Bye bye VST2

[Audiority]

Thanks!
I'm doing further tests and so far Reaper 7.x and Studio One 6 migrate without any hassles. If they don't find the VST2 of an existing project and there's only the VST3, the instances are automatically replaced preserving the automations. Live 11 won't do that at all and Cubase 13 doesn't seem to support VST2 at all. I have to see if I have an old installation of Cubase 11/12 in my old machines to make further tests.

[jamcat]

IMHO the company that would make a big difference for the adoption pace of CLAP is Ableton

But Bitwig took the lead in developing CLAP, and Bitwig was created by some guys who left Ableton to start their own company (with a lot of Ableton’s designs.) So Ableton might not be so keen to do Bitwig any favors.

But Ableton also has the problem of substandard VST3 implementation. So with poor VST3 handling, no CLAP, and the end of VST2, Live is looking rather… dead.

[BONES]

Given how many successful artists have been using Live for years, decades even, why would anyone care?

[SamDi]

IMHO the company that would make a big difference for the adoption pace of CLAP is Ableton, they have the second biggest user base, only second to FL studio which already has CLAP support in beta. I think that DAW companies might be the more concerned about this since they are the ones that are going to be hit the most with complain from customers when they stop support of VST2 and may push them to adopt CLAP. Unlike the 32 to 64 bit migration this time the depreciation is totally imposed by Steinberg.

In the long run if VST3 loses market share it might get relegated to Cubase/Nuendo and then developers will stop making versions for it just to piss Steinberg.

Yeah wanted to mention some days ago, that CLAP won't be a success, until at least the remaining big players after AVID, Apple and Steinberg, where it's obvious, that they won't support, namely Ableton and IL are going to support it and just saw by incident, that it's going to happen for FL Studio now. I think if Ableton would switch either, then the critical mass would be reached for most if not nearly all developers to include CLAP support.

[jamcat]

CLAP support in DAWs is an easier sell, because DAW developers generally don’t want to be in a position where the competition is offering features that they don’t.

However, that probably still will not move very many plugin developers, who see that supporting just VST3, AU, and AAX gives them 100% DAW coverage, with no need to add additional support for any other formats.

It’s the same obstacle that VST3 adoption faced: why spend resources on supporting VST3 when everyone already supported VST2? It wasn’t until Steinberg dropped VST2 support in Cubase that some plugin developers finally started supporting VST3. Because now, not supporting VST3 was losing them market share. CLAP doesn’t have that kind of leverage.

[SamDi]

My main DAW is Ableton, they joined vst3 very lately, that’s why a lot of projects from 2022 are mixed with VST2 and vst3. Most older projects before 2021 are vst2 only …

Also a lot of developers joined vst3 lately, like spire, serum, soundtoy or haven’t joined vst3 completely like UJAM.
Some other vst3 like vengeance avenger or Korg modwave are unusable in Ableton, because Ableton has a bug with slow vst3 preset change since years by some vst3 synths. Or all PSP vst3 plugins do crash Ableton
So even last year I have used a lot of vst2 plugins, and I stated avoiding vst2 in 2021 if I had a stable vst3 alternative….

Yeah this I recognized also, that VST3 was much less cared about and I hope now, that at leat that will improve.

It would be no problem to allow them opening vst2 in future, maybe they see a disadvantage, if other daw support vst2 what they don’t.

This is a good point, which I didn't see. Maybe they behave because of that, but I think it's silly though.

Ok, so… Have you never made a piece of music that you liked and wanted to be able to return to in future?

No, the older my stuff is, the more shitty it is, because I develop continuously. Either I finish a track - then it was some good. If I even don't finish a track, so why should I take it years later and finish it then? On my side always the latest is the greatest.

Have you never had an instrument, or a plugin, that you liked? An instrument becomes your voice for expressing something.

Yes sure, but normally it are the devs themself who depreciate a plugin and as soon as this happens I use the plugin as long as possible, but accept that it will once not work. All the older plugin, which you can not use, after VST2-dropping do not work primarily, because the dev doesn't support it anymore.

As a dev, even if you have no feeling for the musicians who are creating their own stuff using your tools, even if you are so mean that you do not care if people are silenced and their favorite stuff taken away, even if you're able to be happy as people lose what they care about for your convenience… you still had better not be happy. Because they will set your mailbox on FIRE, man, and they will MAKE you understand what they've lost.

I don't understand your point. If I am a developer and I do my job and support my product actively, thus people can still use it with VST3 in the future. For what should I take care or responsibility then, beside what happens in my action field?

[Cochrane]

IMHO, a GPL'd VST2-to-CLAP/VST2-to-VST3 'invisible' (for reloading old projects) wrapper is the future!

Cheers,
Cochrane

[jamcat]

That last quote from jinxtigr is beyond ironic since he refuses to support VST3.

[SamDi]

CLAP support in DAWs is an easier sell, because DAW developers generally don’t want to be in a position where the competition is offering features that they don’t.

However, that probably still will not move very many plugin developers, who see that supporting just VST3, AU, and AAX gives them 100% DAW coverage, with no need to add additional support for any other formats.

