markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

That's not quite the case... HDX cards can be used on Apple Silicon with Rosetta 2 via the Avid-branded chassis from Sonnet, and I've personally not had a problem with that. Of course, some driver-level work would be required to fully support HDX natively in Apple Silicon. Also, the Carbon interface works fine on Apple Silicon under Rosetta 2 as it uses AVB. More and more, HDX is less important for DSP, although remains vital for large I/O configurations. On the other hand Pro Tools 2022.x supports Core Audio (or ASIO) hardware with more I/O. And if you're running the Dolby Renderer on the same machine as Pro Tools, for example, you have to run native audio hardware in any case, using the Pro Tools Aggregate I/O option (or any other Core Audio device). So I wouldn't say these are cases of limited usefulness; during Covid I had to do a whole movie soundtrack album that way at home, running Pro Tools on a 27-inch iMac with the Dolby Renderer. But when that 27-inch iMac (the last Intel 2020 model) can easily outperform a Mac Studio when it comes to running a full Atmos Netflix dub, you kind of feel it wouldn't hurt for Avid to kind of hurry up!

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

> Adding VST3 support to Ardour/Mixbus, we did not experience this as a notable issue at all.

Not as a host; but this was a major stumbling block for more advanced plug-ins like, say, Kontakt. Given that VST3 was based on VST-MA (largely the work of one of the original Studio One authors), which is derived from Steinberg's COM-like interpretation, there were some genuine pain points for plug-in developers.

But I think your point about the framework approach is a reason against having yet another API to spit out. As you say, developers who do make a living out of this, aren't going to be able to dig their heels in and say "it's CLAP or nothing if you want to run my wares." I imagine it would be suicide for smaller developers like Fabfilter or Valhalla. And if CLAP is just another API supported in branch of a framework, where is the "killer application/plug-in" going to come from?

I think VST3 shows how well this is going to be received. Nobody was keen on VST3 from the start, and AFAIK this wasn't to do with philosophical objections to commercial licensing. It was largely due to the fact VST2 worked well enough, was understood, supported, and nobody saw the point in adopting it. The fact Steinberg had to deprecate 2.4 and then announce they were going to end-of-life support for it in their own applications to convince market forces says it all. Even when Doric came out a few years ago, in v1.0 only VST3 was supported. But they quickly backtracked and added whitelist support for VST2 plug-ins.

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

Apologies, Paul. When I saw your 2017 keynote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk2AMwc4e2k) from the Linux Audio Conference, you seemed less enthusiastic than in other talks you've given. Maybe I was reading too much into the message you were trying to convey; as I say, apologies if that was the case, I have nothing but respect for your work.

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

The proliferation of bespoke sample players has solely been for commercial reasons, though. For example, a company receives outside money, say Spitfire; the investors ask if the company owns all their own IP; a discussion ensues that the company's products require a per-license fee to be protected with the Kontakt Player realm; the investor raises their eyebrows. What follows is pain for the user as developers who've never built a sampler player download JUCE and see what they can do, all making the same mistakes, and taking versions to iron them out much to the annoyance of end users. Plus, there's really not that much innovation that comes out of this... And some of the seemingly innovative aspects of SINE were simply stolen at the behest of one of the celebrity names they have behind some of their products.

I would love to see more change in music and audio, but when the main applications in use are all over 30 years old, you have to wonder. Cubase started in 1989 on the Atari and became reborn as Cubase SX 1.0 in 2002, Logic was released by Emagic (after the separation with C-Lab) in 1990/91 and purchased by Apple in 2002, Pro Tools also came in 1991, based on the earlier Sound Tools products, and so on...

Also, it's depressing to think how much exciting research existed in this field in the 80s that still hasn't come to fruition. Look back at Stanford and CCRMA, the close ties to Lusasfilm Computer Division, NeXT, etc... Michael Hawley who is sadly no longer with us, even talked about creating a MusicDroid (like SoundDroid and EditDroid) for John Williams to be able to prototype orchestral scores.

