Music/audio production tools commonly support plugins to augment their capabilities. However, well-supported plugin architectures have mostly been proprietary. For example, Steinberg’s VST2 is strictly controlled via a proprietary licence. They are now promoting VST3, which is being made available under the GPL, but their (mis)handling of the VST2→VST3 transition has left a bad taste in many developers’ mouths. On Linux, you will likely heard of open-source plugin systems like LADSPA, DSSI and LV2. And also JUCE and GMPI. Of these, LV2 seems like the most popular, but developers report that it can be hard to get to grips with. Here is a backgrounder <https://lwn.net/Articles/890272/> by Alexandre Prokoudine on the current state of play, leading up to the introduction of Yet Another Plugin Standard, the “Clever Audio Plugin”, or “CLAP” (fnarr-fnarr). He goes into more detail in the followup <https://lwn.net/Articles/893048/>. And he has a bunch of more info on his own site <https://librearts.org/2022/06/introducing-clap/>.