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

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With NI being part of Soundwide now, together with Plugin Alliance and iZotope, maybe it's time for someone to talk to management overseeing all of the assets in the Soundwide group, to get them on CLAP.

But then again, neither of these three are on the shortlist of companies interested in CLAP.

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EvilDragon wrote: Thu Jun 16, 2022 9:04 am No objections to that. You haven't seen NI libs codebase though... :D
I can imagine that the current state of things at NI is beyond horrendous, it's such a vast amount of products, all withering in neglect in so many cases, but it's only being compounded by what on the outside by looks like a complete lack of forethought or conceptual rigour.
Their attitude towards their users is far from good, and they appear to have sunk into non communication mode again. It's quite hard to see them pulling themselves out of their backwards momentum.

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AtlanticDreamer666 wrote: Thu Jun 16, 2022 9:55 am With NI being part of Soundwide now, together with Plugin Alliance and iZotope, maybe it's time for someone to talk to management overseeing all of the assets in the Soundwide group, to get them on CLAP.

But then again, neither of these three are on the shortlist of companies interested in CLAP.
I have to point out, we originally did not think we'd have anyone on any shortlist. The original plan was to develop CLAP 1.0, then create proof of concept and only then start talking to others.

Everyone who is on that list has either come to us, or someone had spoken to them about CLAP in the past year, or was part of a chat somewhere where they expressed interest in CLAP. Only after we realised that we had a trove of supporters already did we chat to some others to see what they'd think about it.

E.g. the developers of the Unreal Engine came to us because they had discussed CLAP in their dev channels without any prior contact.

The list could have been a lot longer, but many developers and companies were afraid that any form of commitment now would e.g. mean more hassle from people and they were busy with something else, or, I don't know.

So yeah, the actual work to get commitment from supporters has begun yesterday, and I'm sure most of the people and companies on that list will get there!

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EvilDragon wrote: Wed Jun 15, 2022 10:31 pmThat's not exactly a framework. You can consider it continuation of SOUL, basically.

And this is not NI directly working on that, it's just Jules and Cesare AFAIK. Or to explain it better: SoundStacks is a separate entity within Soundwide, just like NI, iZo and PluginAlliance are.
I watched their presentation on this, it was interesting. The overall plan seems to be new languages and tools optimised around those feature sets, with high quality DSP libraries from NI and iZotope for the core audio processing stuff, and html/JS for the front end and non-realtime stuff.

It sounds very much like "If we were to build a JUCE-like development system/platform/framework for audio tools from scratch now, and could dream up the best way we'd like it work, with the industry resources we now have in our group, what would we make?" - with Soundwide/NI/iZ/etc bank rolling it. It would still build to standard plugin formats, and they did mention CLAP in their presentation (or at least, had it in their slides, so they're certainly aware of it...)

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Yawn…
Wake me up when my two major DAWS - Cubase and Logic will support this… :hihi:

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Atlatnesiti wrote: Thu Jun 16, 2022 11:04 am Yawn…
Wake me up when my two major DAWS - Cubase and Logic will support this… :hihi:
Go back to sleep - like those DAWs :D

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How about spectrasonics? Any word if they are interested?

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Atlatnesiti wrote: Thu Jun 16, 2022 11:04 am Yawn…
Wake me up when my two major DAWS - Cubase and Logic will support this… :hihi:
theyre the least likely to support this, at least cubase is

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Well, yesterday I've seen a VST2 running as a CLAP in Bitwig. In a week or so I'll see a CLAP running as VST3 in Cubase.

I don't think it matters what they do or don't do, not in the short term anyway. I'm sure though that CLAP will evolve quicker and safer and generally nicer to develop for, and thus hosts which support it directly will have a business advantage.

I still can't get over the fact that the president off the MIDI Association is from Yamaha, and their own plug-in format snubs MIDI off as something best tucked away as something "legacy" that belongs extinct.

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beely wrote: Thu Jun 16, 2022 10:17 am I watched their presentation on this, it was interesting. The overall plan seems to be new languages and tools optimised around those feature sets, with high quality DSP libraries from NI and iZotope for the core audio processing stuff, and html/JS for the front end and non-realtime stuff.

It sounds very much like "If we were to build a JUCE-like development system/platform/framework for audio tools from scratch now, and could dream up the best way we'd like it work, with the industry resources we now have in our group, what would we make?" - with Soundwide/NI/iZ/etc bank rolling it. It would still build to standard plugin formats, and they did mention CLAP in their presentation (or at least, had it in their slides, so they're certainly aware of it...)
Perhaps their sights are longer range (late 2023?) for a proprietary, all-in-one subscription service. Just need to juggle some current offering in the meantime.

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Atlatnesiti wrote: Thu Jun 16, 2022 11:04 am Yawn…
Wake me up when my two major DAWS - Cubase and Logic will support this… :hihi:
So witty :v
It's very tasty, I swear!

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nevermind...

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When you base majority of your products on a 20 years old homebrew GUI framework that has no concept of HiDPI, this is how you get to that situation.

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Trancit wrote: Thu Jun 16, 2022 2:35 pm If I could accept this as an excuse for not having found the time in the past decade then it must have happened to all devs/companies...

It didn´t... and one must ask him/herself why it didn´t affected most of the others??
And it´s not that NI got sooo many own plugins to maintain that not a single one (other than the new released ones) could have sorted by now...
I'm not trying to defend NI or anyone - just pointing out that software development is often nowhere near as 'simple' or 'obvious' as people not involved with the company think.

It may be that an executive decided they weren't going in that direction. It may be that legacy issues mean the work would take more cost/time than other higher prioritised features. It may be that there are not enough resources (I couldn't say how many engineers, teams or products NI internally maintain or develop).

The point is, it's easy to accuse a company of being slow or bad in development, but without all the information there's no way to know. It absolutely could be that they don't care as much as you do about something.

Smaller companies often have less resources, but more incentive to cater to customer requests because they depend more on individuals. It really depends.

There is one absolute truth though - if a company is not doing something you want or need, don't feel attached to them. Equally, if a company comes through for you, repay that with support.

Direct your money and support where it best gives you value.

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Well said!

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