CLAP: The New Audio Plug-in Standard

[glowrak guy]

Steinberg can simply join in the CLAP party, and unleash their coders to create great new plugins and daw functions, that could earn them more than any lost licensing revenue, and solidify their place in the future of computer based music. If the ego's get kicked out of the boardroom, it's a no-brainer to support clap. More music tools, more freedoms, more money
(and parent company Yamaha certainly would favor of such an outcome!)

If ego had not been a factor, they would have chosen LV2.

I'm not a coder, but have purchased software from devs who consider vst2 and lv2, to be equally flawed in parts of their implementation,
but in different areas. I think a year from now, we'll be enjoying the fruits of open cooperation from both industry leaders, and low-profile geniuses,
and seeing great new plugins from sources who wouldn't have thrived under flawed, closed or monetized plugin formats.

In Steinbergs defense, with vst, they created great new functionality for musicians, and such things aren't fully mature at birth,
so those pioneering people were at the top of their game, experimenting, learning, and inventing day by day.
It will be great fun seeing how things play out. An industry giant facing excellent new competition. I hope they choose to co-operate and diversify,
rather than turning out a new closed and costly contender. Surge XT, Odin2, and Dexed have clap versions, hoping for a few dozen more in coming weeks.

(I still have and use my Kawai PH-50, I was amazed to hear it so wonderfully captured by your K1 synth.
Hope your K4 project is taking shape as you hope for!)
Cheers

[merlyn]

My understanding was that VST2 is going to be phased out. VST2 will cease to exist within a couple of years I thought. This means all VST2 plugins will have to be ported to VST3, as hosts will stop supporting VST2.

I thought CLAP was in part to free plugin developers from Steinberg's whims.

[nils]

I thought CLAP was in part to free plugin developers from Steinberg's whims.

CLAP is still under corporate control. Development and support will stop when the company’s accounting department says so, and not when the users/customers are no longer interested.

[Largos]

I thought CLAP was in part to free plugin developers from Steinberg's whims.

CLAP is still under corporate control. Development and support will stop when the company’s accounting department says so, and not when the users/customers are no longer interested.

Isn't every project developed until the people developing it can't/don't want to? The freedom comes from the ability for anyone to use the code and do what they want with it?

[robbert-vdh]

I thought CLAP was in part to free plugin developers from Steinberg's whims.

CLAP is still under corporate control. Development and support will stop when the company’s accounting department says so, and not when the users/customers are no longer interested.

It is absolutely not. Do you have any proof of this other than 'companies that are selling closed source plugins for money are involved in the project'? I've gotten involved with the CLAP project as an absolute nobody, and discussion, feature requests, and potential issues that were brought up over CLAP's development were all handled equally regardless of whether the reporter was part of those 'corporations' or not.

[mike@overtonedsp]

This defensive API design comes in two forms. First, the invariants/preconditions for all functions are well documented, and every function call has thread safety guidelines which indicate that a function must be thread safe/non-blocking, may only be called from an audio thread, or must be called from the main thread, with a simpler and thread safe way to request a main thread callback if needed. This was done because past experience has told us that quite a number of sometimes difficult to track down host host<->plugin compatibility bugs came down to unclear threading models, and plugins and hosts having incorrect expectations. We also spent a lot of time and effort to design APIs to make them as difficult to misuse as possible. Simple examples of this are a complete lack of mandatory lifetime management, and URID mapping being limited to a single place (namespaces for events brought in by custom extensions, if you only use core events you don't even need to worry about this)

That's all fine - and I'm sure a great deal of effort has been expended on it (I'm not being critical for the sake of it, far from it, I'm perhaps just prone to playing devil's advocate... I think I mentioned in another thread, that I've been in pro-audio for 30+ years, I started in analogue electronics before affordable DSP was a thing, so while that doesn't make my opinions 'right', or any more valid than any other, I've seen a lot of wheels being reinvented in that time and that might make me a little cynical).

What concerns me is that all this really tells me is that you've made the simplest part of making a plug-in even simpler. Writing a plug-in that does anything useful is complicated (especially if you want a custom GUI - which is one of the most awkward aspects of Linux plug-in development, and as far as I can tell 'CLAP' (please find a better name, I get uncomfortable even writing it... ) does nothing to solve). It could be argued that an understanding of the issues the API seeks to guard against should be a requirement for the developer and not something to be abstracted away (which usually just transforms one problem into another rather than solving it per se).

