Presonus Studio One 7 now also supports CLAP…
So we have Bitwig, Studio One, MuLab, FLStudio, MultitrackStudio, Bidule, Reaper and some Linux DAWs now supporting it.
Maybe time for Renoise, too?
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Looks like JUCE will finally natively support CLAP soon, not yet, but soon!
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+1
CLAP is the future, people!
Advantages of CLAP for Musicians
Developed in collaboration with experts from diverse fields in the music software industry, CLAP is a cutting-edge plug-in standard, designed for modern computers, software, and paradigms. CLAP caters to novel DAW concepts, and opens up new horizons for what a plug-in can do or be.
Here are some immediately useful advantages of CLAP:
Better Performance From Modern CPUs
Developed with modern CPUs in mind, CLAP takes multi-thread management to a new level, with a clear and efficient allocation of roles between plug-in and host. Specifically, CLAP allows collaborative multicore support between plug-in and host through a so-called “thread-pool”, also allowing hosts to manage CPU-threading for plug-ins that provide their own multicore support. Preliminary tests show significant performance gains compared with current solutions.
Better and Faster Organization
CLAP hosts can read plug-in metadata and help organize your plug-ins. As CLAP hosts can retrieve information from plug-ins without having to wait for them to initialize, plug-in scans can be much faster.
Furthermore, we’re currently finalizing an extension which lets plug-ins tell the host which files they need (e.g. samples or wavetables), and the host can consolidate those in the project file. That means you’ll never lose a sample while transferring a project between systems!Better Modulation
The CLAP standard promotes new ways to create music with automation, modulation, and expressions. Here are a few examples:
- CLAP supports per-note automation and modulation (in accordance with the recent MIDI 2.0 specifications).
- Going one step further, CLAP’s parameter modulation concept allows for temporary parameter offsets. Parameter modulation is non-destructive, so as soon as the modulation has finished, the target parameter will return to its original state.
- CLAP makes it possible for polyphonic plug-ins to have their per-voice parameters modulated for individual notes (“MPE on steroids”).
With this new standard we aim to inspire host developers to add exciting new features to their products. Initial implementations by Bitwig, u-he and the Surge project demonstrate just a few of the possibilities.
Not to mention the fact you don’t have to pain shit to Steinberg!!! Amazing.
CLAP is open source, released under the MIT license: No fees, memberships or proprietary license agreements are required before developing or distributing a CLAP capable host or plug-in, and the license never expires. In a nutshell, there are no entry hurdles for developers, and plenty of open source projects already benefit from CLAP.
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Most definitely! It’s 100% essential being able to run every kind of plugin. And the performance has to be good in any case. This is even more important than fixing smaller issues within the DAW (imho).
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I’m not sure but I think a tick can be converted to a sample position in time. So maybe automation values sent to such a plugin could not be sent by Renoise for every single sample rendered, but it’s rarely an issue.
Can it just send the automation in a lower resolution as a workaround?
I remember vst3 also to have this feature, but we now have vst3 supported in Renoise, unless I am wrong about this feature.
Yes I guess so, even Surge doesn’t support per-sample-automation in their CLAP version AFAIK (let me ask a Surge dev for details…).
But CLAP makes sense, if the DAW can support per-voice-modulation and those multicore scheduling extensions. None of those currently are supported in Renoise. Seems to me that then CLAP support brings zero benefit (other than supporting this nice, free and open standard). I would assume that it would be more clever, if first per-voice-modulation / MPE whatever were added and then CLAP. So a long way to go.
Clap still have two advantages:
The license is mit, so dramas like vstplanet and vst2 plugins being taken down won’t happen. I heard about Steinburg can demand other companies to stop using vst2 if they want, and that was the trigger point of Image line supporting Clap
Also, I heard they are more performant than vst, not sure if that is just marketing or it does run better, so I need others to confirm that.
