I have written a program to help with testing of LADSPA and LV2 plugins.

Download

You can download version 5 from here. The source code is also on github; clone it with git clone git@github.com:cth103/plugin-torture.git.

What does it do?

The tester will load your plugin and run it with various inputs. These are:

• Silence.
• A Kronecker delta (impulse).
• A pulse.
• A 440Hz sinusoid.

And optionally (in evil mode):

• A buffer of FLT_MIN.
• A buffer of the value that Ardour uses to try to avoid denormals.
• A buffer of denormal numbers.

It will then check the plugin's outputs for denormal numbers. It can also (optionally) abort when any denormal is encountered during the plugin's processing.

How should I run it?

• Most importantly: compile your plugin with -msse -mfpmath=sse passed to GCC, so that the tester can detect denormal computations.
• Run plugin-torture --ladspa -p some-plugin.so for LADSPA plugins or plugin-torture --lv2 -p some-lv2.ttl for LV2. If the plugin is LV2, make sure it is on LV2_PATH.
• For extra points:
  • Pass -d -a to plugin-torture. This will make the test abort if a denormal number is processed by the plugin. You can run plugin-torture within GDB to find out where it happened.
  • Pass -e to plugin-torture to run the evil tests. Such evil inputs are fairly unlikely to occur in real life, but then Murphy is always waiting.
  • Run plugin-torture under valgrind and fix any complaints that it has.