It will be interesting to see how this develops but as someone who actually wants to see much greater adoption of Linux for pro-audio, (and I've actively positioned my current plug-in product line hoping that can be a reality) I worry that this is a distraction from or may even undermine what we really need, which is more ports of existing plug-ins to Linux and greater adoption by other developers, all of which can be done - relatively easily - at the present time using the currently available industry standard formats and development frameworks.

[sunrat]

'CLAP' (please find a better name, I get uncomfortable even writing it... )

That's the first thought I had when first reading about this. "Clap" is street slang for gonorrhoea where I live. They could have called it "CRAP" for similar stigma.

[wrl]

What concerns me is that all this really tells me is that you've made the simplest part of making a plug-in even simpler. Writing a plug-in that does anything useful is complicated (especially if you want a custom GUI - which is one of the most awkward aspects of Linux plug-in development, and as far as I can tell 'CLAP' (please find a better name, I get uncomfortable even writing it... ) does nothing to solve).

In your opinion, what would constitute a better API for custom GUI on Linux?

-w

[glowrak guy]

I thought CLAP was in part to free plugin developers from Steinberg's whims.

CLAP is still under corporate control. Development and support will stop when the company’s accounting department says so, and not when the users/customers are no longer interested.

Clap was created beginning around 2014, by a young student, who still works on it now in his old age, along with some notable open-source devs,
and some relatively famous professional coders. No mega corporation involved. Yamaha owns Steinberg, that's the big corporation in your soap opera. So maybe reduce the intake of whatever it is clouding your mind. We need you at 100%, making clap versions of your plugins!
Here are a couple early adaptors of clap, again, no board-room full of fat men and cigar smoke in this picture
Linux Bitwig, and Surge XT

Surge-claps22.jpg (148.98 KiB) Viewed 2149 times

Note: The flatpak version of bitwig 4.3 beta 7 installs to /var/lib/flatpak

I start bitwig with this: flatpak run com.bitwig.BitwigStudio

Surge nightly build and clap versions are found at https://surge-synthesizer.github.io

surge-xt-linux-x64-NIGHTLY-2022-06-12-f131ade.deb

installs it's data files in /home/you/Documents.
and the plugin went to /usr/lib/clap

I copied the two plugins to /home/me/.clap

[sadko4u]

I see a huge movement around the CLAP format everywhere at this moment.
New PR action?

[robbert-vdh]

I see a huge movement around the CLAP format everywhere at this moment.
New PR action?

There was an press release to gather interest on the 15th, yes. CLAP 1.0 was stabilized shortly before that. Check out the press release here:

https://www.bitwig.com/stories/201/
https://u-he.com/community/clap/

[glowrak guy]

Here's a recent interview with the founder of U-he and his top 2 sound designers, from the bossman at
Sonic State, circa Feb 2022.

It might help to see and hear some of the people whose efforts are being questioned, or eagerly anticipated,
as the case may be. The discussion centers around making a soundset created for a movie, but takes a few detours.

https://youtu.be/Xc1RlRrxL7k

[Largos]

Here's a recent interview with the founder of U-he and his top 2 sound designers, from the bossman at
Sonic State, circa Feb 2022.

It might help to see and hear some of the people whose efforts are being questioned, or eagerly anticipated,
as the case may be. The discussion centers around making a soundset created for a movie, but takes a few detours.

https://youtu.be/Xc1RlRrxL7k

That's not about CLAP though?

[glowrak guy]

...that reduces the risk of running into common current plugin and host specific implementation bugs.

This is mostly because only one host supports it at the moment.

Bitwig is one of the newer big-name daws, so, coding skills aside, I'll assume the older daws are a bit more mature, have mature skilled coders, and thus are as fully able to integrate clap support, as Bitwig, and any other newer daws. Bitwig may have had an inside track, but they said 'Yes!', and the other daw makers will be welcome to do likewise.
Cheers

[glowrak guy]

Here's a recent interview with the founder of U-he and his top 2 sound designers, from the bossman at
Sonic State, circa Feb 2022.

It might help to see and hear some of the people whose efforts are being questioned, or eagerly anticipated,
as the case may be. The discussion centers around making a soundset created for a movie, but takes a few detours.

https://youtu.be/Xc1RlRrxL7k

That's not about CLAP though?

Not directly, but will give you a small personal indication of people actively supporting it. So after watching the interview, ask yourself, are these people I'd like to meet up with after hours? At a music-gear store? At the beach? Are they sensible? Are they friendly? Do they seem to know what they are talking about? etc

For example, I found Urs cheerier in this interview, than others I have seen, although the topic in others is often more technical. So my perception of him is now a bit more accurate.
Cheers