CLAP, the Plugin Format (of the future?)

[Tagirijus]

So forcing him to port everything to another format, supporting and developing it, will take days and months.

You replied during my long post. So I'll quote you here now, sorry, hehe. To the quote of yours: isn't CLAP supposed to solve this problem? Being able to build into other plugin formats quickly?

[AlexShesha]

So forcing him to port everything to another format, supporting and developing it, will take days and months.

You replied during my long post. So I'll quote you here now, sorry, hehe. To the quote of yours: isn't CLAP supposed to solve this problem? Being able to build into other plugin formats quickly?

I`m not sure, actually. Quickly is not 0. So it will take a bit of time anyways.
I`m a composer and when I receive a quick edit request from a client (which is totally ok ) it usually takes around 30 minutes - 1 hour. And I can write a new short theme with this amount of time

[humanboeing]

At least I know what brand I don't buy anymore.

I don't think this is the right approach especially with the fact that CLAP seems to be on the liberating side. Sure, consumer buying power and all of that but this is just coercion, no one likes that. Perhaps the better way to go about this is if the change was to came from within naturally, once the format spreads devs would see it's worth supporting or even ditching vst in favour of it. Also worth to remember that Melda (afaik) is just one person managing 100+ plugins, skepticism is understandable here.

[Urs]

I just wonder indeed why Urs did not put this much effort into pull requests for LV2 or so

Well, many people from the open source community have wondered the same thing.

I just wonder how this would have panned out in reality. CLAP was already there and it was what we wanted. So in order to turn LV2 into what we wanted, there would have been a team of maybe 20 developers, some of which from pretty high profile companies (just look int he CLAP contributors list, there were people involved as private people who actually work for NI and such). So these 20 developers would have sent one contribution after the other over the course of a year to mold LV2 in something similar to CLAP. It would certainly have made a lot of existing plug-ins incompatible.

I do not think this would have been a realistic scenario.

It was a lot easer starting with a "clean slate" where no harm would be done to existing plug-ins and hosts.

[Tagirijus]

I`m not sure, actually. Quickly is not 0. So it will take a bit of time anyways.
I`m a composer and when I receive a quick edit request from a client (which is totally ok ) it usually takes around 30 minutes - 1 hour. And I can write a new short theme with this amount of time

I guess this is not quite a fair and realistic analogy. As far as I understood it correct, the mentioned automatism is meant to convert the code into different plugin formats on its own. Even if this is an algorithm which might take a bit time, it's still automatic in the end. You, on the other side, brought up the analogy with a service, done by a human being with a revision task which cannot be done automatically (yet at least, hehe ... AI some day, wink wink? d-: ). So in my understanding you basically compared an algorithm with human skills. The latter one for sure in most cases might be slower after all. (-;

I just wonder how this would have panned out in reality. CLAP was already there and it was what we wanted. So in order to turn LV2 into what we wanted, there would have been a team of maybe 20 developers, some of which from pretty high profile companies (just look int he CLAP contributors list, there were people involved as private people who actually work for NI and such). So these 20 developers would have sent one contribution after the other over the course of a year to mold LV2 in something similar to CLAP. It would certainly have made a lot of existing plug-ins incompatible.

I do not think this would have been a realistic scenario.

It was a lot easer starting with a "clean slate" where no harm would be done to existing plug-ins and hosts.

Hey Urs, thanks for this explanation! I did not know that CLAP was there already! And also: at least I, as a non-pro dev, can understand this point of view.

Another question which now comes up: how do you think will it be for other devs now, which might be in a similar position like yours back then? I mean: if other devs also want to have certain things implemented and will have to do many and regular pull requests or so. Will there be any difference compared to your situation back then?

[Urs]

Another question which now comes up: how do you think will it be for other devs now, which might be in a similar position like yours back then? I mean: if other devs also want to have certain things implemented and will have to do many and regular pull requests or so. Will there be any difference compared to your situation back then?

Well, you can already see the difference in which way the Github repositories are set up. The CLAP one has a discussion channel and it's actively used. Furthermore discussions on the Issues tracker happen in a timely manner, not after weeks of delay.

It is literally already happening, the number of active contributors has probably doubled since the announcement.

[Tagirijus]

Thanks for the reply and the info. This sounds promising, nice. (=

[magmagwa]

Plugins have a general usage, like ReaStream as a VST inside OBS to move audio between apps, very nice.

[pierb]

So will Melda support CLAP?

[Hexspa]

So will Melda support CLAP?

Probably eventually is my guess.

[] Peter:H []

Can we have mix revolution first then later (if at all) clap please.
If I look into google trends ... hm ... one has to search for "CLever Audio Plugin" rather than CLAP ... there's no trace of relevance of Clap. That's astonishing.

[rasmusklump]

Astonishing? After just 3 weeks?

[] Peter:H []

Astonishing? After just 3 weeks?

a.) 5 years old... CLAP is a revived project that has been almost abandoned in the past.
b.) release of 1.0 is 3 weeks ago. Beta phase up to 0.23 was a bit longer.
c.) if it should gain any relevance, I would expect more traces already today. Don't know why google trends does not show anything
What's missing is that major DAWs offer suppoert. But then the hazzle only will begin with "interpretation of the API" ... My guess is that Melda can sit back with pop corn and a soft drink and watch waht happens ... or use the time to add something to the portfolio that creates income through market share.

[ThomasHelzle]

Not sure what your beef is with clap, but mostly one dev creating something on Github for years on and off of course doesn't create Google trends - whatever relevance they may have.
The time before the release was mostly a core group of people working on it, and they probably didn't have to use Google to find their stuff.
So to me, for a small community like the audio world, all looks good.

The baby is born, it's healthy and welcomed to the world and now a lot of development has to happen to make it a strong and versatile basis for future oportunities.

And as was repeatedly said by Urs and others: the main goal is NOT that every DAW in the world supports it on day one, but that plugin devs have a stable base to work with that isn't in the hands of a corporation with a rather bad history of erratic decisions.

As for sitting back: sure, that is exactly what gave us the what, 14 years with VST3 going nowhere and being an unpredictable pain in the behind?
At one point one has to drop the pop corn and the soft drink and do something, or nothing will change ever.

Rome wasn't built in day and CLAP won't become the one standard for everything in 3 weeks.

If Melda is interested in getting in early and help with shaping the standard or not is up to them, but everybody is welcome and making a difference. It's NOT about hype or trends or market share.
It's about building a stable basis for the future.



Cheers,

Tom

[rasmusklump]

Maybe it's because they didn't create numerous fake accounts and sock puppet accounts to spam the forums with advertisings like a certain developer did with Mdrummer ...