An introduction to Linux audio plugin APIs | Hacker News Reader

An introduction to Linux audio plugin APIs

lwn.net

30 pointschmaynard6 comments

There's also a very interesting new OSS plugin standard called "CLAP", from the U-he devs:

Bitwig has it integrated experimentally, and I believe the REAPER devs have said they aren't opposed to adding it in the future.

That's the focus of the second (upcoming) article :)

Minor correction: CLAP was not made by U-he, but by someone who works for Bitwig and maintains VST2 builds of U-he synths for Linux.

Schwaa has basic support of CLAP in Reaper at the very least in his own branch. I believe both Reaper and Bitwig devs are waiting for CLAP 1.0 to be announced to make all this official. Which is not too far away.

  > CLAP was not made by U-he, but by someone who works for Bitwig and maintains VST2 builds of U-he synths for Linux.

Ah, TIL -- thanks!

I read an article saying that jackd (which routes audio between programs, and offers a cross-program audio transport/play/pause/timestamps) arose to bypass the issue of the GPL making it difficult to link multiple audio plugins with incompatible licenses into a single DAW. The article said that session management (saving and restoring the state of multiple independent programs, as well as routing between them) proved to be the biggest weakness compared to audio plugins. Unfortunately I can't find the link to the article anymore :(

You can hear/see Paul Davis talking about the history of Linux audio in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk2AMwc4e2k. It's a lengthy video though :)

Oh, and you can probably scroll to 46:51 in that video I linked to.

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