There’s a new plugin format being launched - open-source, independent of any proprietary vendor-driven standards. Apparently, first plugins and hosts by reputable companies (Bitwig, u-he) are on the road to releasing software using this standard - looks promising.
Now that Steinberg is phasing out VST2, adopting an open-source standard could be helpful. It’s just a bit unfortunately named
I remember hearing something about this a while ago, but it was very early. Sounds like they’ve made some good progress on it.
I’m all for supporting an open source initiative like this and if it does what Urs says (no doubt it will) then I think it’ll be an excellent platform. Certainly lots of the points he mentions are issues I’ve faced.
update: CLAP is official! Bitwig is already live with it, some plugin devs (Surge) have versions ready, and a number of plugin developers (some big names, e.g. Arturia, FabFilter, …) are already working on it.
I think we really do need a truly free and open standard.
One that is thoroughly modern.
The vst2 deprecation is just a mess. As far as I know, vst3 brought nothing compelling.
Playing live vsts is absolutely one of the use cases for CLAP.
I’m pretty tired of the trial and error to get a bunch of plugins to sit nicely regarding cpu affinity and multicore performance.
Host controlled thread pooling sounds like a great solution and Urs from u-he is bragging about some significant performance gains.
On Windows?
You have your protools world and then the rest of the world.
Protools do what they want to do. They’re not the least bit interested in 90% of music creators and certainly anyone playing live.
So basically Windows is VST, and Steinberg throw their weight around when it suites them.
No competition, no competing standards.
There’s probably more competition on Apple computers! At lease they have VST and AU.