Hello, my name is Danny and I’m a first year student at Hull College studying for a diploma in Music Technology and Production. We’ve been assigned to look into a special subject for investigation which interests us personally. I’ve chosen to look at why there isn’t any standardisation of plugins between the most popular DAWs in the marketplace. I use multiple DAW software both at home and at college and I wonder why when switching between the applications I don’t have the same VST plugins for certain tasks, for example, compression and reverb. Every DAW has their own plugins which can achieve the same purpose but they aren’t exactly the same in both the process, features, and the user interface.
My proposal is that we all need to have a collection of VST plugins which will become the standard across all the DAW makers who follow these new guidelines: -
- The collection of audio FX plugins which at a minimum will include a compressor (single and multiband), deesser, delay, equaliser (graphical and parametric), expander/gate, filters (low pass, high pass, band pass, and notch), limiter, maximiser, reverb, and a spectrum analyser. This list is not exhaustive.
- All the plugins must work in all DAWs (ie, no vendor lock down) regardless of the operating system used (we must be able to at least use the plugins on Windows and Mac with Linux optional).
- All the plugins must also have their source code released under one of the OSI-approved licenses. I recommend the three-clause BSD license.
- To allow for collaboration between DAW makers for the plugins (so everyone can help with the development of the plugins), the plugins source code will be publicly available online at GitHub.
- The plugins must compile in both 32-bit and 64-bit. But 64-bit is preferred.
- Binary installers must be available for both Windows and Mac and available in both 32-bit and 64-bit and must be able to be installed side-by-side.
- All plugins must utilise all cores available on the host for processing.
I would be very interested if Steinberg would be like to action this proposal or even if other users of Steinberg products would be interested in this as well. If you have any questions, comments, on what I have said here; please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Thank you for your time and I look forward to your reply.