"Due to technical reasons the following plug-ins and technologies have been removed from the product scope
VST instruments: Mystic, Prologue, Specter, LoopMash are no longer included in the factory content of Cubase."
I’ll miss Mystic, Prologue and Specter (LoopMash not so much) - is there anyway of getting this into Cubase 12?
I think i saw vst 2 plugins dont work in cubase 12 so they wont be the only plugins not working…im keeping cubase 11 as a backup i have a few songs which use mystic.
I have found a suggestion online that Mystic, Prologue and Specter were written by a third-party developer. Whether that is or is not correct, it may well be that the issue is that the code for these old (but clearly, to some, still valuable instruments) cannot readily be made Apple Silicon native. If so, I can understand why they were dropped rather than some factory content being Windows and OS X Intel only.
They are VST 3 in Cubase/Nuendo 11, so this is not because they are VST 2.
As I replied in another thread, if on Windows, you can copy the SynthEngine.vst3 from your Cubase 11 installation and insert it into the Steinberg/Cubase/VST3 folder. You will need the Cubase 11 licence probably, to be able to run them.
This technique does not work with Loopmash though.
If interested, the plugin TERA 2/3 by Virsyn includes the engines of Spector, Mystic and Prologue. That answers also the question of the 3rd party developer, I guess…
Thanks Roger! Worked a treat.
Hi Waxxy - VST2 is still working on Windows
yep i thought they were but on some forums people were saying they dont…your right though they dont show up in c12 ill have to do the work around mentioned above to get them working.
holy crap just checked my vst folders and mystic.prologue and spectre are no longer there !!!
were can i get these i really need them some old songs wont load without them.
According to the Virsyn web site, their TERA synth plugin is VST2 only for Windows 7/8(?!). TERA Am I looking at the wrong thing? I’d love to have a replacement of Spector/Prologue/Mystic that’s with the times.
You are looking at the right one :-).
Tera 3 is running in Windows 10. Bought it years ago, it´s 64 bit.
Thank you! Do you happen to know if it also runs on Windows 11? Does it allow the import of existing Prologue/Mystic/Spector patches? I’m looking for a solution to carry those synths forward, and if this is a supported product, and can replicate Prologue/Mystic/Spector at the patch level, then that would be great!
Hi there!
Let me do a check on a Windows 11 machine tomorrow or in the next few days. I expect the software to work, but I will let you know.
Unfortunately there is no way of importing presets of Prologue, Spector or Mystic directly. There are several reason for that…
Possibly there is a chance of reconstructing the presets somehow, but I never tried that (as I always used Tera 2 and Tera 3). Obviously that would be a considerable task…
To give you an idea of TERA 3… it has 7 engines:
anaTERA = like Prologue, but more advanced
specTERA = is the Spector engine on steroids
waveTERA = is the Mystic engine on steroids
fmTERA = 3 OSC FM engine
formanTERA = engine with bandpass/formant filters
microTERA = Waveshaping engine
profiTERA = modular environment with all engines available
other goodies:
Besides typical LP/HP/BP filters there is also a TERRAIN FILTER which creates vocals like A, E, I o and U. You can morph between them (very nice).
Every single engine can be converted to a profiTERA modular preset, so you can start on one engine, and continue with all.
Integrated simple arpeggiator per sound.
Plugin is 16x multitimbral. You can stack up to 16 sounds assigning them to the same MIDI channel, through a mixer with volume and panning options.
Super CPU friendly (due to age, see below, it runs on a Pentium III 
).
Weak points:
In the anaTERA you can - in theory - import samples as oscillators, but when I tried to use it, it crashed.
Multi-outputs are broken.
This plugin is over 15 years old:
As always in this cases, I recommend to download the DEMO and spend some time on it. The software is quite complex. Parameter names between the Steinberg synths and TERA 3 are identical.
See it as a blown up version of the Steinberg synths.
Hope this helps.
Roger
Oh wow, that is such an informative answer - thank you so much for taking the time to write it up! Unfortunately, my use case really is all about being able to continue to use Spector/Mystic/Prologue patches (I’ve used these synths pretty extensively in my projects), so I think I’ll just bite the bullet and render these synth tracks as audio and stop using these synths going forward. If I need something similar sounding, TERA seems like a great choice and I’ll indeed check out the demo then!
In case you have HALion 6, you could create sample banks from those plugins (internally via Cubase and Sidechaining) and save them as HALion patches. This way you can still (somehow) play them. Halion allows Velocity zones too.
well steinberg kept this really quiet … every one just seems to accept it lol
I have never complained about anything that STEINBERG has done.
Always a great experience,
but removing instruments just doesn’t seem right.
I paid for my CUBASE upgrade, but it feels like a downgrade when STEINBERG removed instruments.
Just to clarify,
I think CUBASE 12 is excellent.
Just didn’t like the removal of plugins.
agreed. If I knew this, I would have kept Cubase 11 installed. Now I wonder what else may be removed one day.
Little strange to remove these plug-ins without replacing them with something.