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Comment by ushakov | Hacker News Reader

what’s the point of a new standard when no DAW besides Bitwig supports it?

Old standards suck. VST is owned by Steinberg, and has caused all sorts of trouble in the quest for the "perfect" plugin format. Apple had a couple different solutions to this, but all of them were obviously proprietary to their ecosystem (and only a sidegrade to being shacked to Steinberg). It would be nice to see "one standard to rule them all" for Windows, MacOS and Linux, and u-he has enough weight behind their name to influence a change.

There's a lot of hope behind this, and unless Apple decides to open-source their plugin format, there's nobody to compete. VSTs are so bad that most DAWs would adopt an alternative with zero additional features, simply because Steinberg's positioning is a pain for the community. I reckon this little format has a chance, but it remains to be seen whether it's successful or not.

Since CLAP was announced last year, I've seen lot of online interest in CLAP from electronic musicians, plus independent audio developers who are sick of dealing with bureaucratic BS around Apple's AU Avid's AAX, and Steinberg's VST plugin standards. I would put Urs Heckman from u-he at the tip-top of not just audio DSP developers, but small business owners who truly care about advancing the state of the art. If u-he and Bitwig can get other Berlin-based audio shops on board this has a good chance of succeeding.

Looking at Ableton 11's feature set it seems they're running out of ideas; CLAP support would definitely be the kinda thing that could compel people to upgrade to a future version.

It being MIT licensed also gives it a much better chance of getting integrated into all sorts of smaller DAWs and cheaper ones too that might not have wanted to deal with all the nonsense that comes with VST.

They can't even add ARA2 when every other major DAW has had it for years. Something is deeply wrong with Ableton, either they have trash product managers, SWE, or the 20+ year old codebase is too fragile. For example, why can't I have more than 7 collection folders?

Note that Bitwig does not have ARA2 support either. Bitwig was developed by some folks who left Ableton to push in directions that Ableton did not want to go.

So ... consider the possibility that the fundamental data models in both Live and Bitwig make it hard to support ARA2, in an inverse of the way that Live (and later Bitwig) had clip launching for 16 years before any other DAW.

Yes, I think that is very likely the case. That worries me as a customer, especially as more ARA-based plugins are released.

Or ARA is not a priority for their market?

They have rewritten their codebase back 10-15 years ago (or at least refactored it heavily) and have made videos about it.

https://i.imgur.com/u7VVCLT.png

Given enough users, people will ask for any feature. The question was whether it was a priority for most.

Were you not able to make an inference from the post count of that thread?

That it can inspire a flame war/big discussion?

Live 11 is becoming more of a cpu hog to my iMac Pro with each M1 update. It crashes the most often of all my DAW software. That said while I could go back to Logic or Cubase I still get 10x more music done with live vs the others. I remember about 10-12 years ago live version 7 or 8 was way behind schedule so much so that the CEO/Owner made a statement about it. This is all from memory though so some details may be wrong. I say that to say that is suspect that the code base is probably more fragile than the others.

I've been using Live for 15 years. The workflow is better in some ways—or at least it's extremely familiar—but I recently forced myself to learn Reaper. My mind is painstakingly slow to adjust, but Reaper's features make Ableton feel outrageously archaic. If I'm being honest with myself, I'll need another year or two to match my productivity with Live, but the bandaid had to be ripped off at some point, and I'm glad I did.

>Looking at Ableton 11's feature set it seems they're running out of ideas

Ableton adds pragmatic stuff. They have tons they could add without running out of ideas for those for 50 years. A new format is not one of those (and will have small workflow impact on users anyway).

Examples: ARA support (somebody already mentioned), melodyne/flex/style vocal correction, soft track re-arragement (versions), and 50 other things besides...

Ableton is just slow at developing Live. I wonder what are the reasons behind this, perhaps they want to make sure they don't stray away from the core vision (which is what made it popular) or perhaps it's stability. Or perhaps everyone is just too busy working on their own music.

I've invested a lot of time in VST3 lately and honestly, it's got problems.

The actual API isn't terrible, if you can find it under the huge pile of abstractions and classes and toolkits built overtop of it and shipped in the SDK. Steinberg's SDK has too many normative lifestyle assumptions. From VSTGUI to their own COM-like component model to the huge mile high pile of macros they've thrown onto CMake, it's just ... pushy, its own universe. Doesn't play well with others.

I built for it because I wanted what I was working on to be workable in the majority of DAWs. But as the thing I was working on went from "maybe a $$ project" to "I'll open source this", I'm not sure I want to invest anymore time in VST3.

I could see porting to CLAP instead.

Most likely Studio One, FLStudio, and Reaper will have it too.

I think Live will support it at some point.

Cubase and Logic... I doubt it.

FL Studio is already mentioned as application supporting CLAP

Image Line (makers of FL Studio) are in the "are already evaluating CLAP" list, so they're not already supporting.

> 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 from across our industry.

Looks like it's only a matter of time until others pick it up.

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