Im trying to understand this more completely, so please bear with me–
it seems that VST3 will be the format used in Dorico with a few VST2 allowed or “white listed”. I was under the impression in my travels that VST2 was used almost by all, and Im embarrassed to admit I didn’t eevn know VST3 was around!
And the workaround for this is to use the added expense of VE Pro to use the VST2 we already have, until and if they’re upgraded by their manufacturer to VST3.
Is this correct?
Also do ‘expression maps’=sound sets as I know them from Sib? And since these sound sets cant be used with Dorico, we’ll have to create our own expression maps for each device we have to use our existing plugins?
Thanks–sorry if this has already been covered. And Im looking very much forward to Dorico’s release!
VST3 has been around for a few years now. Cubase currently loads VST2 plugins but VST2 is no longer officially supported. It’s a totally different architecture that was introduced to fix some longstanding problems with VST2: Our Technologies | Steinberg
Expression Maps have some overlap with Sibelius sound sets, in that they will contain the key and controller switch information, but they will be structured quite differently (and hopefully in a simpler way than the SoundID stuff).
Is there some reason that Steinberg decided not to include patch change in the VST3 spec? It’s still widely used, notably by Kontakt. I would guess that’s a strong reason why NI haven’t embraced VST3.
AFAIK Program Changes (which I think is what you are referring to) was replaced by Program Lists in VST3. Native Instruments could have updated to VST3 any time they liked. They have just chosen not to do so, which is a shame, because there also other goodies, such as Note Expression, to be had with VST3.
The VST2 and 3 specs provide different forms of being able to query a list of the available patches provided by the plugin, but what they don’t do is allow you to query which patch is loaded into each channel, or load specific sounds into each channel. This is what you need in order to be able to do the automatic loading of sounds. The patches loaded into Kontakt aren’t accessible via the VST interface.
To add to Paul’s replies, you won’t necessarily need to invest in something like Vienna Ensemble Pro to use your VST 2.x plug-ins in Dorico. You’ll be able to manually add plug-ins to the whitelist by editing it in e.g. a text editor, but obviously you’ll be somewhat on your own with regard to any issues that might arise from using those plug-ins in Dorico.
As a general rule, if a plug-in works in Cubase, we would expect it to work in Dorico, too, but from what I understand from my colleagues in Hamburg, badly-behaved VST 2.x plug-ins are one of – if not the – leading causes of crashes in Cubase, so we are trying to protect Dorico users from these kinds of instabilities, and, yes, encourage plug-in developers to adopt the superior VST 3 technology.
There must be more to this than anyone’s saying. No one’s really adopted VST3. Not NI, not EW, not UVI. Even VSL has only done it for VE and not their VI player…
Part of the reason is that VST3 is a very different architecture, and it separates out the audio logic from the UI logic, which is good practice. Many plugins are written in a more ‘monolithic’ way where these bits of logic are intertwined. I think Pro Tools’ AAX format is similar in this regard, and most ofthe main developers have now migrated to it. I think the reason why some vendors haven’t moved to VST3 is that VST2 still works (for now), but Pro Tools turned off RTAS support which forced them to move to AAX.
However, another than the sample player, all VSL plugs are VST3, and most other plugin developers are using VST3, so it seems to be something about the sample players that is causing the hold up.
I did have a chat to the guys at VSL about this a while back, and they said that they could do it, but didn’t really see any advantage. I explained about Note Expression, which would be very useful in the case of polyphonic instruments, and whilst they agreed that it could be useful, they still didn’t seem keen.
“BTW…does anybody know if Dorico will be able to support NotePerformer? (High hopes…maybe?)”
I have a feeling this has been raised before and the answer was that no, Dorico won’t work with NotePeformer in its first release, but the door is open for that to be revised if Wallander is up for it.
EastWest may or may not be working on a VST 3-compatible version of their Play plug-in, but we anticipate that Play will be among those VST 2.x plug-ins that we have on our whitelist, so you should be able to use EWQLSO with Dorico.
