Bye bye VST2

[Greenstorm33]

If Steinberg doesn't want VST2 support in Cubendo anymore, that's fine. I couldn't care less about that crap. They havn't had any work to do on the VST2 sdk for 15 years and they won't in the future. But why force all others, in an absolute disgraceful & disgusting move, to drop it? It doesn't help the branche, it doesn't help devs, it only helps Steinberg. Maybe that's the surprise to anyone even if they've been paying a modicum of attention and that's the motivation to get away from Steinberg. Fool me once...

It's the corporate synergies, baby!

The best possible outcome would be all active formats get supported and everyone can use what they want where they want.

Unfortunately this is exactly what is not happening.

[jamcat]

VST2.x is a long-since deprecated iteration of the VST standard, which is now in version 3.7.x. Steinberg gave people 15 years to get up to date. That's way more time than Microsoft gives you. It's really no more complicated than that.

[Greenstorm33]

VST2.x is a long-since deprecated iteration of the VST standard, which is now in version 3.7.x. It's really no more complicated than that.

It's widely used, almost universally supported, and has no significant deficiencies compared to its supposed successor. The only thing wrong with VST2 is the morons at Steinberg.

[jamcat]

It has a lot of deficiencies. And it's not nearly as widely used as Microsoft software.

VST3 has sample-accurate automation, VST2 does not.
Automation with VST2 is sloppy, to say the least, and it was incurable without a rewrite. That alone is reason enough for VST3.

[MirkoVanHauten]

VST3 has sample-accurate automation, VST2 does not.
Automation with VST2 is sloppy, to say the least, and it was incurable without a rewrite. That alone is reason enough for VST3.

Of course VST2 has vstevents with timestamps which could have been easily used for that without a rewrite.

It's almost as if much of the VST2 criticism has been debunked already in this or other threads. But some try so hard

[jamcat]

My actual experience with automating physically modeled bowed instruments is that instruments built with VST2 are not capable of consistently reproducing bowed articulations correctly, while the VST3 versions are.

So in real-world application, VST2 is deficient for my needs.

[rod_zero]

The technical reasons really doesn't matter much, it is the politics, changing the EULA and forcing everyone to abandon. It is a show of power for absolutely nothing. Apple can get away with it because they actually have a huge user base in music production. Steinberg is now behind Live, Logic, FL in users and really only dominates in post production with Nuendo.

The only thing they will sow with this move is distrust from devs and will slow push the adoption of CLAP, and some day VST will be confined to Cubendo.

[jamcat]

I still don't see how this sows distrust from very many developers. The vast majority have already moved on to VST3 and now have an excuse to drop legacy VST2 support. Probably most are quietly happy behind the scenes to finally be done having to expend their limited development, testing, and support resources on VST2.

[machinesworking]

I still don't see how this sows distrust from very many developers. The vast majority have already moved on to VST3 and now have an excuse to drop legacy VST2 support. Probably most are quietly happy behind the scenes to finally be done having to expend their limited development, testing, and support resources on VST2.

yeah that’s why it took 15 years for them to adopt VST3!

[Urs]

I still don't see how this sows distrust from very many developers. The vast majority have already moved on to VST3 and now have an excuse to drop legacy VST2 support.

A vast number of plug-ins still has VST2 at its core which is then wrapped to VST3. It's not even unlikely that this is the vast majority of plug-ins.

All of these plug-in need to be changed, partly rewritten, VST2 replaced with something else inside, tested, rereleased, bug fixed and all that.

For those which don't have VST2 at its core but something like JUCE. If these plug-ins are currently released with VST2 support, they have to be repackaged and rereleased.

The cost of each of these rereleases may vary from company to company. For us just a release like this (without any rewrite etc.) takes about a month in planning and execution. Our monthly revenue is beyond 100k. If half the team is bound by a release, it's half of that. So that's what that costs us when we do useless shit instead of working on something that makes us money.

Does this eventually sink in with you?

[jamcat]

I still don't see how this sows distrust from very many developers. The vast majority have already moved on to VST3 and now have an excuse to drop legacy VST2 support. Probably most are quietly happy behind the scenes to finally be done having to expend their limited development, testing, and support resources on VST2.

yeah that’s why it took 15 years for them to adopt VST3!

The major developers have been supporting VST3 for a decade or more already. Waves, for example, added VST3 support in 2009. It was probably a matter of limited resources and no immediate urgency for VST3 support that led to some smaller developers taking longer. After all, if VST3 support wasn't absolutely necessary at the time, why rush to allocate resources for it and take away from other areas that were resulting in immediate revenue?

But now that they have made the investment in VST3, it's VST2 that is a drain on resources.

[jamcat]

The vast number of plug-ins still has VST2 at its core which is then wrapped to VST3. It's not even unlikely that this is the vast majority of plug-ins.

Presented without evidence.

[Urs]

The vast number of plug-ins still has VST2 at its core which is then wrapped to VST3. It's not even unlikely that this is the vast majority of plug-ins.

Presented without evidence.

Oh, so now we have additional provisions on information when posted by actual experts who have actually conducted some survey among his peers?

Like, when it suddenly turns out that there are no simple answers, suddenly the level of detail counts?

[ramseysounds]

Wow. An actual developer who actually knows what he's talking about because he does it for a living day in day out, or a keyboard warrior. Who to believe?

[jamcat]

Argumentum ad verecundiam isn't evidence.

I would like to see the data from this survey. That would be evidence.