I'm proud to announce the latest major yabridge release. I spent the last couple months working on support for bridging CLAP plugins. With yabridge 5.0 you can now use Windows CLAP plugins in native Linux CLAP hosts with full functionality. CLAP is a collaborative effort by a group of plugin and host developers of all backgrounds to create a permissively licensed extensible plugin standard that is simple while also catering to the needs of plugin developers, host developers, and musicians alike. When bridged under yabridge, these plugins are likely to have lower bridging overhead than their VST2 and VST3 counterparts while also being more responsive and offering better support for instrument plugins and parameter modulation.

The other changes in yabridge 5.0.0 are fairly minor. One quality of life improvement that may be relevant to users of more obscure distros is that yabridge now directly talks to the D-Bus daemon for sending its desktop notifications instead of relying on the notify-send command line utility, which may not be installed on those systems.

If you need any help setting up yabridge or if you just want to keep up to date with new releases and important Wine related announcements, then feel free to join the Discord.

• Yabridge 5.0 now supports bridging CLAP plugins in addition to its existing VST2 and VST3 plugin support. CLAP is a collaborative effort by a group of plugin and host developers of all backgrounds to create a permissively licensed extensible plugin standard that is simple while also catering to the needs of plugin developers, host developers, and musicians alike. When bridged under yabridge, these plugins are likely to have lower bridging overhead than their VST2 and VST3 counterparts while also being more responsive and offering better support for instrument plugins and parameter modulation.

  Yabridge 5.0.0's CLAP bridging supports all official CLAP 1.1 extensions except for the audio thread pool extension. Support for that extension will be added in a future yabridge release as Windows-only plugins that rely on the feature get released.

• Desktop notifications no longer rely on the notify-send command line tool, and are now sent by directly talking to D-Bus instead. This ensures that you'll always see yabridge's notifications when something important happens, even when using more niche distros where you may not have notify-send installed by default.

• A new editor_disable_host_scaling yabridge.toml compatibility option lets you prevent hosts from setting an explicit DPI scaling factor for a plugin's editor. In some cases this can help with inconsistent scaling when using HiDPI displays. This option affects both VST3 and CLAP plugins and it replaces the older vst3_no_scaling option.

• The vst3_no_scaling compatibility option has been removed in favor of the new editor_disable_host_scaling option.

• Slightly optimized the use of serialization buffers to reduce memory usage for VST3 audio threads. This change also potentially speeds up parameter information queries for parameters with lots of associated text.

Fixed

• Fixed a minor memory leak in the Wine->X11 drag-and-drop implementation when converting Windows file paths.
• Removed leftover debug prints when opening VST2 editors.

yabridgectl

• Added support for setting up CLAP plugins.

Packaging notes

• There are new libyabridge-clap.so and libyabridge-chainloader-clap.so files need to be included in the package.
• The new CLAP support requires version 1.1.2 of the CLAP headers because earlier versions did not yet contain calling conventions. (free-audio/clap#153, free-audio/clap#154). Building against older versions will result in memory errors.
• The VST3 dependency is now at tag v3.7.5_build_44-patched-2. The only difference with the previous v3.7.5_build_44-patched is a fixed version number in the meson.build file.
• The Meson build now requires the libdbus-1 development package to be installed. Yabridge's binaries don't dynamically link against the shared library, but they do use the definitions from the headers to load libdbus-1.so.3 at runtime when it needs to send a desktop notification.

Compatibility

The archive ending in -ubuntu-18.04.tar.gz is a compatibility release meant for older distros and is thus slightly larger in size. If you're using Ubuntu 18.04, Linux Mint 19, Debian 10, AV Linux MXE 2021, or any other distro that's older than Ubuntu 20.04, then you should use this archive instead of the regular release. If you need a build of yabridge for use with 32-bit plugin hosts, then you can find those on the automated builds page.

Updating

To update from an older installation, simply overwrite your current yabridge and yabridgectl files with the ones downloaded below, and then rerun yabridgectl sync to complete the update.