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

[aMUSEd]

Regarding the slowness of NI:

they still haven’t adapted to HiRez screens and making their plugins scalable, especially not their big master suites like Komplete etc.

And we have HiRez displays for how long?! Even free plugins manage to give you a fully scalable UI these days. So that’s very disappointing that NI is unable to manage even this simple task

Yes they have for a lot of their range now, especially the more recent ones. The main applications that are not hires yet are the ones reliant on old bitmapped technology for graphics resources like Kontakt and to an extent, Reaktor, both of which also have a ton of in house and third party instruments and libraries that are not a simple proposition to change.

[noiseboyuk]

CLAP has made me even more depressed about Cubase. Every release now is a hornet’s nest of bugs that come and go, basic performance and stability is all over the place.

Now here is a shiny new tool that might just help a little on the performance side of things and I think we can all agree that its not going to happen in the short or medium term, and very unlikely in the long term.

No need to tell me all the better DAWs. I’m just moaning. Thanks, I’ll see myself out.

[aMUSEd]

Will CLAP have its own preset type for plugins that rely on hosts to save out presets? eg VST2 has FXP/B, VST3 has vstpresets, AU has aupresets.

[Urs]

Will CLAP have its own preset type for plugins that rely on hosts to save out presets? eg VST2 has FXP/B, VST3 has vstpresets, AU has aupresets.

Not planned. Instead there's work on a mechanism that let's the host know about the preset directories and file suffix, and get the plug-in to load the files itself.

More elegant than yet another preset file format... hey, we can even load nksf then

[GruvSyco]

Will CLAP have its own preset type for plugins that rely on hosts to save out presets? eg VST2 has FXP/B, VST3 has vstpresets, AU has aupresets.

Not planned. Instead there's work on a mechanism that let's the host know about the preset directories and file suffix, and get the plug-in to load the files itself.

More elegant than yet another preset file format... hey, we can even load nksf then

That's good to hear. It's about time plugins feel more integrated into DAWs.

[wuworld]

I'm more confident in established companies that have been in the market for the while when it comes to this like Steinberg or Avid. Too many resources, and time wasted trying to do all these "standard formats".

[vertibration]

I'm more confident in established companies that have been in the market for the while when it comes to this like Steinberg or Avid. Too many resources, and time wasted trying to do all these "standard formats".

Sounds like you havnt read anything about CLAP, or what it can do.

[apoclypse]

It's not a story, it's facts. But nevermind.

Technical debt is a challenge. However NI aren’t the only ones who’ve had to deal with this yet other companies in this space seem to be able to manage it better. The technical debt excuse can only go so far when it’s been almost 10 years and they are still dealing with the same issues. At that point it’s not just a technical debt issue, it’s a cultural and management issue.

Either way they need to figure something out as they are bound lose customers due to frustration. There are way too many great developers and products out there for NI to be slacking right now.

[Trancit]

I'm more confident in established companies that have been in the market for the while when it comes to this like Steinberg or Avid. Too many resources, and time wasted trying to do all these "standard formats".

Hear hear...

So companies like Bitwig or u-he are not established???

[Markus Krause]

I plan to add CLAP support to our plugins.

CLAP does NOT suffer from the problems that Steinberg's proprietary VST3 format has:
- Arrogant and unhelpful developers that ignore the demands of the industry
- No proper Midi support
- A bloated, messy and buggy SDK that fails compiling in many places

I think that CLAP is a well-designed and elegant plugin format with a developer friendly licensing. It should be easy to add to our existing projects.

[Markus Krause]

Will CLAP have its own preset type for plugins that rely on hosts to save out presets? eg VST2 has FXP/B, VST3 has vstpresets, AU has aupresets.

Not planned. Instead there's work on a mechanism that let's the host know about the preset directories and file suffix, and get the plug-in to load the files itself.

More elegant than yet another preset file format... hey, we can even load nksf then

I absolutely agree with this. The plugins and not the host should manage the presets.
I recall how much time I wasted when I tried to make the VST3 preset management work, just to find out that it is broken in most hosts and then drop it

[EnGee]

I plan to add CLAP support to our plugins.

CLAP does NOT suffer from the problems that Steinberg's proprietary VST3 format has:
- Arrogant and unhelpful developers that ignore the demands of the industry
- No proper Midi support
- A bloated, messy and buggy SDK that fails compiling in many places

I think that CLAP is a well-designed and elegant plugin format with a developer friendly licensing. It should be easy to add to our existing projects.

Great! u-he and Tone2 synths with Bitwig is a great setup I hope Synapse Audio and Rob Papen will join soon as well

[Urs]

I'm more confident in established companies that have been in the market for the while when it comes to this like Steinberg or Avid. Too many resources, and time wasted trying to do all these "standard formats".

If you read the list of contributors carefully you'll find people who work for industry leaders in synthesizers. They do so on their private account, but they certainly bring the expertise that those companies offer. There are also former employees from the biggest host developer, developers of the biggest open source host, and probably a few more droppable names, if size matters that much.

[Urs]

I plan to add CLAP support to our plugins.

Fabulous!

If you are looking for examples with VSTGUI (not sure if you use it), there is an example synth that is easy to analyse, uses VSTGUI (with live resize, if that matters) and implements a lot of the good features of CLAP which you might wish to add later on:

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

[noiseboyuk]

It's not a story, it's facts. But nevermind.

Technical debt is a challenge. However NI aren’t the only ones who’ve had to deal with this yet other companies in this space seem to be able to manage it better. The technical debt excuse can only go so far when it’s been almost 10 years and they are still dealing with the same issues. At that point it’s not just a technical debt issue, it’s a cultural and management issue.

Have to say I agree. I’ve felt for a long time that the NI culture is dysfunctional. They still produce some excellent products which are state-of-the-art with scripting etc, but these are mostly Kontakt libraries.

Whenever I’m tempted to give them too much benefit of the doubt, I remember that Komplete Kontrol STILL has an unworkably small display, sometimes producing two whole results (among many other crimes). This was obviously stupid in 1.0, the day of release. Eventually a user hack modifying ini files was found. All it needs is for someone to put that hack into the official preferences and problem solved.

They still haven’t done it. A decade later.

Technical debt doesn’t entirely explain their strategic and development thinking. I’m not saying it’s not real or a problem - it is - but there are unquestionably other factors.

Sorry, tangent off.