Don't know if anyone noticed... VST3

[whyterabbyt]

Hehehe, and who would that be?

those least likely to make any fuss about it.

[duncanparsons]

"There is nothing in the VST3 kit that makes anything better, faster, stronger, lower CPU, lower latency, more likely to get you laid, anything. Don't believe the hype."

..more's the pity...

DSP

[JonHodgson]

you mean this fredo: [] are you certain he is on the steiny payroll?

No, I am not on Steiny's payroll, and I can't speak on behalf of Steinberg.

I do moderate the Nuendo.com forum and I am allowed to ask any question to any developer.
Which I regulary do.

Wasn't it Fredo who also told you that all developers had invited to join the Beta program a year ago?

Yes, that was me.
That is what I have been told by our head developers.
To be more correct (My mistake), it should have been: most *major* plugin developers have been invited.

--Don't take this the wrong way, I don't mean anything with it. --

I also know that of all 3th parties who were invited, only few have accepted the invitation.
Yvan told me that the number of reactions was dissapointing, probably due to the overload of work they were facing with MacIntel & Vista.
I have no reason to doubt Yvan's words.

Since I have said this in public, I have been contacted by half a dozen 3th party developers to ask how they could join the betatesting.
AudioEase was one of them and the proof that I am not making this up.
Many 3th parties *have* been invited to join the testing and it makes sense to me that not *everybody* is invited. I can only guess on what grounds Steinberg has invited (or not invited) 3th parties.

Best regards
Fredo

Thanks for clarifying that, the situation as you now describe it is as I suspected.

As for the "major" thing.. well
Who are you calling minor?

I do ask you to be careful how you word things in future though, because a carelessly worded statement on your part can be a public relations nightmare for the developers. I already expect Dave to have to wade through a bunch of "when are you releasing through VST3" emails when he gets back from NAMM, but going by past history with Audiounits and Universal Binaries, i wouldn't be surprised if there are some along the lines of

"When are you lazy f**kers going to support VST3. You just DON'T CARE about your customers. I read you could have it done A YEAR AGO. You guys all SUCK!!"

Not sure about the capitalization and exact word choice, but I'll betcha a beer that this will be the gist of it and that the word suck will feature, in capitals, in an email Dave receives over the next few months.. probably several.

[Ben [Camel Audio]]

For those people interested in some of the specifics of what may be the potential issues with VST3, Angus has written an excellent post over here: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=204365 If there are any Steinberg devs reading here, it would be great if you take a look and see if you can resolve some or all of these issues.

I'd also like to add that I (and most/all other developers on this thread) don't bear the Steinberg devs any ill will. I'm very grateful to them - recently to Arne for all his help, and further back in the days of Charlie Steinberg, who I remember as being incredibly helpful and kind. I'm also grateful to Steinberg for the creation of the VST standard in the first place. The resentment has been building for a while, as a result of the many changes in the AU spec as well as the VST spec, which seemed to unnecessarily break backwards compatibility and cause plugin developers lots of headaches for marginal, if any, benefit, and frequently accompanied by misleading PR - so the resentment is by no means just towards Steinberg. In answer to Jons question, I (Camel) wasn't asked to join the VST3 discussion.

Ben

[whyterabbyt]

"There is nothing in the VST3 kit that makes anything better, faster, stronger, lower CPU, lower latency, more likely to get you laid, anything. Don't believe the hype."

..more's the pity...

DSP

attribution : .sig stolen from Chris Randall.

[Fredo Gevaert]

I do ask you to be careful how you word things in future though, because a carelessly worded statement on your part can be a public relations nightmare for the developers.

Edit :::

Misunderstood the question.


You are correct, anything you say can and will be used against you.
;o)
It was not my intention to harm anyone, on the contrary; since there wasn't much reaction from the 3th parties, I thought it wouldn't harm to "spread the word". And as said, there were a handfull of developers who have approached me. As far as I know, most ofthem have joined after. Pretty late, I admit.


Best regards
Fredo

[JonHodgson]

For those people interested in some of the specifics of what may be the potential issues with VST3, Angus has written an excellent post over here: http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=204365 If there are any Steinberg devs reading here, it would be great if you take a look and see if you can resolve some or all of these issues.

I'd also like to add that I (and most/all other developers on this thread) don't bear the Steinberg devs any ill will. I'm very grateful to them - recently to Arne for all his help, and further back in the days of Charlie Steinberg, who I remember as being incredibly helpful and kind. I'm also grateful to Steinberg for the creation of the VST standard in the first place. The resentment has been building for a while, as a result of the many changes in the AU spec as well as the VST spec, which seemed to unnecessarily break backwards compatibility and cause plugin developers lots of headaches for marginal, if any, benefit, and frequently accompanied by misleading PR - so the resentment is by no means just towards Steinberg. In answer to Jons question, I (Camel) wasn't asked to join the VST3 discussion.

