New Engine “Jalv”: LV2 plugins as standalone layers

Great news, @zynthianers!

I’ve been working in a new engine that allows to launch LV2-plugins as standalone layers. For doing that, i’ve used (and extended!) Jalv, from David Robillard, one of the creators of LV2 plugin specification. In his words:

“Jalv is a simple but fully featured LV2 host for Jack. It runs LV2 plugins and exposes their ports as Jack ports, essentially making any LV2 plugin function as a Jack application.”

You could think … “OK, but we already have MOD-UI that allows to load any LV2 plugin and combine with other plugins in any way we want …”

Yes, you are right, MOD-UI is fantastic, really! But is not a 100% zynthianic animal and some functionality is missing in the MOD-UI layer (and it’s not easy to implement!). In fact, only one MOD-UI layer is allowed in Zynthian, and no MIDI channel assignment is possible, nor cloning or transposing. You have to hardcode all this behaviour in your pedalboard using the MOD-UI web interface. Not a big problem …

But sometimes you only want to have Dexed, Noizemak3r, MDA ePiano or any other LV2-plugin working as “normal engine” in a layer, that can be transposed, cloned or assigned to the MIDI channel you want. And this is what Jalv engine allows. And it’s a small-but-huge step for Zynthian 😉

You can run any LV2-plugin inside a normal layer. Everything works normally in Jalv layers. All functionality is available:

MIDI Learning
Transpose
Clone
Audio-Routing to MOD-UI
Move to a different MIDI channel

As the list of LV2-plugins installed in the system is quite long, we don’t want to have a huge list of engines in the Zynthian UI’s Engine Selection Screen . We would like to decide what LV2-plugins are enabled for the Jalv Engine. So … our beloved developer @mheidt has created a webconf-tool for choosing the plugins we want to enable. Thanks a lot, @mheidt!! 😉

Finally, this is the list of default plugins that you will see in the Engine Selection Screen prior to choosing your own list:

Dexed
Helm
MDA ePiano
MDA Piano
MDA DX10
MDA JX10
Noize Mak3r
OBXD
SynthV1

For enjoying the new Jalv engine, just update your Zynthian software. If you don’t remember how to do it, read the Wiki!! 😉

If you don’t have a ZynthianBox, perhaps you should think about building one 😉

Enjoy!

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