Bitwig and u-he have announced a new open standard for audio plugins and hosts. CLAP (“CLever Audio Plug-in API“) offers modern features, innate stability, and rapid support for plugin and host developers. And since it’s open source and liberally licensed, CLAP is a safe bet for the future.

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.

CLAP takes multi-thread management to a new level, offers better and faster organization of plugins, per-note modulation and automation, and more.

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.

Various companies and projects are already evaluating CLAP for their host and plugin software, including PreSonus, Image-Line, Avid, FabFilter, Arturia, Vital Audio, Cableguys, Valhalla DSP, VCV, Xfer Records, and more.

For the latest updates, example code and information check CLAP’s Github page.

More information: Bitwig