Please consider supporting the new CLAP plugin format…

[gesslr]

All of this info and more can be found at this link: viewtopic.php?t=574861

They are actively looking for DAW developers to work with…Tracktion has always been at the forefront of such groundbreaking developments. I hope this is one of them!

CLAP is an open source plug-in format originally designed by Alexandre Bique a few years ago that we currently help to bring forward, along with friends at Bitwig and a whole bunch of other developers from both host and plug-in side.

While there is no official launch date, we have decided to include the current state of CLAP in all future updates and installers. That's why now it's in the MFM 2.5 public preview/beta installer.

The main reason we (u-he, others may have other reasons) try to bring forward a new plug-in standard is very simple: It's liberally licensed. No one needs to pay fees, hire lawyers or go through vetting process. No need to sign weird contracts or NDAs that may turn into future risks of investment.

Another reason is its robustness. CLAP is very easy to grasp and very determined to avoid misinterpretation. CLAP is designed to minimise bugs that arise from different host implementations or plug-in implementations. CLAP offers ways and helpers to avoid conflicts between hosts and plug-ins that commonly happen all the time.

A third reason is its completeness. It's got all the modern features and quite a few that we haven't seen yet. For instance it takes into account that some hosts are not just modern tape recorders, some hosts are modern modular synthesisers. Such that CLAP offers parameter modulation which is non-destructive (unlike classic automation) and which can be polyphonic. Things like that, including event based parameter, tempo and timing changes.

Another reason is, it solves common problems. It has fast plug-in scanning, it offers host controlled multithreading (which we have benchmarked with eye popping results), it offers plug-in meta data to organise your plug-ins, resource consolidation (i.e. the plug-in can tell the host about the samples and stuff it references so that the host can gather all that in its project file) and a lot more.

As for reasons that we haven't mentioned, maybe because they're not as important for u-he as others, CLAP is a pure C ABI, so people can develop in any programming language they like. It can run on pretty much any hardware and operating system, even embedded. I'm writing this off my head, I'm sure there are numerous reasons to develop and deploy CLAP that I can't possibly all mention here.

[spoontechnique]

That sounds awesome! I'd love to see Tracktion support it, especially if U-He is behind it.

[Steve Bolivar]

What happened to the SOUL plugin format they were trying to get support for? CLAP looks good.

[jabe]

I'm afraid this reminded me of an old edition of the satirical and intermittently amusing Spitting Image TV show from years ago in the UK. The relevant sketch has Sting and David Bowie discussing acting techniques. They soon find they've used a method called Clap acting. Bowie had been in a film called "Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence", based in a Japanese POW camp. He proudly recalls that during filming actor Ryuichi Sakamoto had pointed his finger at him and said, "YOU CLAP ACTOR!"

[jabe]

What happened to the SOUL plugin format they were trying to get support for? CLAP looks good.

I believe it's art of the JUCE package, but I know little more.

[gesslr]

I'm afraid this reminded me of an old edition of the satirical and intermittently amusing Spitting Image TV show from years ago in the UK. The relevant sketch has Sting and David Bowie discussing acting techniques. They soon find they've used a method called Clap acting. Bowie had been in a film called "Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence", based in a Japanese POW camp. He proudly recalls that during filming actor Ryuichi Sakamoto had pointed his finger at him and said, "YOU CLAP ACTOR!"

That was a funny show (I only saw a few of them here in the States) and sounds hilarious. I have to try to find it.

U-he and Bitwig are supporting this. There are a couple of others too...but they seem a little coy to name them. Maybe one of them IS Tracktion....!

[Watchful]

SOUL is still out there, but I don't think there's been much public development on that front. The only folks talking about it seem to be one-person developers trying to develop libraries and templates for things. The big developers don't seem to have much interest, and the SOUL consortium doesn't reveal much publicly. So I think it will be a long time before there are solid, shipping products you can try.