Ableton Forum

I know effectively there's probably not much of a difference but I figured it's worth asking.

If you have a plug that's AU and VST which one would you go with in Ableton? Assuming that you have zero intention of bringing the session over into PC land as no one you know that does music that owns a PC.

Are there any differences?

to be honest.. i use both but for some reason with some plugins (like with reaktor spiral) vst's usually behave better than AU. For example if i use reaktor spiral as an AU it will not send midi to another plug in, and that is precisely what i want it to do so i always open it as a VST, for the rest i really can't tell the difference...

have not seen much of a difference.

I'm having some serious stability issues with a few VST plug-ins and they're much more stable in their AU incarnation.

This doesn't seem to be a general experience though and maybe there are plug-ins that are more stable as VST's.

A couple of other things to consider:
* With VST plug-ins, you get a menu for selecting presets, in the device. And you can exchange presets in the fxb format. You don't get that with AU's.
* On the other hand, only AU's will allow you to handle presets the same way as with Live's native devices.
* If you ever gonna exchange Live sets with Win users, using AU's will mess things up (it's a Mac only format you know).

EDIT: sorry, missed that you weren't gonna exchange sets with Win folks.

slirak wrote:only AU's will allow you to handle presets the same way as with Live's native devices.

ok, good to know!

Im installing my first plugin; moog voyager!

Au apart from the waves plugins which work better as VST's for some reason.

it really depends whether the plug-in was designed ground-up as an AU, or directly ported from its VST version. The latter allegedly involves a tiny bit more processing overhead.

You wouldn't notice any difference. You can use any plug that you are comfortable with. The processing part would just be a tiny difference as well.

The Waves AU plugins sometimes are disabled when I load a set - I have to turn them off and back on for them to work. I use the VST's for that reason. Also, I found that some AU compressor plugins do not allow the option for sidechaining from other audio tracks. Apart from that, I don't notice much of a difference, but prefer using AU's where possible as I use Logic too.

antarktika wrote:it really depends whether the plug-in was designed ground-up as an AU, or directly ported from its VST version. The latter allegedly involves a tiny bit more processing overhead.

This is true, and has contributed to the idea that "VST is faster than AU." This isn't necessarily true, but many commercial plugins are programmed first in VST and then are wrapped as an AU, so the AU version has an extra abstraction layer to deal with. Not all plugins do this, so the best bet is to just try them and see if you can tell a difference.

Warrior Bob wrote:

antarktika wrote:it really depends whether the plug-in was designed ground-up as an AU, or directly ported from its VST version. The latter allegedly involves a tiny bit more processing overhead.

This is true, and has contributed to the idea that "VST is faster than AU." This isn't necessarily true, but many commercial plugins are programmed first in VST and then are wrapped as an AU, so the AU version has an extra abstraction layer to deal with. Not all plugins do this, so the best bet is to just try them and see if you can tell a difference.

Beyond trial and error you can tell this from the web page of the developer. There are quite a few that start off VST Win and AU Mac get VST mac, RTAS etc. NI mostly perform slightly better as VST, Zebra is likely more stable as AU as Urs started out as an AU only developer.
Personally I sometimes use Digital Performer and now Metasynth, which both are AU only so I stick with AU outside of Kore.

slirak wrote:I'm having some serious stability issues with a few VST plug-ins and they're much more stable in their AU incarnation.

This doesn't seem to be a general experience though and maybe there are plug-ins that are more stable as VST's.

A couple of other things to consider:
* With VST plug-ins, you get a menu for selecting presets, in the device. And you can exchange presets in the fxb format. You don't get that with AU's.
* On the other hand, only AU's will allow you to handle presets the same way as with Live's native devices.
* If you ever gonna exchange Live sets with Win users, using AU's will mess things up (it's a Mac only format you know).

EDIT: sorry, missed that you weren't gonna exchange sets with Win folks.

I just looked up this topic out of curiosity (after noticing I could adjust the output level of some uhbik AU plugins, but not in the VST version) and thought it was worth mentioning that, although you can only save AU presets as aupreset files to (and load them from) Live's browser like you can with Live's bundled instruments, it isn't too hard to just "group" your VST plugins into an instrument rack, and save presets using the rack's save UI. This also saved me from needing to move all of my VST instruments into a specific "instruments" folder to sort/make finding them easier, as by simply prepending my default instrument rack preset names with _vi_, they all show up at the top of the list in the Presets > Instruments > Instrument Rack folder in the User Library.

Also, if you want, you could just add a separate folder(s) in the user library and save/move your various VST instrument rack presets there. And if you always load from the browser location you saved the grouped instrument to, if you decide to save the instrument rack preset again, it will default to the same location you loaded it from.

Pretty much the best of both worlds, IMO. And either way, it's nice to keep instruments in a group by default so you can save your most used parameters to the 8 macro controls of the group, and have the configure settings for the plugin always make visible to Live whichever plugin parameters you want by default. I haven't seen any noticeable CPU impact from having an instrument grouped either.

Could anyone explain why vst save defaults to .fxb, and why I need to change this manually each time if I want .fxp? It takes quite some time to fill up the slots of a bank, and I'm often saving just a preset at a time or including it directly in a project. Furthermore it just doesn't make sense to me to swap out a bank entirely when I just want to use or preview a single sound, and the way it defaults I'd end up with hundreds of banks all with incremental differences from one another....

slirak wrote:I'm having some serious stability issues with a few VST plug-ins and they're much more stable in their AU incarnation.

This doesn't seem to be a general experience though and maybe there are plug-ins that are more stable as VST's.

A couple of other things to consider:
* With VST plug-ins, you get a menu for selecting presets, in the device. And you can exchange presets in the fxb format. You don't get that with AU's.
* On the other hand, only AU's will allow you to handle presets the same way as with Live's native devices.

Further to this though some (but not all) AUs will NOT show their factory presets in the browser menu. Or anywhere else since Ableton does not let you access AU presets in a drop list. Schwa Olga comes to mind. You could get them in Live 8 but it got broken in Live 9 as part of the browser update.

And a couple of AUs will let you load .fxp that you saved from vst versions(Cakewalk Z3ta 2 will for example let you load .fxp patches that you made in Z3ta 1 that was not available on Mac)

And if you have any Elektron gear Overbridge the vst works a LOT better than the AU

To be honest where there is a choice I normally try out both and use the one that works best.

Echoing all the above-decade plus in ProTols user & now switched (rigidly to Ableton so to "plum the depths of what it can do" in there. Please keep us in mind!