If you haven’t heard about it yet, CLAP (CLever Audio Plug-in API) is a new open standard for audio plugins and hosts announced last week by Bitwig and U-he. Check the announcement here.

So, why do we need yet another plugin format? With the current major plugin formats, developers need to sign contracts with unilateral clauses for cancellation, or restrictive NDAs. Proprietary formats are rarely updated taking into account feedback from developers. Proprietary formats can be discontinued without notice.
CLAP, instead, is open source, liberally licensed, modern, and, on top of that, has some really cool features not available to other formats.

As a proof of concept, we decided to port one of our plugins, Wires, to CLAP. We wanted to see how long it would have taken us. We also wanted to send a message to our customers and other developers. It took just 6 days to get a working CLAP plugin and automate the whole building process.

We are proud that Wires is one of the first commercial plugins ported to CLAP.

Fellow developers, we use JUCE to develop our plugins, but it’ll take a while before they add CLAP support (you can vote this feature request). However, there’s already an unofficial CLAP Plugin Support repository for JUCE 6 and 7. It’s easy to use and can be implemented with both Projucer and CMake.

We are not using any CLAP-only features yet, but we’ll work on it in the following months.
From now on, we will also offer CLAP versions with each new plugin update and release.

This is a very good first step in the right direction for the whole audio industry.

Try Wires today. Available in VST2, VST3, AU, AAX, and now CLAP (64-bit) formats.

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