I would argue that although it would be nice, and helpful even, CLAP does not even need host support to succeed. All that is needed is a CLAP to VST3 wrapper. The developer can code with CLAP, wrap to VST3, and compile. CLAP would still be a success and make developers’ lives easier without the customer ever knowing the difference in their VST3 binaries.stargate wrote: Mon Jan 31, 2022 9:55 pm I wish the CLAP format all of the success in the world, but the odds are stacked against them. It's going to be almost impossible for them to get the critical mass of hosts and plugins required to succeed. Because VST(tm) is that name brand that consumers demand, with more inertia than a runaway train. Also, being "open source" only means that anybody can implement a CLAP host or plugin without unreasonable restrictions, the standard is still controlled by somebody who can completely screw it up (now or later), or hand control over to somebody else who will.
What they need is a broad coalition of major plugin and host vendors to come together and agree on a standard, governance, and most importantly, all agree to implement it. If Ableton, Bitwig, FL Studio, Xfer and some other plugin vendors not in bed with Steinberg joined forces to promote CLAP, then it will almost certainly become a thing.
The vast majority of users won't consider using something without VST support (please, ask me how I know that), and there is no clear path for CLAP to become so dominant that it replaces VST. Which leaves host developers with gambling on a huge burden of providing support for yet another plugin format, while still supporting VST in parallel for many years.
Now truthfully, I fully believe that independent host developers will jump to make their DAWs natively CLAP compatible—there is no drawback other than a couple of days’ work, and there’s a lot to gain. But I don’t think even the lack of widespread native host adoption will slow CLAP down, as long as it makes development easier—even for VST3 apps.
As for a broad coalition? It was already tried and failed.
Also, another standard, LV2, failed to gain mass acceptance as well. It is a powerful and complete standard, but, like VST3, not easy.
This has a chance where others have failed, because it is not competing against VST3, but is complementary to it. Yet, it has the legs to stand alone as its own native format as well. This is why I think it has a good chance.
