About CLAP

[perpetual3]

I’ve said it in the MFM thread, I would LOVE for Bitwig to license the uhe algos the way that Ableton licenses Cytomic and AAS.

I never used the AAS stuff in Live cause I had the plugins. All the Live versions miss a few features.

I'm happy using u-he plugins in Bitwig... especially if Bitwig per voice modulation can work with u-he CLAP plugins!

Yeah, but I think having quality stock plugins would make Bitwig a much more compelling package than it is now.

Bitwig already has some quality stock instruments and fx

I’m sorry, but agree to disagree compared to Ableton.

[mystran]

One thing that caught my eye was the min and max values for parameters, but no mention of how to deal with non-linear curves (frequency and time parameters for instance) of parameters. One of the things that VST3 got right imo, was to force parameter modulation to a normalised 0-1 range, while at the same time providing functions to convert to and from normalised and scaled values for display. That way curves and scaling could be left to the plugin and it was dead simple to map a parameter to a controller knob or similar.

I agree. There should be value_to_normalized and normalized_to_value callbacks available for more practical control from plugin editor controls, host automation lane etc.

Given that there seems to be "value to text" and "text to value" callbacks for the host to convert back and forth between the actual values and their textual representations, I don't personally see a huge issue with allowing any arbitrary range. If one prefers to work with normalized (and I certainly do) then just specify [0,1] as the range for every parameter and just do the conversion for the host in the string formatting?

[pdxindy]

I’ve said it in the MFM thread, I would LOVE for Bitwig to license the uhe algos the way that Ableton licenses Cytomic and AAS.

I never used the AAS stuff in Live cause I had the plugins. All the Live versions miss a few features.

I'm happy using u-he plugins in Bitwig... especially if Bitwig per voice modulation can work with u-he CLAP plugins!

Yeah, but I think having quality stock plugins would make Bitwig a much more compelling package than it is now.

Bitwig already has some quality stock instruments and fx

I’m sorry, but agree to disagree compared to Ableton.

No worries... I prefer the instruments in Bitwig and use them more than I ever used to ones in Ableton. It's good we have choices that suit our interests

[perpetual3]

I’ve said it in the MFM thread, I would LOVE for Bitwig to license the uhe algos the way that Ableton licenses Cytomic and AAS.

I never used the AAS stuff in Live cause I had the plugins. All the Live versions miss a few features.

I'm happy using u-he plugins in Bitwig... especially if Bitwig per voice modulation can work with u-he CLAP plugins!

Yeah, but I think having quality stock plugins would make Bitwig a much more compelling package than it is now.

Bitwig already has some quality stock instruments and fx

I’m sorry, but agree to disagree compared to Ableton.

No worries... I prefer the instruments in Bitwig and use them more than I ever used to ones in Ableton. It's good we have choices that suit our interests

Well, I compose with and within Bitwig exclusively, which just goes to show where my priorities lie. For digital synthesis, like wavetable, I’ve matched the output of pigments with polymer, but I feel that Bitwig let’s me down when it comes to filters and any kind of non linear process. So, for those I use Cytomic the drop and Softube modular. But I would love a decent, polyphonic native filter in Bitwig. Decent like Cytomic the drop decent.

[lunardigs]

Interesting! It's really nice to hear about this kind of thing.

[DRMR]

Have also had an escalation of using Harrison Mixbius. So hopefully them as well.

That would be Ardour devs (the Mixbus core) and they said they'd be happy to look at pull requests that offer this, but are unlikely to work in this themselves any time soon. (they only fairly recently added VST3 and are working on quite a lot of cleanup for Ardour7)

[pdxindy]

Well, I compose with and within Bitwig exclusively, which just goes to show where my priorities lie. For digital synthesis, like wavetable, I’ve matched the output of pigments with polymer, but I feel that Bitwig let’s me down when it comes to filters and any kind of non linear process. So, for those I use Cytomic the drop and Softube modular. But I would love a decent, polyphonic native filter in Bitwig. Decent like Cytomic the drop decent.

I wouldn't turn down such a filter!

[u-u-u]

I don't know exactly the details about the VST format. But do the developers have to pay Steinberg some kind of license fee for using their SDK? Or is it just that it isn't open source?

If so, I'd suggest a good strategy for plugin developers to push CLAP to the mass market:
- offer a cheaper version of your plugins that are CLAP-only (assuming that this saves you the license fees / closed source trouble you'd have otherwise)
- If you do so, customers will beg the DAW developers to directly support CLAP because they get some good plugins cheaper this way
- more and more daw and plugin developers will come onboard

Does that sound realistic?

