Celemony has announced that the ARA protocol is now open source. The company has also released a comprehensive software development kit (SDK). Could this mean that we’ll see ARA support being added to many more plug-ins in the near future? Celemony releases ARA SDK under open source license Big news from Celemony: The company has placed the ARA protocol (Audio Random Access) under an open source license. To facilitate the development of new ARA-enabled software, they’ve also released a comprehensive software development kit (SDK). This makes it much easier to integrate ARA support into plug-ins and other audio software – great news for the audio development community! The ARA interface was originally developed by Celemony – makers of Melodyne – in cooperation with PreSonus. The protocol allows DAWs and plug-ins to exchange musical information such as notes, chords and tempo, as well as audio data, much more seamlessly than before. For example, this means that users of the Melodyne plug-in no longer need to wait for audio files to be transferred from the DAW to the plug-in in real time. ARA was subsequently adopted by makers of many other DAWs like Logic Pro, Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, Samplitude and a few others. On the plug-in side, ARA is now supported by Melodyne itself, Steinberg SpectraLayers, iZotope RX and Antares Auto-Tune Pro, as well as Synchro Arts VocAlign and ReVoice Pro. Cubase and Nuendo updates with ARA support Cubase and Nuendo are among the DAWs which offer ARA support Comprehensive SDK According to Celemony, the ARA Audio Random Access Software Development Kit is released under the Apache 2.0 license. This also allows for the integration into projects with open-source licenses, such as GNU GPLv3. Developers can take advantage of the full range of the ARA2 specification. Celemony says that the SDK offers seamless integration with development tools like Git and Make. By making ARA open source and providing an SDK, Celemony is making it much easier for developers to integrate the protocol into their software. This means that we could soon see the list of ARA-compatible plug-ins grow considerably, which would be great news indeed. While not all plug-ins lend themselves to ARA integration, any application that depends on real-time transmission of audio data and musical information between the DAW and plug-in does. This opens up vast possibilities. |
