Ableton Forum

One feature of CLAP that would be a game changer is indeed the cross platform compatibility.

On KVR, Urs (from U-He) said they are working on a migration feature that would allow us to migrate from any format (vst for exemple) to the clap format when the vst plugin is not installed on the machine. It's not yet existing, but in a close future it will, and there's no technical barriers : it's perfectly doable. We just need the feature implemented in our Daws (like the migration from previous versions of Kontakt to Kontakt 7 is implemented in Cubase).

Try to imagine : instead of installing vst2 and vst3 versions of the same plugins, transitionning old sessions from vst2 to vst3 by copying presets and opening them in vst3 and then null testing them, you could just have clap installed and let it do the migration, finally using only clap versions of your plugins.

I'm speaking about my recent experience with Native Instrument : they did abandon vst2 and in order to get Apple Silicon compatibility I'm obliged to check my old sessions and transform each vst2 instance of a NI plugin into a vst3 one...
PITA !

VST2 is now being retroactively pulled by Steinberg license wise. It's still not clear what this means, if it means that there will be no support in updates to Live and other DAWs for VSt2 or not? but that's how it reads. This is exactly why CLAP came into existence. Hosts have a hard time using VST3, it's a battle to implement hosting for, since Steinberg haver no incentive to give extensive documentation to their competition on hosting. Not to mention the 15 year resistance from plugin developers.

So, with that in mind, it's no longer some pet project, but something anyone hoping for more stability and less issues with plugins should be excited to see implemented in Live. You can vote for it on Centercode if you're signed up to the betas for 12 here: https://ableton.centercode.com/project/ ... f481a13540

Yes, please add CLAP support, but also per-voice modulation for instruments then! Only clap supports that, as already possible in Bitwig (e.g. U-He stuff). It is a huge benefit. This might require an overhaul of the Ableton's modulation system. Maybe the MPE implementation could be used for that?

ffx wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 05, 2025 7:02 am

Yes, please add CLAP support, but also per-voice modulation for instruments then! Only clap supports that, as already possible in Bitwig (e.g. U-He stuff). It is a huge benefit. This might require an overhaul of the Ableton's modulation system. Maybe the MPE implementation could be used for that?

The MPE implementation if it's robust should cover per voice modulation since pressure, slide, release and velocity can all be assigned to any parameter if the instrument allows them to be. At the least slide or cc74 is supposed to be polyphonic or per voice and assignable to most parameters in a virtual instrument.