[THE INTRANCER]

Clap rhymes with crap.... so from the outset and with the intent of the new format, it actually sounds inferior to the VST format.

ABLE - Short for Alexandre Bique Language Extension. Would have been better than Clap I think, whilst having some air of a particular music program and providing a more positive vibe.

UABLE - Urs ABLE is another example based on that above. (You're/s able in normal speaking / association with Urs Heckman when referenced.

[Functional]

I really hope that Steinberg will play ball with this one. Super excited though, VST3 has been such a big disappointment at large. And the fact that u-he is taking the lead with this one (or so it seems?) makes me that much more confident that this is going to be a huge success

[machinesworking]

I really hope that Steinberg will play ball with this one. Super excited though, VST3 has been such a big disappointment at large. And the fact that u-he is taking the lead with this one (or so it seems?) makes me that much more confident that this is going to be a huge success

I think it's plainly obvious that Cubase will be last in line, Pro Tools may never get even a wrapper, and probably Logic will get a wrapper at best. This is one of the biggest hindrances to this being a truly universal format, that three out of five of the biggest DAWs have their own formats.

IMO that's why I think it would make total sense to go after Reaper, which isn't hard, then go after the "wrapper" DAWs FL and DP since it would be trivial compared to others for them to adopt it. Then get Live and Studio One involved, and the thing has too much traction for the proprietary plug in format DAWs to ignore.

[Super Piano Hater 64]

I don't know exactly the details about the VST format. But do the developers have to pay Steinberg some kind of license fee for using their SDK? Or is it just that it isn't open source?

Developers have to get a license from Steinberg, but Steinberg isn't giving anybody VST2 licenses anymore. They even (briefly) had a clause in the VST3 license that permanently revokes your VST2 license. They're trying to kill off VST2. The good news is that they will no longer have the power to do this when their copyright expires. Depending on your country, that should happen in... let's see... 2119? Something like that.

In the meantime, an alternative plugin format seems like a good idea to me.

[glowcoil]

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I put together some Rust bindings for CLAP over the past couple days and thought I would post them here in case other developers are interested. The repository includes a simple do-nothing test plugin which loads successfully in the example host: https://github.com/glowcoil/clap-sys (https://github.com/glowcoil/clap-sys)

I think this is a pretty good proof of concept for the advantages of a pure C ABI. Overall, CLAP looks really compelling to me and I'm excited to see what people do with it.

[fese]

So I had a look at the clap repo (I am not a C dev, but I can very roughly read and understand), and I am all in all able to kinda understand it. Which is probably a good sign.
Couple of questions:

- Am I right in guessing that if you want a plugin with sidechain functionality, you’d add additional ports with the flag “is_cv”?

- It says that i/o port reconfiguration can only be done when the plugin is deactivated. What does that actually mean? What needs to happen if a user wants to add another output for say a multitimbral instrument like a sample?
at the moment with VST/VST3 (in Cubase for me) I have two examples of how to do/not to do:
a) Steinberg’s own Grooveagent, where I can e.g. click on a sample group and say “route this to output xy”, and the plugin/host automatically create a dedicated output and a track in the DAW, both correctly labelled with the name of the sample group. Does CLAP support such a possibility?
b) NI Kontakt. need I say more? It is a complete clusterf***, an unintuitive mess where is a matter of luck if you are able to route a sample group or instrument to an output that has just generic names and activate exactly that output on the host side, and if you change anything it won’t work unless you re-instantiate the plugin instance.

- Urs wrote that one possibility for compatibility to other plugins formats would be wrappers, but don’t those wrappers add an extra layer of complexity and source for errors?

[fese]

I don't know exactly the details about the VST format. But do the developers have to pay Steinberg some kind of license fee for using their SDK? Or is it just that it isn't open source?

The VST3 SDK is open source, but under the GPL, which means that any product made with it must also be open source. If you want to create a non-open source plugin, you must get a proprietary license from Steinberg, which is free of cost afaik, but they dictate the license terms.
Frankly, I am always a bit surprised why it’s always Steinberg that gets the flak. They are the only ones of the three big formats that even offer an open source license. From what I read, e.g. AAX is much more restrictive, you have to apply to Avid for a developer partnership before you can even have a look at the SDK, and for AU I also think you have to register with Apple as a developer which afaik costs a yearly fee.

Edit: AU is actually also open source, as Urs pointed out. Just not portable across platforms.