CLAP plugins

CLAP (the CLever Audio Plugin format) is friendlier than VST for tooling: presets are files on disk, and the plugin exposes them through the CLAP preset-discovery API. patch-press can scan a CLAP plugin’s preset directory directly — no patch-probe required.

patch-press scan-clap ~/.clap/Surge XT.clap ~/.local/share/clap/surge-xt configs/SurgeXT

The three arguments:

1. Path to the .clap plugin file itself.
2. Directory containing *.clap-preset files (usually the plugin ships one under ~/.local/share/clap/<name>/ or ~/Library/Preferences/clap/<name>/).
3. Destination for the generated configs.

What scan-clap does

For each .clap-preset file:

1. Loads the plugin, hands it the preset file to restore, and captures the resulting state.
2. Renders one probe note (default: MIDI 60) to classify sustain type.
3. Writes one config per preset with source.type: clap, source.raw_state baked in, and source.preset_path set to the original file.

Config shape

source:
  type: clap
  plugin: /path/to/Plugin.clap
  plugin_id: "com.example.plugin"      # auto-discovered from the .clap
  preset: "Init"                        # documentation
  preset_path: /path/to/init.clap-preset
  raw_state: "<base64>"

plugin_id is required by the CLAP host to instantiate the right plugin — scan-clap reads it out of the .clap file for you.

scan-clap options

Same set as scan-from-probe:

• --profile, --sample-rate, --tempo-bpm
• --probe-note, --probe-velocity
• --note-step, --duration
• --start-note, --end-note

After scanning

Identical to the VST path:

patch-press batch "configs/SurgeXT/*.yaml" --path /media/DELUGE --format deluge
# ...or --path staging/Polyend --format pti for a Polyend Tracker instrument