So what I just learned from the CLAP devs (namely EvilDragon):
- CLAP supports sample-accurate automation, it is not mandatory though
- Most CLAP hosts do not support sample-accurate automation
- Implementation into a host should be much easier than adding VST3 support
- No feature-wise benefits compared to VST3 for current Renoise
- Thread pooling is quite a benefit, if supported, “which reduces CPU usage when using a lot of plugins (or when a plugin does multicore processing). Reaper for example uses this to great benefit, even if it doesn’t have per voice modulation”.
That’s not true. Renoise can and does schedule automation and note events sample accurate.
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The only problem I have with CLAP is that it’s yet another standard to support. Right now in Renoise there’s LADSPA, DSSI, AU, VST2 and VST3 in Renoise. CLAP is great, but almost all CLAP plugins out there are also available as AU or VST3 plugins so there’s not much pressure to support it.
So unless there’s an obvious, super-duper user-visible feature in CLAP that we urgently need, I don’t see the need to support it - sorry. I wish I had the time to support it though, because VST3 is a pain to maintain and CLAP is great from a developers perspective.
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That’s a shame, but understandable if you need to put your resources elsewhere.
Unfortunately CLAP is 10 years too late, and will most likely end up with only partial support from the major hosts.
I disagree. The standard is developing very well and the number of applications is growing every day. You just make cool applications and have excellent support and do not depend on licenses that can be cancelled any day.
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I’m not saying CLAP isn’t a good standard, but the reality is Steinberg will never support it, and neither will Apple in all likelihood. So we end up with a partially supported format.
Steinberg has not been a leader for a long time. And clap is just a result of their approach to their own product.
I guess you are right. Even much more likely Steinberg will support it than Apple. Apple has zero interest in supporting an open standard, they really love a proprietary world, and only their own products are the reason to use AudioUnit at all. I also think the sales numbers of Logic are strangely not that important for them, it should be just an argument to buy a Mac machine. They have simply too much money.
Steinberg was very stubborn for a long time now. I think the current state of VST3 is ok now and it also supports extensions, as far as I know, but developer still hate it usually, for good reasons. I cannot see really a good reason for Steinberg not supporting CLAP, but these decsions cannot be explained by logic at all. On the other hand they just recently started to add DAW-Project support. Maybe they could change the mind, if CLAP support was requested. And I have the impression that there still is some developer exchange going on between Studio One and the Cubase team.
But isn’t the CLAP support growing very, very well? It would make a lot of sense for Ableton. They even could throw out AudioUnit then.
For Renoise, I would say the same, maybe one day, when the Renoise team has more time. Why not then throw out AudioUnit, too? I think AudioUnit really is the format to be considered dead. So adding CLAP and at the same time throwing out AudioUnit. It’s weird special case, only available for Mac world.
regarding the audio unit, everything is not so clear. I follow one developer who used to work at Elektron. Now he works for himself and released his first plugin Tela which used apple libraries. His comment was very positive in terms of development, which allowed him to get a very optimal plugin in terms of resources, which he would not have been able to get with VST. But as an alternative and convenience, clap also allowed him to implement this version quite quickly, which is also a big advantage.
I didn’t wrote that AudioUnit is a bad API. It already was much more capable than VST2.4 back in the days.
Then there are different reasons for plugin developers to support it: There is not only Logic (pretty little reason to support AudioUnit in my opinion), but there is the whole ios market.
For a DAW developer though, every functionality can be replaced by CLAP. And AudioUnit is not cross platform, it is purely Apple world only. So I can’t see any reason to support it anymore, other than backwards compatibility. It is a lot of effort for little benefit. And I assume it also is like a disruptive element when it comes to easy portable crossplatform code. Apple is the problem here, and Apple will never change their behaviour by their own motivation. It should not be supported by DAW vendors.
a great resource where you can see which plugins work with this standard
Another +1 for CLAP in Renoise, give really good performance boosts in Bitwig and Reaper and is already in Studio One and FL Studio as well.