CLAP: The New Audio Plug-in Standard (by U-he, Bitwig and others)

[pc999]

This seems great I hope it picks up fast

Made mostly by U-He, the Bitwig team, and other big players in the area, plus I love it is open source.



https://www.bitwig.com/stories/clap-the ... ndard-201/

https://github.com/free-audio/clap

[Urs]

It'll officially be under https://cleveraudio.org which atm points to the Github

Happy to discuss benefits and stuff in case any developer is interested in why/how/who.

[Urs]

Oh, maybe this is a good place to mention this:

We got into this thing because we needed to replace dependency of some other format that is currently/slowly/eventually being deprecated. So all our internal testing tools and stuff are slowly being ported to CLAP. The plethora of available open source command line tools is quite helpful here.

I also spoke to many devs who have based their whole codebase around that deprecated format and who will have a hard time avoiding derivatives of it in their build products. So one of the great things about CLAP is that such a thing is a doable refactoring job. Moving the codebase to CLAP is a serious possibility, and a solution to be independent in the future.

In order to ease this transition I've also asked the open source community to create a CLAP example that uses VSTGUI. So this exists as well today:

https://github.com/surge-synthesizer/clap-saw-demo

This synth has all one needs to know - from how CLAP works, to how to set up NoteExpressions (if that's something you hadn't considered yet because the core of your codebase didn't have it), Parameter Modulation (a kick ass feature of CLAP, I think), and how to bind to VSTGUI (Paul is finishing the comments today and there's one linux edge case with VSTGUI he's still working through).

[humanboeing]

Looks promising for Linux as well as for smaller devs. As an end user of plugins, I hope it quickly gets some recognition. One thing that could speed up the spread is SynthEdit incorporation, hopefully SE dev team will notice the advantages.

[audiothing]

Cool! As said before, we'll definitely support CLAP if it gets added to JUCE.

[koalaboy]

Urs (and any other devs) - are there any suggestions for the best scalable/vector UI to look into, for new CLAP development, that would be suitable for cross-platform and license-free/open-source ? I am looking at the IMGui demo, but just wondering if there's something else folks would recommend.

[abique]

Cool! As said before, we'll definitely support CLAP if it gets added to JUCE.

Some plugins seems to work well using https://github.com/free-audio/clap-juce-extensions

[audiothing]

Some plugins seems to work well using https://github.com/free-audio/clap-juce-extensions

Thanks, but we don't use CMake and it would be better to have an official implementation by the JUCE team.

[S0lo]

This is all becoming more exciting and attractive. Specially with the inclusion of this VSTGUI example code.

[DRMR]

Cool! As said before, we'll definitely support CLAP if it gets added to JUCE.

Since JUCE7 officially supports LV2, is that something you will also build for now?

I think with MIDI-2.0 slowly gaining traction CLAP will also become more relevant .. but could still be many years before we see broad support for MIDI-2.0 in both hardware and software.

The two main selling-points for CLAP in my pov are being "not by Steinberg" and polyphonic automation. However I don't think I'll be implementing support in HVCC any time soon, unless someone opens a PR for this. (having looked at the examples it seemed like too much work for too little benefit in my usecase)

[audiothing]

Since JUCE7 officially supports LV2, is that something you will also build for now?

Well, adding another OS to test and support is a bit more complex than "just" adding another plugin format. If CLAP is added to JUCE then it will be easy to update pluginval and partially automate the testing process.

[baconpaul]

This is all becoming more exciting and attractive. Specially with the inclusion of this VSTGUI example code.

Thanks!

I'm literally finishing up the comments now to make it clear, and also reviewing it for bugs. (I would have had it done for launch, but I saw a great concert last night instead!). Happy to take questions and PRs.

[DRMR]

Well, adding another OS

What do you mean OS? LV2 is a plugin-format that works cross-platform on all major operating systems (and yes, Linux support would of course also be nice).

[audiothing]

What do you mean OS? LV2 is a plugin-format that works cross-platform on all major operating systems (and yes, Linux support would of course also be nice).

I didn't know that Reaper added LV2 support, but other than that, which major DAW can actually load LV2? I can only see an advantage for Linux users, to be honest, am I wrong? It's not widely adopted on macOS or Windows, and I doubt that's going to change any time soon.
CLAP is way more promising IMO, and it looks like it's moving fast. We'll see.

[DRMR]

I didn't know that Reaper added LV2 support, but other than that, which major DAW can actually load LV2?

Reaper, Ardour, Harrison Mixbus and with JUCE7 you can see support coming to Tracktion Waveform and BespokeSynth and such. There are also other (embedded) commercial products using LV2 like Polyeffects (Beebo/Digit) and MOD Devices since many years.

No telling how wide the support with CLAP will be, so far we only have Bitwig (and some hint that Reaper has an experimental build that supports it). It certainly hasn't proven its viability yet, but we will see