Well this is a kick in the nuts: VST2 plug-ins

[Urs]

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/vst-3-sd ... /201638/18

[AnX]

that's that sorted then...

[lkjb]

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/vst-3-sd ... /201638/18

Thanks for the link. I'm almost surprised that Steinberg might actually have listened to concerns from developers.

[Dewdman42]

That’s sorted for some of you and glad they did it but since I wasnt grandfathered in to a perpetual vst2 license I’m still SOL.

[mr.ardour]

why not? what would be the alternative? trying to convince steinberg to set vst2 free?

I think I missed the "what's actually wrong with VST3" part of this thread ... why isn't that the alternative?

[mr.ardour]

I don't mind skeuomorhphism, per se, but the photo-realistic part really needs to die a flaming death and a rain of pixels into the bit bucket in the sky.

thanks for saying this. I, of course, have no comment

[ghettosynth]

why not? what would be the alternative? trying to convince steinberg to set vst2 free?

I think I missed the "what's actually wrong with VST3" part of this thread ... why isn't that the alternative?

It's a standard that's under the control of a single organization which is how we got here in the first place.

[syntonica]

I don't mind skeuomorhphism, per se, but the photo-realistic part really needs to die a flaming death and a rain of pixels into the bit bucket in the sky.

thanks for saying this. I, of course, have no comment

My apologies! I didn't realize that you were a photo-realistic skeuomorph.

I get carried away when it comes to wasteful programming efforts that unnecessarily eat up RAM, storage, CPU cycles and end-user good will. I was a part of the 8-bit revolution back when we only had 4k RAM and dreamed of 16k! I still agonize over alloc-ing 4k to cache data so my programs run faster.

[syntonica]

It's a standard that's under the control of a single organization which is how we got here in the first place.

I'm still trying to work out what benefit I get from the proprietary vs GPL-ed license. (Read: none whatsoever.)

[S0lo]

It's a standard that's under the control of a single organization which is how we got here in the first place.

I'm still trying to work out what benefit I get from the proprietary vs GPL-ed license. (Read: none whatsoever.)

GPL forces you to release your code (or provide a means for obtaining it). And forces you to use the GPL license for your code. (I'm sorry if this tells you what you already know)

[S0lo]

Behringer is making a new DAW. May be if someone tips them of about this thread. They'd consider adopting or making an open standard. They are well known to be open for collaboration. At least in hardware from what I know.

[Dewdman42]

The fact that we have to jump through such legal hoops just to make a plugin that is compatible with Cubase has always been and still is...just ridiculous. We're really talking simply about whether we can use a header file that defines opcodes or not. Steinberg has demonstrated they can't be trusted to be the bearer of a standard, the industry badly needs an independent and simple solution that is just as simple as VST2. If the industry wants to adopt some other complicated future tech like LV2 or whatever..great...let it develop..but what I can say right now, is that VST2 really isn't that complicated, nobody is using Steinberg binaries to enable their plugins to work. They simply need to be able to build a plugin with the right functional opcodes defined so that numerous hosts can use them, including Steinberg products of course.

My personal opinion is that Steinberg has internal corporate politics with Arne and probably others that are related to all of this, putting their own engineering work and how it relates to their internal product architectures ahead of all other concerns. I personally don't think they are going to gain any market share or sales by their current tactics, if anything they are constraining profits this way. But if they spent some years re-architecting Cubase and other products on top of the fancier fully-abstracted VST3 platform...they obviously are interested in pushing VST3 everywhere, to see more plugins taking advantage of their vision of VST3, I think an industry wide adoption of LV2 would be very bad for that aspect, many people would simply stop making VST3 plugins in my opinion. All that work on Cubase would go down the drain and some engineer inside Steinberg (hint, Arne) would have to answer to his bosses about it.

That's how I see it..this is a personal internal corporate political struggle that is affecting us all.

[syntonica]

It's a standard that's under the control of a single organization which is how we got here in the first place.

I'm still trying to work out what benefit I get from the proprietary vs GPL-ed license. (Read: none whatsoever.)

GPL forces you to release your code (or provide a means for obtaining it). And forces you to use the GPL license for your code. (I'm sorry if this tells you what you already know)

Either way, it's a lot of kowtowing to somebody for very little future benefit. If only GPL wasn't so virally toxic--everything it touches becomes open sores. Even if I did decide to reveal my code to the world, there's no guarantee that VST4 won't suddenly come out with all the same licensing issues and forced obsolescence.

I wish I could find that one black-boxed VST 2 header. I'd switch in a heartbeat now.

[mr.ardour]

Either way, it's a lot of kowtowing to somebody for very little future benefit. If only GPL wasn't so virally toxic--everything it touches becomes open sores.

As someone who has developed using the GPL for more than 30 years, I'd suggest a different way of looking at it. The GPL is like a giant meta-company. Go to work for the company, and you can use any of their existing code for whatever you want. Decide not to work for the company? No problem, but then their code is just as off-limits as Digi's.

I wish I could find that one black-boxed VST 2 header. I'd switch in a heartbeat now.

vestige.h is present in the Ardour source code. It's not complete. There may be a better one available at this point. I think it was noted upthread that it's probably enough to write a plugin with, but not enough to implement a host. Note that from a strict legal perspective, it's not clear just how black-boxed vestige.h actually is.

[mr.ardour]

If the industry wants to adopt some other complicated future tech like LV2 or whatever.

LV2 is NOT complicated. The presence of Turtle to declare the plugin metadata, and for that matter the very idea of metadata about the plugin stored in a separate file from the shared object throws people off. The actual coding side of an LV2 plugin is at least as simple as a VST2 plugin.