Floating GUI behaviour with Reaper's new LV2 support

[elcalenx]

Hi! As you may or may not know, the Reaper devs are finally adding LV2 support. This is included in their current Release Candidate build, so it likely should be in the next stable release. I've been using the dev builds, and while I haven't been testing the LV2 support very thoroughly, a decent number of plugins I've tried have appeared to work without issues, including some of the x42 plugins. Now, with the Meter plugins specifically, I've encountered a mildly annoying issue with floating GUIs. I've brought this behaviour up in Reaper's forums, and it seems they're unable to easily fix this on Reaper's end. One of the devs told me: "Those plug-ins have UIs that only exist as floating widgets (that are not embeddable in the chain window)".

While I don't understand much about what's happening here under the hood, I'll try to describe what's going on from a user's point of view. Reaper can basically open plugin windows in two ways, either as an independent floating window, or embedded inside what they call the FX chain window, where you can easily switch between the plugins of a track. And each plugin can naturally also be displayed either with a generic UI or with the plugin's own GUI. Now this is where it gets weird with the Meter plugins. When I open one of them in the FX chain window, it displays the generic UI in the chain window, and simultaneously opens a separate floating GUI window, making me close two windows every time I'm done using the plugin GUI. This floating window is also a little different from usual, lacking typical controls on the DAW's side (I believe this was a fix made by the devs to mitigate some of the issues with these floating widgets—at an earlier stage it would always open two windows, even when attempting to only open the floating window).

I've only ever seen this behaviour with the x42 Meter plugins. All others I use open without issues, with their own GUI, inside the FX chain window. It's more an annoyance than a real issue (it's possible to just open the floating GUI directly, without the chain window), but still... I don't know if there's any way to easily fix this, if it's related to the fundamentals of how GUIs are displayed by these plugins. But any ideas would be appreciated. There aren't a whole lot of good native Linux audio monitoring plugins around that I know of, so I would like to keep using these, without any extra annoyances. :)

[x42]

Those plugins are by design not embeddeable. This is in order to meet strict requirements for meters redrawing which cannot be guaranteed if they are inside a host provided window.

[x42]

When I open one of them in the FX chain window, it displays the generic UI in the chain window, and simultaneously opens a separate floating GUI window,

The host should only display one or the other. I expect a future version of reaper will address this.

[elcalenx]

Thanks for the swift reply. Even if it is a minor annoyance from a workflow perspective, I guess I can live with it if I know there's a good reason behind it...