Surely for something truly innovative to happen, we need bigger truly revolutionary thoughts along these lines, not just another plug-in format. That's kind of boring, to be honest. Surely with developers like Urs and others can think of something bigger; CLAP seems motivated by developers wanting to unshackle themselves from the hosts they ultimately need to support them, either via wrapper code or native support. It's hard to articulate why this changes the world for the better for an end user who just wants a cool new synth.

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

I'm not sure how you become less dependent on Steinberg or Apple by promoting another standard that really needs them to support it to fulfill its logical destiny. If Steinberg can revoke a developer's license at will (I've never heard of them actually doing this, though, although I'd love to know examples of such behaviour) they could therefore do just that if they smell any wrapping code needed to bridge into the VST domain. Avid used to, for example, although I don't know if it's still the case, have a clause in the developer's agreement that prevented RTAS/AAX host plug-ins... I guess I'm old enough to remember when FXpansion! had such a plug-in to host other formats within another.

I do agree with you on the state of the current plug-in APIs. But unless CLAP plug-ins are hosted natively, they will still have to piggy back on top of all the crud you describe. So unless a product comes out that truly takes the lead away from Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, et al... I feel like this is going to be a massive uphill struggle. Plug-in developers will gravitate towards where the money is; and unless users place serious pressure on Apple (that thought is amusing in and of itself!), Steinberg, and so on... It's hard to see CLAP making a dent. On the other hand, if it aims to replace JUCE as the intermediary development platform to make life easier for developers, that could be good. Although, that would seem to diminish the long term goals...

So if you need users to apply pressure on large companies, you're doomed. Even famous Cubase users like Hans Zimmer aren't going to get onboard this fight, despite his close relationship to Urs.

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

True. But Avid are largely terrible at implementing new technologies in a timely manner, especially since they started off-shoring development as more and more of the old timers went to recreate Pro Tools as Luna for Universal Audio! I mean, although a Windows version of Pro Tools is available, the core of their professional user base is on the Mac, and they haven't even managed to get an Apple Silicon-native version out the door yet -- over two years since Apple provided DTKs for that purpose. (Meanwhile, Logic Pro, Cubase, Studio One, Live, Bitwig, and others have all managed it.)

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

It is negative, but you have understand how niche the music and audio market really is to put some of my comments in context. I'm all for new and cool and all the rest of it, but the end users here--composers, musicians, producers, engineers--tend to not care so much about pioneering in what you might call the HN way.

To speak to your simple example, Native Instruments could do what you suggest, but they could have done what you suggest by adopting the cool and new VST3 standard back in 2006. This would have set them up for Cubase 5, which introduced VST Expression (3.5) to provide exactly that variance within orchestral samples on a per-note basis. So this has been possible for nearly a decade and a half, and, so far as I can tell, while most composers agree it's a neat idea, by Native Instruments controlling the sampler market (and Vienna to a degree) and not supporting VST3.5, the adoption never materialized.

Also, how many keyboards support polyphonic aftertouch? This would be the MIDI message that would need to be generated in order to perform polyphonic note-based expression. But almost no keyboards support it, and ROLI created the MPE standard to provide a workaround by splitting messages across multiple MIDI channels. Interestingly, MPE has received quite a bit of attention, but this doesn't require a new plug-in format to support it. And ROLI, the company, has been disastrous in the marketplace by adopting Silicon-Valley-esque approaches, raising capital, growing too fast with needless acquisitions, filing for bankruptcy, rising more money, and it even has a leader who thinks he can walk on water!

So if I sound old-fashioned and against new ideas, nothing could be further from the truth. But to pretend musicians would jump on disruptive innovation just isn't what has happened in the past. Maybe this time it'll work, but I don't see that industry has changed all that much. In fact, in many ways it's worse. More and more sample library creators have created their own sampler for playback, so whereas Kontakt used to power most libraries, now Spitfire, Cinesamples, 8dio, Orchestral Tools, and others, have their own engine. The phrase herding cats comes to mind.

