Apologies if I’m behind the curve on this, but does anyone know why Altiverb is not even a vst2 plugin, let alone vst3? I normally have it inserted on the master bus in Sibelius and would like to do the same in Dorico. I can’t seem to find any explanation for this…
Thanks!
Andy
There are also other plug-in formats than VST, e.g. Audio Unit (AU). I don’t know in what flavours Altiverb comes, I don’t have it here, but I have seen log files of users, where it was mentioned as VST2 plug-in.
Many plug-ins are delivered in different formats and the installers then usually ask which version(s) to install.
Can you find out the file location of Altiverb on your machine. Maybe you have the VST2 version installed, but Dorico can’t see it, because it is in a location that Dorico does not scan.
You could also go to Help > Create Diagnostic Report. That will create a zip file on your desktop. Please send to ‘u dot stoermer at steinberg dot de’.
Use this script to automatically whitelisting all your vst2 instruments to Dorico:
Hi Ulf,
After emailing AudioEase, apparently Altiverb is a VST2. Also, a VST3 version of Altiverb is unlikely to be forthcoming. In my Mac plugins folder Altiverb is installed in the VST folder and not in a folder called VST2 which is actually empty. Apparently VST2’s use the .vst file extension so they just get installed in the VST folder…This was my original confusion. I have tried to do the HelpCenter procedure for using vst2’s but it doesn’t seem to work, unless I am dong something wrong. Unfortunately I do not understand how to implement Shiki’s suggestion from above. I have done a diagnostic report as you suggested and will email it to you incase that helps!
Is anyone successfully using Altiverb with Dorico?
Why does Dorico not accept VST2’s as standard like Cubase and Nuendo?
Thanks
Another way to put that question is, “Why does everyone still insist on using the VST2 standard, when it became obsolete 10 years ago” 
For Cubase and Nuendo, part of the answer would probably be “because the Cubase was first released 6 years before VST3 was invented, and Nuendo was first released 8 years before.” Dorico doesn’t have that much technical debt in its code base (not yet, anyway!)
Grainger sent me the diagnostic report and it turned out that his whitelist was wrong. Probably edited with a richt text editor, it contained lots of additional formatting information that the audio engine does not make sense of. I’ve sent him a corrected one and he shall be up and running now.
Thanks Ulf. I can confirm for other users that I have got Altiverb 7 working within Dorico and have reported that in the ‘Let us know which VST2.x plug-ins are working in Dorico’ thread.
Re. Rob’s comment above - From AudioEase: ‘Adding VST 3 to Altiverb 7 requires a major rewrite and would not add anything extra, this is why we did not do this’
It is not pertinent for every VST2 plug-in, but using VST3 would add one very important aspect: stability. You can’t imagine how many badly programmed VST2 plug-ins are out there that are causing us grief.
But is the proportion of badly programmed VST3 plug-ins any better than VST2? There are many more VST2s than VST3s, so you would expect there to be many more bad VST2s than bad VST3s - but that doesn’t tell you anything about the “average” quality of each.
It might be that the people who can see an advantage in using their software development resources to convert their products from VST2 to VST3 are simply “better software developers” than those who don’t see the advantage and don’t attempt to convert - and their plug-ins would not have caused much grief even if they had not converted them.