A shot across Steinberg's VST3 bow?

[MattiasNYC]

@skijumptoes

When you consider that the president of the MIDI Association is from Yamaha, it’s just odd that Steinberg were so keen to snub it out of the VST3 spec - despite decades of MIDI based VST2’s.

Sadly their arrogance on such matters will be what bites them on the rear now that another universal format is ticking the right boxes. It also doesn’t help that this comes at a time where Steinberg has closed the door on VST2 - and yes, we know there were warnings, but people are still bitter about it which adds to the anti SB sentiments.

MIDI 2.0 is incoming, other hosts are leading the way in regards to plugin modulation - really, it’s a perfect time for another standard to come into the game and pick up.

Ok, but if we read Arne’s responses Steinberg’s actions seem to make a fair amount of sense, starting with what I highlighted above plus:

@Arne_Scheffler

The good thing is, with VST3 support you get automatic support for MIDI 2 when the host supports it, you just have nothing to do as a plug-in developer all the burden has to be done by the host developer.

The impression I get when reading his responses is that VST2 was never meant to define MIDI functionality but did support it by accident. It was supposed to be an audio API and now that’s more clear with VST3. So MIDI is pushed more toward the host DAW and if it supports MIDI 2.0 then VST3 is playing along with it 100%.

Problem solved.

So it seems to me that developers are miffed because they took an audio API and started using it for MIDI instead, and when the creator of that API decides to update it they don’t like that they’d have to rethink their approach.

I just get the feeling that Steinberg’s approach seems to be technically and practically the better approach here and developers would rather just not follow it because it takes time and effort - not because it’s “wrong” or “bad”.