It’s the same obstacle that VST3 adoption faced: why spend resources on supporting VST3 when everyone already supported VST2? It wasn’t until Steinberg dropped VST2 support in Cubase that some plugin developers finally started supporting VST3. Because now, not supporting VST3 was losing them market share. CLAP doesn’t have that kind of leverage.

I would say, that most at least many of the developers already supported VST3, when it was not yet mandatory at that time, so 100% DAW coverage seemed not to be the only goal. Maybe for some plugin developers it's also the case, that they want to offer features, which the competitor does. Maybe not for the smaller devs, but for sure for the bigger names, I guess.

Furthermore, from an absolute sales point, it might be that supporting CLAP as plugin dev, doesn't bring you a bigger market share. But as I understood, it was in the past for many plugins the case, that they were VST2-centric implemented and the other formats were derived from that. So you got a plugin, which probably worked for VST2 very well and for other formats you introduced a certain risk for failures, bugs, etc. in the adapters or encapsulation layers. At least it was true for VST2->VST3, because for some devs the VST3 variant worked noticeably worse (which changed a little bit, since VST3 got some more love).

Want I wanna say is, that if you are now going to make your plugin CLAP-centric or at least format-agnostic, you get CLAP almost for free and sure, you have to test it, but wouldn't it be less effort to test primarily the CLAP variants with the common DAWs and focus on VST3 as a niche format with all it's quirks just for the Steinberg DAWs from support point of view? You might say: "no, they need to support VST3 in a same intensity for all DAWS", but as we know that didn't happened also in the past, because VST3 was noticeably more unstable...

[SamDi]

That last quote from jinxtigr is beyond ironic since he refuses to support VST3.

Really? If that's true, then I'm playing in the wrong movie...

[Urs]

IMHO, a GPL'd VST2-to-CLAP/VST2-to-VST3 'invisible' (for reloading old projects) wrapper is the future!

Cheers,
Cochrane

A VST2-as-CLAP wrapper can't be GPL'd because the VST2 license is incompatible with any version of GPL. Such a wrapper can only ever be closed source and needs to be published by someone who still has a valid VST2 license.

You see, that is the inherent problem with non-permissive, non-standard licenses. They limit the formats' usefulness. OTOH with CLAP you can do pretty much everything and its license (MIT) is compatible to any closed source, open source, paid, free, permissive, non-permissive license.

Anyhow, for those who can't or couldn't bring their VST2/3 to Arm CPUs (Apple Silicon, Windows/Linux on Arm), this doesn't help either. On Mac such a wrapper could run in Rosetta as long as Rosetta is around. Later on, the wrapper would have to internally run an Intel emulator. I doubt that that's going to fly well in the long run.

Therefore, migration is the best way forward and IMHO Steinberg should oblige host developers to support IPluginCompatibility.

[TS-12]

Good. All VST plugins should be VST3 long time ago

Good. All VST3 plugins should be CLAP long time ago

CLAP wasn't available long time ago

CLAP (or something like it) should have been available a long time ago. We had several discussion threads for many years on and off in the development subforum about how badly needed such a free format would be. Most of the time, the gist of these discussions was: yes, we need such a thing but nah - it won't happen. Now it finally did happen - which is a very good thing. Big thanks to all people that made it happen. This will shape the future of audio plugin development for the better.

Yes CLAP should have happened long time ago but it didn't.

[TS-12]

IMHO, a GPL'd VST2-to-CLAP/VST2-to-VST3 'invisible' (for reloading old projects) wrapper is the future!

Cheers,
Cochrane

A VST2-as-CLAP wrapper can't be GPL'd because the VST2 license is incompatible with any version of GPL. Such a wrapper can only ever be closed source and needs to be published by someone who still has a valid VST2 license.

You see, that is the inherent problem with non-permissive, non-standard licenses. They limit the formats' usefulness. OTOH with CLAP you can do pretty much everything and its license (MIT) is compatible to any closed source, open source, paid, free, permissive, non-permissive license.

Anyhow, for those who can't or couldn't bring their VST2/3 to Arm CPUs (Apple Silicon, Windows/Linux on Arm), this doesn't help either. On Mac such a wrapper could run in Rosetta as long as Rosetta is around. Later on, the wrapper would have to internally run an Intel emulator. I doubt that that's going to fly well in the long run.

Therefore, migration is the best way forward and IMHO Steinberg should oblige host developers to support IPluginCompatibility.

I don't think Rosetta will be available for too long

[mi-os]

VirSyn was already coding VST3 plugins when many of you weren't even born yet.

And? But also, no.

Yeah, i know it's mostly old geezers. Inlcuding myself. So let's say 'some' not 'many'.

It's lame for how long many plugin devs refused switching to VST3. Also DAW devs for not supporting it. VirSyn showed it was usable many years ago. I'm pretty sure if adaption would have happened earlier Steinberg would have addressed concerns with some implementation details earlier as well.

[seafire]

I don't understand why Steiny want to kill vst2 off, they could just leave it as 'unsupported' and allow devs to keep using it if they want to. It would eventually die a natural death at some point I guess...