About TAP-plugins (the LADSPA ones)

TAP-plugins is short for Tom's Audio Processing plugins. It is a bunch of LADSPA plugins for digital audio processing, intended for use in a professional DAW environment such as Ardour. These plugins should compile and run on any recent (that is, not seriously outdated) GNU/Linux system. They don't require any special libraries besides the standard GNU C and math libraries, which are expected to be provided on the machine used for compiling.

Check the LADSPA homepage for links to other great plugins available on the Linux platform. Also feel free to check out LinuxLinks.com and get a feel of the amazing amount of excellent software available on Linux (you will find TAP-plugins in the section Software/Multimedia/Tools/Plugins). Dave Phillips also has a very complete link collection of Linux MIDI & Sound Applications.

The plugins have been developed with Ardour as a primary host in mind, but they should be usable within any LADSPA-capable host. The main issue here is that LADSPA plugins don't generate their own GUIs, but the GUIs are generated by the host. Therefore the arrangement and appearance of the controls may vary using another host. In particular, Ardour displays drop-down lists instead of pure integer inputs in LADSPA plugin GUIs, if and when appropriate RDF metadata of the plugins is available. TAP-plugins makes use of this feature, see the screenshots of TAP Dynamics and TAP Reverberator for example.

On other (non-RDF-aware) hosts, it is very likely that only numerical input fields will appear in place of drop-down lists. In this case, the mapping is simple: 0 means the first item in the list, 1 the following and so on. However, no audio processing ability is involved, so the plugins should perform the same way even with a somewhat lacking GUI.

To support easy spotting/selection of the TAP-plugins in a plugin selection dialog loaded with lots of other available plugins (and to achieve consistency), every plugin's name starts with the letters TAP. The actual name of the plugin follows after a space.

The audio processing algorithms done by TAP-plugins are coded to be independent of the actual sample rate. The sample rate is always a parameter during computations. The plugins have been tested with sample rates 44.1 kHz and 96 kHz, as the author uses these values in his studio. Please note that although all plugins should be essentially functional at virtually any sample rate, the audio fidelity depends slightly on the actual sample rate used. Higher sample rate is better, of course. This means that an equalizer or reverberator plugin will produce higher quality output, and will sound a bit smoother at 96 kHz compared to, say, 44.1 kHz. This is a natural effect that results from the fundamental properties of digital signal processing, but you should be aware of it nevertheless.