Is Cubase ever going support third party Midi Plugins?

The title says it all, there are a lots of cool plugins we could be using if Steinberg would allow us to use third party midi inserts.

Thanks

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Which ones exactly?

There is an excellent new plugin that allow you to perform rolls with any vsti, you can assign a cc and you hits transform in rolls, and you can modify speed and intensity. It´s called Roll Control

Also, there are solutions for the different delays of Cinematic Studio series, that allows you to deal with lookahead and use the notes quantized to the grid

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Are we talking about something like the Cakewalk MIDI FX?

I don´t know about cakewalk, steinberg has its own midi effects, (arpache, etc)
but you can´t install third party ones as you can with audio plugins or vst instruments.

There are threads about this from years ago, and steinberg never gave us any response, so, didn´t hurt to ask again

The MIDI inserts in Cubase use Steinberg’s proprietary framework, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s even disappeared from the Steinberg developer’s forum in recent years, so I wouldn’t hold out much hope of there ever being any more MIDI inserts.

I think the logic is that everything should be achievable using the VST3 framework, however even trying to route MIDI between tracks is a bit of a nightmare. Let’s hope an improvement on MIDI routing in a future version of Cubase makes using VST3 MIDI easier, because that would open up the possibility of third-party MIDI processors.

Cakewalk MIDI FX (or MFX) use a different framework and won’t work in Cubase, although I do remember there used to be a wrapper for Cubase (SX?) that would allow them to be used in Cubase, however I’ve not seen a 64-bit version of that wrapper and I doubt we ever will.

Says on their site that Cubase is one of the supported DAWs.

It’s really simple to route one VSTi to send MIDI to another track for recording the resulting output, or control a second instrument. That’s by far the best option… But some plugins just don’t play nicely, for whatever reason…

The MIDI Inserts are too proprietary across DAWs to really offer a standard at that level. Although I do like what REAPER does, in that you can add VST’s pre-track, so any MIDI VST slots straight in and on the same track as the instrument you’re wanting to control.

Cubase development is quite static at the core level, and the more bugs that occur the more I’m drifting away from it, sadly.

yes but you have to use an instrument track to route to your midi track, if steinberg opened the protocol, I could add the midi insert to all my percussion tracks and have them do rolls whenever needed, lots of cool arpeggiators also.

I agree that cubase development is slow, but I have found threads asking for this from almost a decade ago!

Those threads are probably something like logic’s or if decades ago probably what mrsoundman says mfx which is obsolete now.

There are lot of vsts these days that are midi out capable. Cthulhu, melda, kontakt, pigments, avenger etc etc.

But i do agree that Steinberg can make a way better integration and overhaul whole midi routing and midi effects capabilities.

Will never happen

Cubase as well as Nuendo use VST-MA MidiFx plugins for MIDI effects (e.g. in the MIDI insert path). That API is public, but probably hasn’t changed / be maintained much over the years. Other vendors (hosts and plugins) did not really catch on with that API and instead used VST plugins itself for MIDI processing. There are/were a few VST-MA Midi plugins, but not too many of them.

So, actually vendors could create plugins for Cubase/Nuendo, but as almost no other host supports that particular API they are not too inclined to do so probably.

Cheers.

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That’s it, I couldn’t remember the name.

… but the SDK has disappeared, or at least, I can no longer find it to download and there’s no section for it over on the developers’ forum.

The SDK ist still available on the developers page:
3rd Party Developers

Cheers.

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Excellent, thanks! That’s the one … VST Module Architecture SDK.

The VST-MA SDK code is from 2003/2004 and I would infer is no longer supported since there has not been a recent update, whereas the VST 3 SDK has a very recent archive. I think we looked at VST-MA as a way to write something to improve quantizing. According to some even Cubase’s own plugins that you add thru the inspector panel have not been updated and are basically languishing. If they remove old cruft, they will break backwards compatability with someone’s old session. That’s a 2-edged sword since changing how basic core features work even to improve things can do the same. If you are a Mac user you should look at Logic’s builtin MIDI scripting which is basically Javascript I believe.

The got a facelift a few versions back, and no, they haven’t had much functionality added but they are still very useful. I see no reason to remove them.

I agree the existing MIDI plugins are useful. I wish the Quantize MIDI plugin - which can do real-time quantization on an entire track - was as easy to use and had all the options as the Quantize Panel opened from the toolbar. Looks to me like the Quantize panel gets updates and not the Quantize MIDI plugin.

this i think is important feature. there was only 1 vote for it 1 is from me. maybe the vote feature is new in forum so there are so few votes ?

There … I’ve voted for it!

I do wonder whether anyone pays attention to these though.

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You only get about 5 votes on here globally, so it’s more a priority thing I guess.