Cantabile Development Blog

Unloaded Plugins

Cantabile now has the ability to support "unloaded plugins".

When unloaded, a plugin behaves the same as being bypassed but is completely unloaded from memory - except for it's state which is kept.

Loading and unloading of plugins is done through the plugin slot's context menu:

When unloaded, its bypass button is checked and the slot becomes disabled and displays "unloaded":

Reloading a plugin restores the plugin to the same state as before it was unloaded. The state of unloaded plugins is also saved with the session so on re-opening a session with unloaded plugins they can be reloaded and returned to their original state.

A nice side effect of supporting unloaded plugins is that it makes Cantabile's handling of plugins that fail to load so much better. Now when Cantabile can't reload a plugin from a saved session (say the plugin is no longer installed), that plugin will automatically be treated as an unloaded plugin except it will display "Failed" instead of "Unloaded". If the session is then saved again, the state of the plugin is maintained even though the plugin is not available. Also, the user can re-install the plugin, right click and choose reload to fix it up without needing to reload the whole session.

The purpose of this functionality is primarily intended for when I add support for sub-sessions which will be named states within a session. The loaded/unloaded state of plugins will be included in that sub-session state making it possible to build complex arrangements of plugins that can be switched between quickly.

Posted on July 17, 2008

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