Report missing plugins when loading an Anklang project

[swesterfeld]

When loading a project that contains a plugin that is not available, Anklang should give some form of feedback to the user. It could display a popup with a list of plugins that were missing for the project. Also it would be nice if there was a placeholder device at the location of the missing plugin in the device chain, and saving the project again would not discard the plugin state from the project.

[tim-janik]

Also it would be nice if there was a placeholder device at the location of the missing plugin in the device chain

I can see how that could be useful. Can you provide 2 or 3 screenshots of other DAWs providing this? or is there no prior art for this and we'd have to come up with something from scratch?

[swesterfeld]

I used 3 DAWs, created a project with the SpectMorph plugin, closed the DAW, reopened the DAW and loaded the project again. Here is what happened.

Ableton Live

Loads the project without error popup window, but inserts a place holder plugin in the effect chain. At also displays an error message at the bottom of the screen.

Clicking to that orange error message opens a popup window with details about the missing plugins.

Bitwig

Bitwig doesn't actively complain about missing plugins, however it inserts a placeholder plugin with the error message.

Reaper

Reaper opens a popup window displaying the missing plugins. It also inserts a place holder in the effect chain (which would be the left side of the 2nd screenshot window.

[tim-janik]

Thanks for the background. Looks like this would be useful to split up:

• [ ] Show an error notice when a plugin (version) cannot be found during loading.
• [ ] Implement a dummy plugin that can preserve identifier, properties, plugin state across loading/saving if a plugin was not found.