AU vs VST hosted in Patchwork/MB-7 AAX

[swedish stargazer]

I read somewhere that VST is preferable.
Anybody got some info or opinions on that?

Thanks,
Hakan

[Blue Cat Audio]

This depends on what you are doing: if you want to share presets with windows users, VST is preferred.

However, some plug-ins will be better supported on Mac as Audio Units (stability and 32/64-bit support), but not all. Also, some plug-ins may be available only as Audio Units or only as VSTs.

So it really depends on both the plug-ins you use and if you need to share your sessions and presets with windows users!

[mixmonkey]

I use PatchWork AAX in Pro Tools 11HD and generally the VST versions load and unload better than the AU versions.

When I was testing things out, I created a PT session with 128 tracks and instantiated a Patchwork plugin with my channel strip (Sonnox Dynamics+DMG Equilibrium, wrapped with Novation AutoMap, to use with a Zero SL mkII controller) across all 128 tracks at once (set up PatchWork with the channel strip as the default settings, hold down the alt key and instantiate on one track, plugin is created on all the tracks)

With VSTs this happens very smoothly and also unloads (same alt key method) very quickly. AU plugins take a lot longer and sometimes hang Pro Tools (spinning beach ball) when unloading. Also, looking at iStat menus CPU meters, VSTs seem to spread their processor load more evenly than AU (not sure how relevant this is). YMMV

[Blue Cat Audio]

Thanks for sharing your experience!