CLAP isn’t going to help anyone that wants AU since none of the AU plugin hosts support it (or likely ever will).
Personally I do not see much advantage with CLAP. All the MIDI-2.0 stuff is pointless since Rack uses rtmidi which I think is very unlikely to have MIDI-2.0 any time soon. Perhaps the thread-pooling is useful for Rack2Pro, however that would need some serious adjustments to the engine to facilitate (iirc it currently heavily relies on external threads). Can you name any other advantage of this plugin format for the Rack2Pro case?
The main advantage of CLAP is that it’s not owned by Steinberg, but the current VCV2 Pro VST2 implementation also doesn’t use the Steinberg SDK.
This is great but I’d love to see a common plugin standard for the modules within virtual modular synths to allow interchange of VCV, softube modular, voltage, bitwig grid, aas cv-1, etc modules across virtual modular hosts natively.
that would be next level… but softube should just make their modular available in vcv.
looking forward to seeing how CLAP shapes the plugin world. I sometimes wonder where we would be without the VST standard… is it one of the most popular and most used plugin formats of all time in any software? Its legacy is pretty amazing. where would we be without it?
While that’s true, the problem is that while most developers are happy with VST2 (issues around licensing and it being a proprietary format aside), many are not so happy with VST3. Although it’s been around for almost a decade already, take up has been very slow. There’s no Rack VST3 for example. It’s particularly an issue for developers of certain midi generator/arp modules (eg. Xfer Cthulhu) which iirc can’t be made to work with VST3.
The final push to this new CLAP format was Steinberg announcing that Cubase will soon no longer support VST2 - which seems to be being done for ‘corporate’ reasons and to push developers to use VST3, rather than because the VST2 format itself is obsolete in terms of functionality.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how this plays out. Not sure we’ll be seeing it in Cubase or Logic. Apple have a powerful and functional ecosystem where AU & AU3 are due to merge and I can’t see them embracing it (not invented here), whereas Steinberg has made a bit of a mess of things, and are on weaker ground. It looks like Arturia are on board but Native Instruments & Izotope on the plugin side are needed, and Live & other DAWs.
Well no-one seems to be suggesting a DAW that only supports CLAP so it’s not like some enforced ecosystem. Nothing to stop you mixing and matching CLAP with VST etc unless you happen to have some monopolistic minded DAW.
Indeed, but momentum is required if it is to gain traction, and not just be seen as yet another format that devs are expected to support. If many of the biggest players in the space don’t support it then what is the incentive for smaller devs to take it on?
lol let’s hope so or Nick won’t give it his blessing.
I don’t want to mess around with beta versions so I’m eagerly awaiting Bitwig 4.3 full to drop so I can try CLAP versions of these u-he plugins out. I have hit stability issues before with Repro and CPU so hoping this improves things.
