VST3 Support!

Share what you’d like to see added to Ableton Live.
Idonotlikebroccoli
Posts: 1205
Joined: Thu Aug 11, 2005 12:29 pm
Location: Norway

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Idonotlikebroccoli » Sun Nov 13, 2016 7:43 am

It hasn't even been 10 years - you're all so impatient. :P
VST 3.0 came out in 2008. Changes included:

Audio Inputs for VST Instruments
Multiple MIDI inputs/outputs
Optional SKI (Steinberg Kernel Interface) integration

VST 3.5 came out in February, 2011. Changes included note expression, which provides extensive articulation information in individual note events in a polyphonic arrangement. This supports performance flexibility and a more natural playing feel.

In September, 2013, Steinberg discontinued maintenance of the VST 2 SDK. In December, Steinberg stopped distributing the SDK.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Studio_Technology

cReePyLunatic
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Joined: Tue Jan 06, 2015 10:02 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by cReePyLunatic » Tue Nov 15, 2016 10:01 pm

no VST3 support in 2016 LUL

ilucaluca
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Joined: Sun Aug 24, 2014 2:46 pm

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by ilucaluca » Thu Nov 17, 2016 11:59 am

Come on ! I hope the Ableton team is reading this. VST3 support is a no brainer. Why is it that every other major sequencer has this but Ableton is still letting people that need vst3 support down. The list of vst3 plugins is growing and some are only available in this format.

Please make this happen.

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Stromkraft » Fri Nov 18, 2016 4:10 pm

ilucaluca wrote:Come on ! I hope the Ableton team is reading this. VST3 support is a no brainer. Why is it that every other major sequencer has this but Ableton is still letting people that need vst3 support down. The list of vst3 plugins is growing and some are only available in this format.

Please make this happen.
Hard to see this not arriving in Live 10. On Mac this is a very small problem as there is an Audio Unit version of close to every plug-in. At least the ones I've been looking at.

What I've found missing from the discussion online is the somewhat luke-warm introduction of VST3 support in many DAWs for so many years. Far from all support VST3 still now. I wonder why. Fees? architecture?

The features of VST3 look attractive on the surface of things at least. Maybe there's a development price to pay for supporting all the cool aspects of VST3? It would be nice to hear an informed developer perspective.
Make some music!

Stromkraft
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Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Stromkraft » Wed Nov 30, 2016 5:46 am

Stromkraft wrote:
What I've found missing from the discussion online is the somewhat luke-warm introduction of VST3 support in many DAWs for so many years. Far from all support VST3 still now. I wonder why. Fees? architecture?

The features of VST3 look attractive on the surface of things at least. Maybe there's a development price to pay for supporting all the cool aspects of VST3? It would be nice to hear an informed developer perspective.
Meanwhile Machinesworking gave this excellent analysis in
Ableton just lost a push sale. (Hopefully he won't mind me reposting this illuminating quote here)
Machinesworking wrote: "The original reason for AU on OSX was poor VST hosting documentation from Steinberg, they give out great documentation for making plug ins and almost nothing to host plug ins.

VST3 I would assume adds a whole new slew of problems reverse engineering Stienbergs dazzling new format for DAW makers, so almost no DAW maker in OSX anyway is interested in wasting time on it when AU and VST2.4 work perfectly fine right now.

Three years later and the only major DAW on OSX hosting VST3 is Cubase. Plenty of plug in developers years ago were mad at Apple for AU because of the extra work it entailed to keep up three formats and two OS's etc. but DAW makers all were more than happy to implement it right away. That should let you know why Ableton, MOTU, Apple, Bitwig, etc. do not host VST3.

An obvious choice for hosting VST3 if it was easy out of the box would have been Bitwig, but very obviously it was easier to implement the older standard even though Bitwig could have theoretically hosted VST3 from 1.0. They want to be platform agnostic so they host 2.4, but not VST3.

