how to work around midi in VST3?

[Dewdman42]

what I really wish would happen is that the JUCE team would step up and introduce a new industry standard for DAW plugin interaction... drive it to all platforms, natively..not as a wrapper around VST/AU, but as a direct system in and of itself that would have to be added to DAW's, but push it as an independent open source alternative that all DAW's everywhere could see enough momentum that they'd be willing to go ahead and add hosting of that plugin type to their respective DAW's. Things like that have already been proposed by others, but none of them have been able to get enough momentum behind them to really gain critical mass. JUCE could do so though, IMHO.

Someone needs to take the reins on this. Until now we have had DX from Microsoft, which was only on windows and died. Then we have had AU from Apple...which hasn't failed, but its only on OSX. VST was developed by Steinberg for its own products and the only reason everyone started using it is because they made the SDK freely available, but with restrictions. A lot of people started using it and the momentum caused it to be a "standard". But Steinberg has not backed up that responsibility in my view, they have done whatever is good for Steinberg, and because of the restrictions that they kept there...now we have a difficult situation where we are kind of stuck, since the last 10 years... The momentum of it has made it "good enough", so it has kept going, but the restrictions are starting to constrain it.

So we need a new independent party that doesn't ship their own DAW, that will take the reins and create a truly open source plugin standard...which frankly wouldn't be that hard, as long as you could get most all DAW's to go ahead and incorporate hosting for it in their DAW's, then people everywhere would move to it. JUCE has enough momentum that they could, IMHO, accomplish that if they chose to.

Then Steinberg would eventually be forced with the decision about whether to support that new standard in addition to or instead of VST. hehe.

In fairness, it might take Apple a while before they would be willing to host that open source standard in LogicPro either, but ya never know.

But their tyrannical control over VST makes it ill suited at this point in time in 2021 to be considered a true industry solution and they show no indication of ever living up to that responsibility. Its just out there and has momentum until now.

[EvilDragon]

I mean a truly open source plugin standard exists, LV2, but... y'know...

Altho, Reaper is adding support for LV2 across the board, not just on Linux, so that might be interesting...


Considering JUCE is in PACE's hands now, I'm really not sure they're up for something like this.

[Dewdman42]

LV2 definitely does! And its not the first one. But the problem is one of momentum and critical mass, which LV2 does not have. It has to be somewhat branded and have a hint that it WILL be the standard in order for all DAW's everywhere to go ahead and update their hosting engines to support it in addition to, or instead of VST/AU.

[Dewdman42]

The main reason I say "JUCE" is simply because there are so many independent people that have bought into the JUCE universe by now.. It doesn't have to be JUCE, it could be LV2, or it could be something else, but the only way VST will be replaced as an industry standard is that in a addition to being fully open source, you need confidence in the industry that its not going away and they are safe to invest time and money on adding the hosting support in their products.

And even then they might not be willing unless the open source project is being directed by a standards committee of some kind, similar as MIDI, I suppose.

[Jeff McClintock]

So we need a new independent party that doesn't ship their own DAW, that will take the reins and create a truly open source plugin standard...which frankly wouldn't be that hard.

I love your confidence...good luck herding the cats

"Our Community Plugin Format"
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=548620

[markus.schloesser]

It makes zero financial sense from a marketing perspective for Cubase to drop VST2 hosting capability today in 2021.
.......
So what happens politically inside that company will determine whether this scenario happens or not, but someone inside Steinberg engineering will have to convince someone inside Steinberg marketing that dropping VST2 would increase revenue. I see that as very unlikely to happen anytime soon. Never know though.

I am not advocating anything, but you left an important part out of the equation: Costs.
Not everything is about revenue, it's how much you make of it: earnings. So if someone convinced somebody that cutting vst2 in Cubase would reduce (dev/QA/support) costs significantly, which isn't even that far fetched, while not pissing off too many people, it'd be gone quite quickly.

[Dewdman42]

along with some sales... but I agree. It comes down to money...not lofty idealistic engineering goals.

[S0lo]

If any new standard would hope to work out and spread and takeover. It has to be very easily portable to, from existing VST plugin code. Otherwise, I frankly don't see hope. But I hope I'm wrong.

[Dewdman42]

you mean kind of like VST3 wasn't?

[S0lo]

you mean kind of like VST3 wasn't?

Say if a new standard happens and within the next year starts to take 1% of the market. (i.e 1% of all developers do adopt it). Any VST developer (with existing legacy code) who wants to consider it, will think about two things

1. How popular it is now.
2. How much effort it takes to port his existing code to the new standard.

In order for point 1 to become interesting quickly (within a few years). Point 2 has to be very easy.

In other words, you have to feed exponential growth otherwise it will naturally go for exponential decay and die, since the other alternative standards already have point 1 high. Now please don't take this literally, I know it's more complicated than that. Just generally speaking.

I would also add that some one important has to talk to all those DAW makers and convince them about it. Some one who is neutral, well known and who all DAW makers would seriously listen to.

[Dewdman42]

I agree with all you say. That’s why I feel it would need to be taken on by something with existing momentum, like juce. Anyway it’s unlikely to happen

[S0lo]

JUCE indeed could do something. They could even just base the standard on their existing API (i.e implement their API using OS kernel primitives bypassing VST/AU etc). The problem is whats in it for them if they release it for free? I don't see a big incentive for them. I even think the current state of affairs, VST3 being this impenetrable bulk and VST2 being forbidden for new comers plays into their advantage and pulls more users to them. If anything, Stienberg is doing them a favor. Why would they try to fight that. Unless ofcourse they make it payed. In this case, I see it working for them.

Lets be honest here and say that the whole purpose of this would be new standard is basically to escape Stienberg's control. The real problem is, there are thousands and thousands of existing lines of code based on VST. A new standard should first and foremost make all this code work with the minimum amount of modification and effort on the developer side.

Now, There is one thing that actually simplifies matters a bit. VSTGUI (AFAIK) is under a completely different, more permissible license than VST. So the new standard (if done) doesn't have to re-do a new GUI API. It can just work with VSTGUI.

[Dewdman42]

I Vote for letting vst go the way of DX

[syntonica]

Other than Steinberg's death group on it, there's nothing really wrong with VST 2 that a bit of consolidation to a single header with some cleanup wouldn't cure. It's worked well for everybody so far and as Reaper has shown, is easily extensible and easy to grok. I think just adding a few features to support e.g. side chaining would bring it up to date.

I'd rather not have to deal with the monstrosity that is VST 3. It pretty much forces you to use classes where 2 is plain C with a thin C++ wrapper.

[EvilDragon]

I would also add that some one important has to talk to all those DAW makers and convince them about it. Some one who is neutral, well known and who all DAW makers would seriously listen to.

Sounds like Godot to me.