Bitwig and u-he are announcing CLAP: The New Audio Plug-in Standard

Bitwig and u-he introduce CLAP (Clever Audio Plug-in API), an open, modern, and free plug-in standard.

Berlin, Germany | June 15, 2022

Bitwig and u-he are excited to announce CLAP ("CLever Audio Plug-in API"), the new open standard for audio plug-ins and hosts. CLAP offers modern features, innate stability, and rapid support for plug-in and host developers. And since it's open source and liberally licensed, CLAP is a safe bet for the future.

Advantages of CLAP for Musicians

Developed in collaboration with experts from diverse fields in the music software industry, CLAP is a cutting-edge plug-in standard, designed for modern computers, software, and paradigms. CLAP caters to novel DAW concepts, and opens up new horizons for what a plug-in can do or be.

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.

Furthermore, we're currently finalizing an extension which lets plug-ins tell the host which files they need (e.g. samples or wavetables), and 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").
With this new standard we aim to inspire host developers to add exciting new features to their products. Initial implementations by Bitwig, u-he and the Surge project demonstrate just a few of the possibilities.

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.

CLAP does not only exist on paper; there are several ways you can try it out now. See the links below for projects from u-he, Bitwig, and others. Several other industry players are currently evaluating the CLAP standard.

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:

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

Synthesis 101
The Filter
by Bob Moog Foundation

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