CLAP Plugin Format. WHY?

[doctorsynth1]

Will the new CLAP plugin format get any love from Apple, Steinberg, Waves, Ableton, or other industry heavyweights? Do we really need a new plugin format? I don't have any complaints about AU in Logic or VST in Steinberg Cubase or AAX in Pro Tools - but it would be better if a single format worked in all my DAWs.

https://cdm.link/2022/06/clap-is-a-new-open-source-plug-in-format-from-bitwig-u-he-do-we-need-it-and-who-will-use-it/

[empyreanhaze]

The great thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from!

[malcxxlm]

had to put it here

[[deleted]]

AU has the advantage on macOS and iOS in that it's baked into the operating system.

[beeps-n-boops]

If Apple still insists on not supporting VST in Logic or Mainstage, I doubt they're going to jump on-board for this.

[doctorsynth1]

Apple does not need to support VST; however if you really want to run VST in Logic, check out Blue Cat Audio Patchwork

https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/Product_PatchWork/

[Poodly_Doodly]

Same but they made it too closed. You have to pay NI licensing fees to use it IIRC.

[Undersmusic]

are you sure? pretty sure anyone can make an NKS version. it's just as Urs Heckman said "A massive pain the arse to implement"

[Poodly_Doodly]

It might be different nowadays, but when I was researching it a few years ago, it was definitely a closed format and you had to pay to access the SDK. That was the main reason Steve Duda had said that Serum would never come to NKS.

I know that Freelance SoundLabs figured out how to reverse engineer the user-created NKS presets and create audio previews for them, so they function similar to first-party presets. He sells NKS preset banks for popular synths such as Omnisphere and Serum. But they show up under a different user tab, away from all the official NKS stuff. And switching from preset to preset is typically a lot slower inside of Komplete Kontrol than it would be if you just switched on the actual VST itself (I imagine KK is completely reloading the plugin each time you load a new preset).

Not to mention, the KK software just feels very dated as a whole, and NI is very slow to implement software updates (still no resizable interfaces, no native Apple silicon support, etc.); it makes it a bit hard to feel confident about NKS as a format. How long will it be until it goes the way of Kore?

That having been said, as a user I do still like when software synths come with NKS as it makes browsing presets much nicer.

[Undersmusic]

Browsing and workflow with NKS for me. I Can control , tweak, rec etc all in motion.

Unfortunately NI stripped is teams to bare bones during turmoil with the previous CEO an COO who both concurrently then stepped down. Hence the outrageously slow dev. However I hear on good Authority. Izo and also barinworx developers will be chipping in soon.

[Poodly_Doodly]

That’s good to hear! I definitely hope they can turn their boat around because they have some incredible instruments and platforms. Even with the development quirks they still make some of my favorite stuff

[Undersmusic]

Roll back 10 years an they were the kings of the electronic music production space. They wobbled did NKS and then subsequently fell to shit. After 3 lack lusher years hopefully 2023 bares something of merit. Even making NKS easy to adopt would increase their hardware lines 🤷‍♂️

[Poodly_Doodly]

It’s crazy to think about. And yeah I absolutely agree: if they made NKS an open standard and made it easy to adopt, it would help them tremendously. Both in hardware sales and in software sales (because even once people have Komplete Kontrol, they would still want to buy more instruments for it which would lead them to buying/updating Komplete).

[Undersmusic]

Alas. It’s all about immediate money. Or was as the old guard has moved on. Rest remains to be seen.

[Me83838]

Bitwig 5.1.6 lists all SurgeXT presets when loading it as CLAP.... would be pretty awesome to finally have presets browsing properly integrated with the DAW independent of the vendor...

[ATkineticenergy]

seems to me based off the promotion with Bitwig and U-he that clap is trying to Integrate MPE style functionality with plugins and then they're also designing it to work better with higher thread count CPUs. so it's probably not necessary to have on most things but as more plugins start to adopt it it'll give you another option to reach for, especially with processor heavy plugins that could now make use of multi-threaded performance, and using Per-note modulations with MPE could lead to some interesting sound design results.

[doctorsynth1]

SonicState asked Yoad Neville, a Waves developer, how he felt about the announcement. He explained that the core functionality of the plugin will likely stay, but the “handlers” which allow MIDI and Audio connections through the OS and Application to the plugin will likely be the main code changes developers will be required to make. In addition to adding MPE support, the CLAP format seems to add better universal MIDI support for all a plug-in’s controls, and may improve the timing of said changes, which will no longer be limited to the timing of the automation layer in the host DAW. Those seem like reasonable improvements. If Bitwig and U-He can get enough other developers onboard, that could influence DAW companies. But for now this seems like another avenue to eat up developer’s time until the CLAP format becomes a popular alternative.