lv2-gtk-ui-bridge

lv2-gtk-ui-bridge is a special LV2 bundle that allows to use legacy LV2 Gtk2/3 UIs as LV2 X11 UIs.
This increases the compatibility of such UIs to hosts that do not support the legacy UI types.

Because Gtk2/3 can often conflict with host function symbols (e.g. a Gtk4 host can't load Gtk3 libraries) the UI is loaded in a separate process.
This means the UI can load without crashing the host if usually there would be function symbol conflicts, but in return it is not possible to support LV2 instance access nor LV2 data access (which some UIs use for fancy fast graphs).
Parameter changes and LV2 atom messages still work as normal though, passing through an IPC layer.

The list of supported plugins is hardcoded in lv2-gtk-ui-bridge.lv2/manifest.ttl.
This file needs to be updated in order to support more plugins with a Gtk2/3-based UI.
Just create a ticket or a pull request in case I missed any.

Dependencies

To build this project the following libraries/packages are required:

• gtk2
• gtk3
• lilv
• lv2
• make
• pkg-config
• x11

Under Debian-based systems these can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev libgtk-3-dev liblilv-dev lv2-dev libx11-dev make pkg-config

Build

After dependencies are installed simply run make in the directory where this project source code is located.

Install

After a successful build, simply copy or symlink the lv2-gtk-ui-bridge.lv2 bundle into any directory within the LV2_PATH, for example ~/.lv2/.

Note that there is no make install step, you can easily just copy the bundle yourself.