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Linux Plugins, for Effects, Filters, and Instruments

These plugins are hosted by a variety of different applications, including Ardour, Rosegarden, jack-rack, and quite a few others.

LV2 Host is an open standard for plugins and matching host applications, mainly targeted at audio processing and generation. LV2 is a simple but extensible successor of LADSPA, intended to address the limitations of LADSPA which many applications have outgrown.

LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developers Simple Plugin API. It is a standard for handling filters and effects, licensed under the GNU LGPL. It was originally designed for Linux through consensus on the Linux Audio Developers Mailing List, but works on a variety of other platforms. It is used in many free audio software projects and there is a wide range of LADSPA plugins available. Demo by Arda EDEN.
List of Applications using LADSPA.

DSSI (“dizzy”) 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. Check Wikipedia and this website for more info and dssi applications.
List of Applications using DSSI and other DSSI instrument plugins.

An example of a DSSI plugin: Hexter is a software synthesizer that models the sound generation of a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer. It can easily load most DX7 patch bank files, accept patch editing commands via MIDI sys-ex messages (ALSA systems only), and recreate the sound of the DX7 with greater accuracy than any previous open-source emulation (that the author is aware of….)

Dssi-VST The dssi-vst package contains a wrapper plugin for Windows VSTs that enables them to be used by DSSI hosts running on Linux or similar on i386, using Wine. dssi-vst was written by Chris Cannam.

*These plugins are also used by many other Linux audio applications.

Ardour does not come with any built-in signal processors of its own (other than volume faders) and it also generally doesn't ship with any plugins. This page provides informations on plugins that you can use with Ardour, many of which are available at no charge.