History of Vst (Youtube video )

Just thought i would post this , great reminder on how far we have come

(2) How the VST Changed the Music Forever - YouTube

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Cool! :sunglasses: Thanks for sharing.

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A very entertaining sweep across time, nice find! The material covers a lot more than VST too, which is great, because it adds context.

My 2c: back in the day ( :slight_smile: ) a typical CPU could not easily deal with “floating-point” numbers (fractions) and you would have to buy an additional processor (“FPU”, or “floating-point unit”), in its own socket, and at great expense, if you wanted to speed things up. Why is this important? Well, you need this type of math if you’re going to do the magical things with audio that we take for granted nowadays.

Back in the '80s, one of Intel’s innovations was to produce a CPU/FPU combination in one chip, and Macs had available Motorola FPUs. Now, most people didn’t need, use or even know thay had one, but as PCs became more affordable, it was soon the case that lots of musicians had unused integrated FPU power there were simply unaware of.

The genius of VST was to develop software that was able to put that unused FPU power to use as a specialized audio co-processor, and at no extra cost. This was done by converting incoming audio so it was represented in the number range +1.0 to -1.0 (i.e. fractions between +/- 1) and therefore could be offloaded to the floating-point processor.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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Thanks Soundman , now that is a bit very useful layman’s knowledge even i understood . Cheers for your knowledge