DSSI

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DSSI is also an early variant of the SCSI disk drive interface, manufactured by DEC and appearing in many late 80's and early 90's VAX and DECsystem servers.

DSSI is a virtual instrument (software synthesizer) plugin architecture for use by music sequencer applications. It was designed for applications running under Linux, although there is nothing specific to Linux in the interface itself. It is distributed under the terms of a combination of GNU Lesser General Public License and some BSD licenses, all of which are free software licences.

DSSI is sometimes described as "LADSPA for instruments". LADSPA is an audio effects plugin architecture for filters, reverbs and other sound processing software tools, whereas DSSI was designed specifically for instrument plugins that generate sound from note events. DSSI extends LADSPA by adding note event delivery, but it also adds predefined program selections and a method for plugins to provide their own user interfaces, both of which may also be used by effects plugins.

DSSI hosts on Linux can also host some VSTi instruments for Microsoft Windows using the dssi-vst wrapper plugin, which in turn make use of the WINE compatibility layer.

DSSI stands for Disposable Soft Synth Interface. This is partly because DSSI was intended to be a lightweight addition to LADSPA that would require little extra effort from authors of LADSPA hosts and plugins to support, and partly to avoid distracting too much developer effort from the GMPI plugin initiative. Perhaps as a partial consequence of this early offhand approach to publicity, the number of DSSI plugins available remains small.

One of the major programs supporting DSSI is Rosegarden.