Diversity and change is the one thing that just hasn't happened in the music and audio world. For example, Steinberg introduced Nuendo 22 years ago with the intention of it disrupting Pro Tools... However, go to Skywalker Sound, for example, or any other high-end audio facility, and they won't be running Nuendo -- at least in the US. And as for open source, listen to Paul Davis talk about Ardour... For some reason, open source music and audio software has just never become a thing. And sure, it would be cool for there to be a kind of Red Hat model adopted in the audio industry, where money could be made from supporting an open-source-based ecosystem, but I think CLAP has more chance of succeeding than this reality.

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

Most are quite similar, which is why the vast majority of commercial plug-in developers gravitate to using something like JUCE (or, to a lesser extent, iPlug). Such a framework makes it easy to target a single API and output cross-platform versions for AAX/AUv2/AUv3/VST2/VST3/etc... I have no doubt that JUCE will support CLAP, and therefore make it easier for developers to spit out yet another format.

Alternatively, CLAP could end up as the intermediate format, with bindings supplied for presentation within other native plug-in formats.

VST3 is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb, because it represented a radical change in how the user interface classes interact with the audio processor class. This created a massive problem because you had to assume that the UI and the processor were essentially running in separate processes and communicated via message passing through a specific interface or just plain text. It's the reason why VST3 didn't ever gain the traction and support of VST2, since Cubase was for many years the only VST3 host, and since more complex plug-ins like, say, Kontakt, would require a huge amount of developer time to upgrade, a stalemate existed for too long. So it's hard to see everyone getting behind yet another format to support and test, especially if the core code has to conform to the lowest common denominator, as it were.

On closed vs. open, although AU is controlled by Apple, and VST by Steinberg, they are both open to the point that anyone can download required SDKs and develop for them. Avid traditionally kept their SDKs through application forms and NDAs, so not everyone had access. Even now, IIRC, JUCE doesn't come with the AAX bindings necessary to build such a plug-in, they have to be copied in from the official distribution.

markofthew

4 года назадdiscuss

This highlights a big problem in the world of music and audio software: everyone likes the idea of standards, just so long as they control the standard. And while this problem no doubt exists in other domains, it's painfully apparent in music and audio applications because the market is too small.

Clap won't succeed longterm because of many of the factors outlined in so many of these posts. Notably, Apple aren't going to support it in Logic because Audio Units work just fine, and AUv3 spans both iDevice and Mac markets. Steinberg almost certainly won't support it; they aren't even allowing VST 2.4 plug-ins to run in the Apple Silicon version of Cubase -- and this isn't for technical reasons. Ironically, Steinberg have been trying to push VST 3 since the release of Cubase v4.1 back in 2006, and it's still a giant pain 16 years later. If you look back at VST 1/2, part of the allure was the simplicity of the API; VST 3 tried to change the game too much towards MVC given that it looked at the time you might want to run the processing part of the plug-in on a different system than the user interface part.

Pro Tools doesn't get a mention in this thread, for the most part, but for better or worse it remains something of standard in audio post-production in the US. AAX isn't a bad re-imagining of what what RTAS/TDM-based plug-ins pre v10, and Avid aren't going to relinquish any control to third parties. Not least because the need for AAX (such as it is) resolves around support for the company's hardware control surfaces. EuCon was originally envisaged as an agnostic hardware controller protocol by Euphonix, but Avid purchased Euphonix, released the S6 and associated controllers and made EuControl into something of a tolerated illegitimate child.

Plug-in developers will have to follow the money, and I would to see the results of a survey correlating money spent on plug-ins based on the main host software used. My guess is that Pro Tools AAX on the Mac probably is the most lucrative, followed by Cubase and Logic. Depressing, but for all the moaning musicians tend to indulge in regarding fair compensation against any company they feel exploited by, there's a reason why music and audio applications and plug-ins remain the most heavily copy-protected software.

I don't know of anyone who's ever ditched their host application because of a plug-in format, and I highly doubt the CLAP is going to harm Apple, Steinberg, and Avid in the longterm.