News in 2023

Consolidation

CLAP received a lot of attention to the details.

We improved the documentation, some remaining ambiguities have been clarified. Together with the documentation improvements, the clap-helpers now perform more checks and give a better sense of validation, correctness and security.

The overall ecosystem did mature.

We stabilized a bunch of extensions, see ChangeLog.md

Reworked audio port configuration

We’ve improved the audio port configuration process, so it is easier to implement complex surround handshake. Also one missing bit was the audio port activation, which is now part of CLAP.

Deeper plugin integration

Preset Discovery

Preset Discovery is a technology which allows the host to find all the presets available for a given plugin, extract the metadata and ask the plugin to load a preset.

This technology works as follow:

  1. The host asks the plugin in which locations the presets are stored, and a pattern to recognize which files are preset. For example “*.h2p” for a u-he preset.
  2. The host will crawl those locations to find all the presets.
  3. The host will ask the plugin to extract the metadata from a preset.

Bitwig Studio >=5.0 supports this, and will let you type “u-he Bass” to find all the bass presets available with all u-he plugins installed.

This technology proved itself to be:

  1. easy to implement
  2. fast
  3. works with the plugin’s native preset file format

Remote Controls

The purpose of Remote Controls is to easily map the plugin’s parameter onto a physical controller, by using a set of pages provided by the plugin itself.

A Remote Controls page contains up to 8 parameter references.

Parameter Indication

The host will tell the plugin if a parameter currently:

  • is mapped on a physical controller
  • is playing an automation
  • has automation data, but isn’t playing it
  • has overridden automation playback

Plugin State Conversion

We’ve introduced a mechanism for converting plugin state and automation.

CLAP Wrapper

CLAP Wrapper is a library which will adapt your clap plugin to VST3 and AUv2 (and maybe others in the future). https://github.com/free-audio/clap-wrapper

That’s not all! It will also provide a lightweight standalone host. It is very practical for debugging too!

CLAP Validator

A validator and automatic test suite for CLAP plugins. Clap-validator can automatically test one or more plugins for common bugs and incorrect behavior. https://github.com/free-audio/clap-validator