Emagic jumped at the chance years ago to dump VST because it was a real PITA to get correct and was 100% the cause of all issues on Apple OS9, so AU and an inevitable buyout from Apple ensued.

All this is [damning] evidence to the lack of transparency Steinberg have for hosting VST."
[my correction]
Make some music!

Machinesworking
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Location: Seattle

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Machinesworking » Wed Nov 30, 2016 7:04 am

No worries at all Stormkraft. More evidence of why I'm pointing all that out, when OSX became a viable platform for audio the website osxaudio.com used to have developers from Logic, Urs Heckman from U-He; guys from FXPansion, Expert Sleepers, Numerology and plenty of other developers discussing why AU came about, what working with Stienberg on VST was like and what the pros and cons were. It's not at all surprising, after listening to them about the issues, that VST3 is floundering in terms of hosts. One other reason could be problems with having both VST2 and 3 plug ins in a session, Waves for instance has issues with that.

From the horses mouth, Urs talking about making VST3 plug ins, 2013 to 2016...
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... 7bd44038b4

JoshaB
Posts: 1
Joined: Mon Dec 12, 2016 5:57 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by JoshaB » Mon Dec 12, 2016 7:08 am

bump for VST3.

Thanks Machinesworking for the insight into why it's hard. Still it seems like several hosts have managed to supported it. I have a Yamaha synth plugin and plugins that I used before switching from Cubase that I'd love to be able to use.

Khazul
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Location: Reading, UK

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Khazul » Wed Dec 28, 2016 6:01 pm

I don't specifically care about VST 3 as such as I do not do multichannel mixes (just stereo), however there are many circumstances in a mix where we work with 4 or more channels:
Side chain inputs
Instruments with multiple outputs.

For instruments with multiple outputs, it is possible hack something up with the instrument rack or drum rack plugins and a bunch of external instrument plugins.

For AU/VST audio plugins with side chain however there is nothing other than explicitly routing audio from another track to that plugin which usually means creating an explicit track fed from sends to serve as a routing bus for the specific plugin - compared to the simple Sidechain input selector on Live's own plugins, that is annoying.

So, what I would settle for in the absence of AU/VST3 multiple input and multi-output support as found in logic and cubase is a wrapper plugin to allow simple access to the auxiliary input and outputs, particularly source selectors for aux (side chain) inputs so as to make using say fabfilter's pro-C2 as convenient to use as lives own compressor.

As a next thing, some kind of virtual audio group track for plugins with multiple outputs just to save all the messing around with external instrument plugins when I want to use a 3rd party drum synth (with it multiple outputs) in a drum rack.

Live does not need VST 3 architecture support for this - it just needs to start treating 3rd party AU and VST and VST3 plugins as first class citizens from a usability perspective in the way that AU plugin are handled in logic and VST3 plugins are handled in Cubase and Live's own plugin are handled in Live. The full general multi-channel thing could be considered separately if at all.

We as users who are not using the full multi-channel bus capabilities (4 channel I/O etc that you can have in cubase etc) just need to be able to work with 3rd party plugins as conveniently as with live's own plugins.

I would be happy if a phase 1 implementation of this just added an aux input selector to the visual wrapper we get for 3rd party audio (and instrument - some instruments have audio inputs) plugins.

Phase 2 could vastly improve integration into drum racks and instrument racks to remove the need for manually creating and setting up loads of external instrument plugins.
The external audio effect plugin should stop being limited to use with hardware I/O channels and become a general multi-channel input and output routing wrappers.
Nothing to see here - move along!

DaWrecked1
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Jun 09, 2014 6:35 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by DaWrecked1 » Sun Mar 12, 2017 8:24 am

Khazul wrote:I don't specifically care about VST 3 as such as I do not do multichannel mixes (just stereo), however there are many circumstances in a mix where we work with 4 or more channels:
Side chain inputs
Instruments with multiple outputs.

For instruments with multiple outputs, it is possible hack something up with the instrument rack or drum rack plugins and a bunch of external instrument plugins.

