Bye bye VST2

[zvenx]

Of course... the people who don't like it are being honest and the people who do like it are being paid to say so.
Makes lot of sense.
I think one of Voxengo's plugins, Curve Equalizer? was also part of Cubendo (for awhile anyway) i don't recall him saying it was easy for him.. Maybe he didn't get paid to say so.

And before someone says once again, I have hidden meaning behind what I am actually saying, I am not at all implying that any of those who have issues with vst3 are not being honest...
It may be difficult with their framework of choice, but it isn't difficult for every framework .

rsp

[mi-os]

... And since three of the Cubase included synths back then were based on virsyn synth I'm sure most of the work wasn't done by Gohs. Probably he got paid for such statements.

You are saying Steinberg coded/ported Harry's plugins for him? That kind of defeats the purpose of outsourcing work.

[gaggle of hermits]

... And since three of the Cubase included synths back then were based on virsyn synth I'm sure most of the work wasn't done by Gohs. Probably he got paid for such statements.

You are saying Steinberg coded/ported Harry's plugins for him? That kind of defeats the purpose of outsourcing work.

that's not the claim here: it's that the port to vst3 was done substantially by steinberg.

personally, I reckon it's more likely harry wrapped the interface around his synths but had substantial help from the steinberg developers from much earlier simply because they needed the synths for the DAW. so he would have had a lot of valuable info for porting his own stuff. either way, it's easy to see why Matrix came out so quickly as a vst3.

[Urs]

It's completely normal that a bunch of people get pre-seeded with SDKs and stuff. We had that a few times too, albeit not for VST3 IIRC. Our framework is made for this, we're good early adopters as we don't have external dependencies.

And of course one does it for the publicity, not the money.

But whenever we did it, we were quite excited and spoke positively. Then, later on, a few times we weren't anymore. Particularly if whatever we supported got modified and/or broke things later on.

Nevertheless, none of this probably had had any impact on decisions decade or two later.

[No_Use]

We went through the process of seeking clarification with a lawyer specialised on the topic, who ended up communicating with theirs. The result for us is: Signing the current license agreement puts an end to VST2 publishing. With certain upgrades to the VST3 SDK comes a new license, and in order to use that SDK you have to sign that license - our old agreement which included VST2 was therefore void for the current SDK.

Do you know by chance if the same goes for host developers?
I.e. if signing the current license agreement puts an end to VST2 hosting (more exactly publishing hosts which are able to host VST2s)?

[jens]

VST2.x is a long-since deprecated iteration of the VST standard, which is now in version 3.7.x.

Lol... that makes zero sense.

[kritikon]

If they're finally getting rid of VST2, it must mean that VST4 is around the corner. CLAP is only at 1, so they need to pick their socks up and get to CLAP 2 pretty sharpish. Being a couple of versions behind the competition is acceptable, but being 3 versions behind can be seen as lazy. TBH CLAP should have released initially at CLAP 3 just to start on an equal footing with Steinberg, but they're always going to be behind now...

[S0lo]

......
Main questions are:
1) Was VST3 backward compatible with VST2?
2) If it is not compatible does it provide all of the functionality of VST2?
Answer to the both questions is no. Had either of answers been yes, we would not have this discussion, and any issues with VST3 development would have been relegated to obscurity of developer forums.

Not on inception, but now yes.. It was mentioned in an earlier page...
iplugincompatibility.. (one of three ways I believe).

rsp

I wouldn't call this backward compatible. AFAIK, iplugincompatibility provides a mechanism to migrate VST2 saved states to VST3. This still doesn't relieve the developer from having to completely redesign his VST2 to work as a VST3. There are vast differences between the two formats. Specially if the developer used the GUI API that comes with VST (VSTGUI). For developers who used, their own internal (or external) GUI API, the porting from VST2 to VST3 may have been just a bit easier.

Proper backward compatibility is when the old VST2 binary completely works flawlessly in a VST3 host, with no or minor tweaking at run time. Which is not possible with VST. An example of this, is how say Windows 7/10 can run old binaries that were designed for Windows XP/98 or so.

I would have still called it backward compatible, if we had to do only a few minor changes to the code and compile it as VST3. Thats also not possible.

[zvenx]

Afaik this is all done in vst3 not vst2 at all..to indeed allow the vst3 to substitute/replace the vst2 in projects.

oh you mean the original plugin code which was written in vst2.
Got ya.
rsp

[S0lo]

Interesting enough. VST3 seams to be downgradable. that is, you can produce VST2 binaries using VST3 code through a VST2 wrapper that is included in the SDK. What many of us really needed is the reverse.

[EvilDragon]

I think VST2 wrapper was long removed from the VST3 SDK, no?

[jamcat]

If none of their hosts support clap, customers may turn to those that do....possibly.

Do you really find it is plausible that Steinberg customer would jump ship they obviously like just because there is another format on the market? You think somebody dropped Logic in last couple of years just because it does not support VST?
They can loose customers only if plugins are consistently not developed for their format, but that would mean that they already lost large fraction of the customers.

I'm saying, it's possible, that current or potential customers could do, or be forced to, if synths and fx are not updated in vst format or even made at all.

That's a long way off, but that's a scenario I could think of that would 'harm' Steinberg

It’s not a long way off if there’s any truth to the claims that VST3 plugins are all really just wrapped VST2 code. Ending VST2 licensing would mean all VST3 development stops dead in its tracks now, which would mean the rapid demise of Steinberg.

Of course if it was actually true, Steinberg would also know all of that, and wouldn’t have chosen to kill themselves off. So we’ll see pretty quickly if all VST3 plugin development suddenly ceases.

[MirkoVanHauten]

Where is the claim that all VST3 plugins are just wrapped VST2 plugins?

[aMUSEd]

There are some, Arturia used to do it and Korg still do for their earlier legacy plugins - I think in their cases the VST3 is like a shell that loads the VST2 so you still need the VST2 installed

The funniest one is when Steinberg first released Padshop Pro it used to be possible (on Mac at least) to rename the VST3 to VST and it loaded as a VST2 (even though it didn't come as a VST2) so I guess that was not even wrapped, just given a different extension - rather ironic I thought coming from them

[machinesworking]

If none of their hosts support clap, customers may turn to those that do....possibly.

Do you really find it is plausible that Steinberg customer would jump ship they obviously like just because there is another format on the market? You think somebody dropped Logic in last couple of years just because it does not support VST?
They can loose customers only if plugins are consistently not developed for their format, but that would mean that they already lost large fraction of the customers.

I'm saying, it's possible, that current or potential customers could do, or be forced to, if synths and fx are not updated in vst format or even made at all.

That's a long way off, but that's a scenario I could think of that would 'harm' Steinberg

It’s not a long way off if there’s any truth to the claims that VST3 plugins are all really just wrapped VST2 code. Ending VST2 licensing would mean all VST3 development stops dead in its tracks now, which would mean the rapid demise of Steinberg.

Of course if it was actually true, Steinberg would also know all of that, and wouldn’t have chosen to kill themselves off. So we’ll see pretty quickly if all VST3 plugin development suddenly ceases.

More than likely what will happen is developers get hit with a lot more work to get rid of any remaining VST2 code in their plugins, which doesn't mean VST3 development stops, it just again reduces the trust that developers have to code for VST3, because flatly whose to say they don't release VST4 tomorrow and depreciate VST3 with no porting to VST4?

I'm on a Mac and AU is right now what I mostly use for this and other reasons. VST3 for Reason Rack and VST2 for the MPC 2 plugin.