Bitwig and u-he have announced CLAP (CLever Audio Plug-in API), a new open standard for audio plug-ins and hosts.

CLAP offers modern features, innate stability, and rapid support for plug-in and host developers. The developers say that, since it’s open source and liberally licensed, CLAP is a safe bet for the future.

CLAP 1.0 is the result of a multi-year project initiated by u-he and Bitwig, with design and implementation contributions by a group of commercial and open source audio developers.

Here’s are the benefits that the developers highlight:

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.

The developers say that they’re also finalizing an extension that will let plug-ins tell the host which files they need (e.g. samples or wavetables), so 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:

• CLAP supports per-note automation and modulation (in accordance with the recent MIDI 2.0 specifications).
• CLAP’s parameter modulation concept also 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”).

Initial implementations by Bitwig, u-he and the Surge project demonstrate CLAP’s possibilities.

Information for Plug-In and Host Developers

The CLAP creators tout many benefits for plug-in and host developers:

“From the C-only ABI, which allows binding to any programming language, to the transparent client-server model between host and plug-in, the robustness and clarity of the threading model, and the single event queue for all kinds of parameter changes, timing and MIDI. Despite being so comprehensive, everything in CLAP is easy to find and easy to implement.

A single cpp/hpp glue layer for C++ offers a quick start into the ABI, and its built-in “proxy layer” finds common threading bugs in an instant. Apropos C-only ABI: There are no platform specific dependencies: In theory CLAP should also run well on embedded platforms, game consoles or specialized supercomputers.”

Open Source & Liberal License

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.

It’s available now via Github.

MIDI Just Works

Inspired by MPE and MIDI 2.0, CLAP can adapt to any future MIDI standard. Wherever a solid standard exists, we allow developers to freely decide how to apply it. Plug-ins can receive and send any MIDI event on multiple ports.

Extensibility & Governance

A simple system for extensions makes CLAP future-proof. Companies can offer proprietary extensions if required for specific features.

Availability

CLAP is now available in the latest Bitwig Studio beta version and in the u-he CLAP beta versions of ACE, Diva, Hive 2 and MFM2.5. It has also been implemented by Chowdhury DSP, MultitrackStudio and the Surge Synth Team.

Open Source Projects Using CLAP:

Avendish project
CLAP JUCE Extensions project
Dexed
MIP2 framework
nih-plug framework
TheWaveWarden (Odin2

Following companies and projects are already evaluating CLAP for their host and plug-in software:

Arturia
Avid
BespokeSynth
CableGuys
Cockos
Cytomic
DMGAudio
Epic Games (Unreal Engine)
Expressive E
FabFilter
Image-Line
iPlug2 framework
LHI Audio
Node Audio (Etonal Studio)
Oddsound
Presonus
Plogue
Qtractor
Togu Audioline
Valhalla DSP
VCV
Vital Audio
Xfer Records