Plugins

A panel for any plugin, without drawing one.

omx-panel reads what a plugin declares about itself and produces its panel: the controls, their ranges and their grouping. Nobody draws it by hand.

What you get.

Give any LV2 or CLAP plugin a panel, from the plugin's own declaration:

a MOD GUI, the format MOD and Zynthian draw;
pages for a controller, eight controls to a page;
a layout for a host that draws its own panel.

Every panel wears the omx look, vintage or modern.

The three steps.

Step 1
The plugin declares itself.
A plugin states its controls: symbol, travel, default, label and group. That statement, the descriptor, is the only input. A descriptor comes from scanning the plugin, or from a package that installs it, such as omx-plugins. The panel never holds a range of its own.
Step 2
omx-panel lays it out.
It orders the controls into sections, gives each a role, picks the family the controls make together and cuts the pages of eight a controller shows. When the plugin declares a panel of its own, that panel wins.
Step 3
omx-panel writes the panel.
For MOD and Zynthian it writes a MOD GUI into the plugin's LV2 bundle: modgui.ttl and a modgui/ directory. A toggle becomes a switch, a choice or a short integer travel a selector, and every other travel a knob.

The command takes a descriptor file and the bundle to write into:

omx-panel modgui --descriptor my-plugin.json --out my-plugin.lv2
omx-panel modgui --descriptor my-plugin.json --out my-plugin.lv2 --check

The second line writes nothing: it compares the bundle with what the descriptor would produce and refuses a stale, missing or extra file.

For a plugin author.

A plugin that wants its own drawing ships a skin package: a directory named after the plugin, holding a skin.json that says how the panel is drawn and the licence of everything in it. Ranges, units and scales stay in the plugin's description; the skin refers to controls by id. Check a package before you install it:

omx-panel validate ./my-plugin-skin

A plugin that already ships a MOD GUI does not start from nothing: omx-panel import reads the bundle and the plugin's licence and writes a skin package from them. A bundle whose licence is missing or not on the allow-list is refused with a named code, and nothing is written.

Install.

On Fedora:

sudo dnf install https://www.openmixer.org/rpm/openmixer-release.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf install omx-panel

On Debian and Raspberry Pi OS:

curl -fsSLO https://www.openmixer.org/deb/openmixer-release.deb && sudo apt install ./openmixer-release.deb
sudo apt update
sudo apt install omx-panel

From the npm registry:

npm install @openmixer/omx-panel

A worked example.

A worked example takes a third-party LV2 and CLAP plugin from its declaration to a generated panel.

Read the worked example.