DSSI supports a plugin discovery method similar to that of LADSPA:
- DSSI hosts may wish to locate DSSI plugin shared object files by searching the paths contained in the DSSI_PATH and LADSPA_PATH environment variables, if they are present. Both are expected to be colon-separated lists of directories to be searched (in order), and DSSI_PATH should be searched first if both variables are set.
- Each shared object file containing DSSI plugins must include a function dssi_descriptor(), with the following function prototype and C-style linkage. Hosts may enumerate the plugin types available in the shared object file by repeatedly calling this function with successive Index values (beginning from 0), until a return value of NULL indicates no more plugin types are available. Each non-NULL return is the DSSI_Descriptor of a distinct plugin type.