A sweep plugin is a shared library which contains one or more procedures. Procedures can modify any of the data associated with a particular sound wave. Procedures take a set of parameters as input. They must specify the types of these parameters, and can optionally provide some constraints (such as an acceptable numeric range, or a list of values to choose from) and hints (such as to interpret a number logarithmically). The constraints and hints are used to construct a useful dialog box to the user for setting parameters.

Procedures can optionally supply a function to suggest appropriate values for the parameters as needed, provide Help and Copyright information, and of course must supply a function to perform the desired operation.

Sweep provides some standard mechanisms for efficiently undoing and redoing some common types of operation.