Are VST3 widely adopted now?

[AndyMusician]

As a new developer, I have no choice but to develop VST3 plugins. Do people still prefer VST2 or it's a thing of the past?

[mgw38]

I‘ve pretty much switched to vst3. The big push for me was when Ableton started to support vst3 (even though I no longer use Ableton). The number of plugins that are vst3 only is increasing. And I think Reason is the last major DAW (other than Logic and Protools) that does not support vst3.

[AndyMusician]

Thank you for your answer. It seems that VST3 is more accepted now. I've turned the thread into a poll to make it easier to answer.

[v1o]

It will be interesting to hear some usage stats from developers.

[AndyMusician]

It will be interesting to hear some usage stats from developers.

Totally! For new devs like me, we are kind of stuck with it, but I'm curious to know if the reluctance of customers is still there. Hopefully, it's not anymore even though I sometimes see on social media users having a hard time installing VST3.

[an-electric-heart]

I don't like it. I normally opt out of installing VST3 if I can.

[timefreezer]

Native Instruments still do not accept VST3 in their apps for the keyboards (Komplete Kontrol) they sell. This is really something to be ashamed. It is not so hard to switch to VST3. But I will not return to VST2 now.

[XxEDxX]

In my experience loading plugins as VST3 is still way more buggy than VST2. And furthermore some DAWs like Ableton or some MAGIX ones only recently started to support it at all. Seeing the responses of devs in the DSP sub forum I assume the majority of problems could even lie within the VST3 standard/SDK itself. I definitely still try to avoid it.

[davidguda]

Saying that the newest version of <insert favourite DAW> supports VST3 is not quite enough.
Not all people buy the newest version when they come out. I can happily skip a couple of versions if nothing of the new stuff excites me.

[chk071]

Do VST3. It's widely adopted by now, and all major DAW's support it.

[timefreezer]

For me I noticed following advantages in VST3 compared to VST2:

sample-accurate automation (very important)
dynamically allocate their input and output configurations
side-chaining
silent output (less CPU-consumption)
resizable GUI
XML-editing og GUI

Yesterday I also managed to import a self written VST3 with 32 bit in a very old DAW.

Refusing VST3 seems to be useless. Few days of accomodation and the you're set.

[frizzbee]

do it but don't drop vst2. though many daws "support" it it's also fairly new for many them and the support is not proper. besides that plugin devs also don't proper support vst3 and crash more often (at least here). as a former long time cubase user i can also tell you even cubase didn't properly support vst3 and it's features. and that is alarming

[timefreezer]

Steinberg don't give developer licenses for VST2 any more. Is it a problem?

[frizzbee]

i thought i read the vst3 sdk includes vst2 and wrappers for vst2, au, aax. and the license thing changed with vst3 but also included vst2. but maybe i misread that.

[FigBug]

How many DAWs actually implement sample accurate automation? How many plugin wrappers -- I don't think juce does.

The issue I have with all these plugin formats (AU, VST, VST3, AAX etc) is that they all offer cool features, but it seems most developers write their plugin / host once and them add wrappers for each format. So the lowest common denominator ends up getting supported.