For AU/VST audio plugins with side chain however there is nothing other than explicitly routing audio from another track to that plugin which usually means creating an explicit track fed from sends to serve as a routing bus for the specific plugin - compared to the simple Sidechain input selector on Live's own plugins, that is annoying.

So, what I would settle for in the absence of AU/VST3 multiple input and multi-output support as found in logic and cubase is a wrapper plugin to allow simple access to the auxiliary input and outputs, particularly source selectors for aux (side chain) inputs so as to make using say fabfilter's pro-C2 as convenient to use as lives own compressor.

As a next thing, some kind of virtual audio group track for plugins with multiple outputs just to save all the messing around with external instrument plugins when I want to use a 3rd party drum synth (with it multiple outputs) in a drum rack.

Live does not need VST 3 architecture support for this - it just needs to start treating 3rd party AU and VST and VST3 plugins as first class citizens from a usability perspective in the way that AU plugin are handled in logic and VST3 plugins are handled in Cubase and Live's own plugin are handled in Live. The full general multi-channel thing could be considered separately if at all.

We as users who are not using the full multi-channel bus capabilities (4 channel I/O etc that you can have in cubase etc) just need to be able to work with 3rd party plugins as conveniently as with live's own plugins.

I would be happy if a phase 1 implementation of this just added an aux input selector to the visual wrapper we get for 3rd party audio (and instrument - some instruments have audio inputs) plugins.

Phase 2 could vastly improve integration into drum racks and instrument racks to remove the need for manually creating and setting up loads of external instrument plugins.
The external audio effect plugin should stop being limited to use with hardware I/O channels and become a general multi-channel input and output routing wrappers.
Well said. Tho i believe the issue is far greater than just the capability to easily sidechain and the extra IO. The problem also extends to compatibility. There are some industry standard plugins that are now VST3 only....like Autotune. It's going to happen eventually. VST format will continue evolving. The only Ableton users that can use Autotune are Mac users. Thats just 1 example.
I'm not beyond routing audio to sends or creating audio tracks for sidechain purposes for Waves plugins. Though it is annoying and a integrated method would be much appreciated.

Honestly I've been looking at Bitwig really hard. I think Ableton thinks it has such a firm place in the DAW market that they've learned ppl will accept things like they are doing now with VST3....and the VST3 thing is minor compared to things that took them so long to finally implement in the past with the plugin delay compensation and 3rd party plugin automation delay compensation issues that plagued Ableton for so soooo long. It took forever for Ableton to finally say they will implement those features even though their user base begged for it for many years and many of their competitor already had it. Kinda disheartening considering how much I like everything else about Ableton.

Warmonger
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Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Warmonger » Mon Mar 13, 2017 2:59 pm

How comes Ableton doesn't support VST3 yet? It's 2017!

EL-NiNo
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Joined: Mon Oct 04, 2010 4:16 pm

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by EL-NiNo » Fri Mar 17, 2017 10:05 am

PLLLLEEEAASSEEE!!!!!

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Stromkraft » Fri Mar 17, 2017 11:04 am

Warmonger wrote:How comes Ableton doesn't support VST3 yet? It's 2017!
And? Did you even read some of the more recent posts? I suggest you need to do that instead if assuming your user case is the norm.
Make some music!

Stromkraft
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Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by Stromkraft » Fri Mar 17, 2017 11:05 am

EL-NiNo wrote:PLLLLEEEAASSEEE!!!!!
And did you even read some of the more recent posts? Go back a few pages and inform yourself.
Make some music!

icehouse
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Mar 19, 2017 6:04 pm

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by icehouse » Tue Mar 28, 2017 11:12 pm

+1 vst3 support.

nrgskill
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Joined: Sun Apr 09, 2017 8:55 am

Re: VST3 Support!

Post by nrgskill » Sat Apr 22, 2017 12:07 am

+1 especially because workarounds for side-chaining are boring

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