Info

• this is a fork of https://github.com/free-audio/clap-plugins
• with simplified build steps for linux based systems
  • no git submodules
  • no downloads in cmake files
  • less bloat

Overview

• Example Clap Plugins
  • Notes on GUI, static build vs dynamic build and symbols
• Building on Linux

Example Clap Plugins

This repo serves as an example to demonstrate how to create a CLAP plugin.

Notes on GUI, static build vs dynamic build and symbols

The plugins use Qt for the GUI.

It is fine to dynamically link to Qt for a host, but it is very dangerous for a plugin.

Also one very important aspect of the plugin is the distribution. Ideally a clap plugin should be self contained: it should not rely upon symbols from the host, and it should export only one symbol: clap_entry.

You should be aware that even if you hide all your symbols some may still remain visible at unexpected places. Objective-C seems to register every classes including those coming from plugins in a flat namespace. Which means that if two plugins define two different Objective-C classes but with the same, they will clash which will result in undeflined behavior.

Qt uses a few Objective-C classes on macOS. So it is crucial to use QT_NAMESPACE.

We abstracted the relation between the plugin and the GUI: AbstractGui and AbstractGuiListener which lets us transparently insert proxies.

The GUI itself work with proxy objects to the parameters, transport info, ... They are then bound into QML objects. See Knob.qml and parameter-proxy.hh.

Building on Linux

Build with GUI

git clone https://github.com/majorx234/clap-plugins-linux
cd clap-plugins-linux
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

TODO

• simplified headless version