Ben

I'm in agreement with Ben on this.

For me the great thing about VST was that despite not being perfect, it WORKED, and they didn't mess with it. It did improve, but in ways that meant you didn't have to rewrite everything, you could just take advantage of things if you wanted to.

Even 2.3 to 2.4 was relatively painless. Far more of the problems I had were due to the introduction of the Intel Macs, including arbitrary decisions made by Apple to enforce compositing windows from that point.

The core code and anything VST in the impOSCar has only changed two or three times since original release, the AU associated part many times.

For that reason I loved VST, and Steinberg by association.... now I fear it may turn out to be as much hassle as AU and Apple.

[Urs]

Btw. I just built again.vst3, but I can't resize the editor window...?

[tobybear]

Hiya,

short comment from me concerning VST3 after trying to get my head around it: no real innovations, much too bloated, don't like the COM-style, very unclear documentation, missing information about threading model and certain MIDI events and so on... (basically what has been said already in this thread).

All in all, I don't see any major advantages in VST3, I would prefer a clearly defined and structured small (but extensible) plugin API that allows plugins to compile on a lot of different platforms and compilers.

I don't know how well VST3 will perform in future, but from the similar reactions in this thread, I expect a rather slow development and support movement. Let's see what the major DAWs will come up with concerning the implementation of this new so-called standard.

Cheers

Toby

www.tobybear.de

[JonHodgson]

I do ask you to be careful how you word things in future though, because a carelessly worded statement on your part can be a public relations nightmare for the developers.

I'm afraid you missed two important parts of my post:

1. "I am not on Steiny's payroll, and I can't speak on behalf of Steinberg. "

2. "--Don't take this the wrong way, I don't mean anything with it. -- "

3. "That is what I have been told by our head developers. "


Since English is not my native language, I don't know how to put it more clearly.



Best regards
Fredo

I didn't miss those points, though I think you missed mine. The fact that you do not actually speak for Steinberg does not change the fact that you are viewed as an authority on what goes on there (and in at least one case encountered here, apparantly mistaken for a Steinberg employee), therefore what you say has impact, I just asked that you be careful that the way you word statements that can affect us actually reflects what you intend to say... especially with English not being your native language, it's easy to make a mistake.

[NiallM]

LV2

What is LV2?

A plug-in spec from Linux land. It's been around a while now, but I think Linux native VSTs sort of knocked the wind out of them, as well as DSSI and what ever else was in the works.
I.e there is already more Linux native VSTi:s than there are synths in all the other specs combined. EnergyXT2 is probably to thank for this.

It might be worth looking into though, depending on the licenses.

Unless I'm mistaken, the LV2 spec was only very recently (like, this month) finalised, so I'm not sure if it's quite right to say VST's knocked the wind out of them just yet.

License-wise, the main header's under the LGPL, which could scare commercial devs off, though it should be possible (based on my limited understanding of software licensing) to keep the LGPL LV2 code in a separate dll to their own (proprietary-licensed) code to avoid any legal issues (this is what I do in Fragmental, which uses some LGPL code).

In looking to port my own plugins to it though, I have to say that all the RDF stuff (while I think I understand why they did it that way) is going to make for a lot of extra typing, in order to enumerate and provide descriptions of all the parameters, particularly in something as big as Fragmental. I'll probably just end up only porting the simpler (and less interesting) plugins.

- Niall.

[Urs]

Btw. I just built again.vst3, but I can't resize the editor window...?

Also, once I doubleclicked the numerical gain value to manually edit it, it wouldn't respond to changes of the slider anymore. Hmmm.

[Fredo Gevaert]

I didn't miss those points, though I think you missed mine.

That is correct; while you were posting, I was editing my reply.

For the rest, I can only agree with what you said.

Fredo

[JonHodgson]

I didn't miss those points, though I think you missed mine.

That is correct; while you were posting, I was editing my reply.

For the rest, I can only agree with what you said.

Fredo

Great... thanks,

I'll still insist you buy the first beer if Dave gets any of those emails I described though!

[eduardo_b]

They do, however, need to free themselves from a standard determined by one company for its own self-interest, that's true.

This so reminds me of the contentious relationships between Microsoft and developers over standards. Often, MS would come up with standards, and then, after much complaining from the dev community, they would open the process up. But MS invariably made changes to existing standards that did not work with other software -- such as html code that was only good in IE, which others were free to incorporate into their browsers these if they wanted to. The result was incompatibilities, and for people like me -- who built large web sites -- a lot more work.