/15/2016 09:23 AM, Marc Balmer wrote:
> For those that understand german, an article mentioning Lua in Ardour:
> 
> http://www.pro-linux.de/news/1/23860/ardour-50-versteht-lua.html
> 

I was hoping someone would save me the time to write an announcement
message :) That article is a bit short on details though.


Ardour [1] is a cross-platform Digital Audio Workstation and since
version 5.0 most Ardour internals are accessible to Lua scripts.

One can now use Lua to automate various workflows and implement new
functionality of many kinds, including writing synths, filters and other
signal processing.


On the technical side: We've used a highly modified version of Vinnie
Falco's LuaBridge [2] to expose C++ bindings to Lua 5.3.3. Note that Lua
integration is still an ongoing process. A "bind-all classes and
methods" was not feasible due to realtime constraints, various
event-loops, excessive shared-pointer use and the sheer size of the
Ardour codebase.

So we took the opportunity to document the API [3] and also write
example scripts to exercise bindings [4] as we went.

The long term goal is to build on top of that. The 5.0 release still
lacks on UI integration but regardless it is already deep and powerful.

A conceptual overview as well as API documentation can be found in the
reference manual at http://manual.ardour.org/lua-scripting/


Any input from the Lua community is very welcome, and let me in return
thank the Lua authors and contributors to make this possible in the
first place. You guys rock!

Happy scripting!
robin


[1] http://ardour.org
[2] https://github.com/vinniefalco/LuaBridge
[3] http://manual.ardour.org/lua-scripting/
[4] https://github.com/Ardour/ardour/tree/master/scripts