rcook/superclick

SuperClick - CLAP click track generator plugin

SuperClick

GitHub Pages documentation

SuperClick is a CLAP click track generator plugin for CLAP hosts including REAPER. I'm building this to generate signals for devices such as the Peterson Body Beat Pulse Solo. This project is at the "proof of concept" stage: it generates an audible click in time with the song etc.

This project makes uses of the NIH-plug framework. For those interested in developing Rust applications for audio, please check out Rust Audio and the Rust Audio Discord.

Released under MIT License

Installation

See GitHub Pages documentation for installation instructions.

Development

After installing Rust, you can use all of the usual Cargo commands. You can also build a bundle as follows: follows:

cargo xtask bundle superclick

This will build the target and bundle it correctly as CLAP plugin—by renaming the target binary to SuperClick.clap etc.

This command will report the location of the .clap file at the end, e.g.

Created a CLAP bundle at 'target/bundled/SuperClick.clap'

You can also bundle a release build as follows:

cargo xtask bundle superclick --release

The absolute path to the bundle directory (i.e. /path/to/target/bundled or X:\path\to\target\bundled) is the CLAP plugin path you will need to add to the set of paths scanned by your host DAW.

superclick's Issues

Link to nih-plug project from README etc.

Allow clicks to be customized

Currently this plugin targets a very specific use case: generating panned clicks to trigger the accent/subaccent/normal vibrations from the Peterson Body Beat Pulse Solo metronome. A long-term goal of the project would be to allow some customization of the clicks:

• Customization of waveform (currently a windowed sine wave)
• Customization of frequency (currently fixed frequencies for accent/subaccent/normal)
• Customization of panning (currently fixed corresponding to Body Beat Pulse Solo's requirements)
• Generation of MIDI notes instead of audio waveforms

Properly bundle the output

Currently the GitHub workflows just run cargo build or equivalent. This generates a regular .dll or .dylib. When building on my local dev environment, I run cargo xtask bundle reaclick which renames the .dll to .clap etc. and creates a proper app directory structure on macOS etc. I think I'll need to modify the Rust build workflow to properly support this. Right now, just having a .dll is sufficient, since users can simply download it and rename it to take the .clap extension instead.

Use a Cargo manifest value instead

https://github.com/rcook/reaclick/blob/86f93d6117dbb5e902a7fc2af26afbf6bfc042a5/src/reaclick/plugin.rs#L166C18-L166C49

Fix code-signing issues

Example: https://github.com/rcook/reaclick/actions/runs/8132487433/job/22222974141

Address crashes when running under macOS

The nih_plug_iced integration crashes on macOS. In fact, I can reproduce similar crashes using nih_plug_egui and nih_plug_vizia with a trivial plugin, so this is likely a bug in the underlying framework. When I get time I'll put together a repro. What I can say is that the problem seems to be something to do with mutexes. Specifically, lines such as https://github.com/rcook/reaclick/blob/main/src/reaclick/plugin.rs#L61 simply segfault on macOS. There is no panic and so the condition cannot be handled on the Rust side of things.

Re-enable building for Linux

This was originally disabled because it was erroring out. Figure out how to fix this and re-enable this target.

Studiorack Integration

It's an open-source plugin manager called StudioRack:
https://github.com/studiorack

The aim of the project is to provide a free open-source way to manage plugin dependencies and their versions. It would involve the following steps:

Publish a Github release containing the plugin source along with metadata plugins.json
Tag your Github repository with studiorack-plugin so it can be discovered
Wait for the studiorack-registry to index your plugin (every 24 hours)
Check the registry feed for your plugin to appear

If you have any questions or issues, make an issue in the Github repo or join the DIscord https://discord.gg/9D94f98PxP
This project is currently in alpha and would massively be helped by early adopters to iron out bugs and guide development!!

Figure out how to get the main UI widget to respond to resizing of the plugin's window

ReaClick's UI with its default sizing:

ReaClick's UI after enlarging REAPER's effects window:

Linux build?

Consider publishing VST3 version of plugin

I've shied away from building a VST3 plugin since I would rather release it under the MIT License instead of GPLv3. I'm not sure why this bothers me. Enabling VST3 support should be fairly straightforward:

• Use the nih_export_vst! macro etc.
• Modify the build and bundling
• etc.

I think licensing is the main sticking point for me. VST3 would, of course, broaden the appeal of the plugin.