Signal Sidechains in VST3i: Not all hosts support it?

Developer VST 3 SDK
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It seems that not all plugin hosts allow VST3i to have an audio sidechain input.
Cubase, Bitwig, Ableton Live, Reaper, Ardour, PlogueBidule, even Logic (with the AU wrapper) do allow VST3 instruments to accept signal sidechains, but MagiX Samplitude and Presonus Studio One only show a sidechain input for audio effect VSTs.
Is there something on our side what we may have overlooked or can we assume that this is an issue with the aforementioned hosts?
Other vendors seem to have circumvented the issue by publishing their VST instruments as audio effects and then have to explain to their user the workaround to get MIDI to them, for example in Waves OVox Vododer.

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That’s correct, not all hosts support sidechain inputs of an instrument (even Cubase did implemented it only recently). The thing you can do is to ask the host developers to implement this feature. Or as you already wrote add “Fx” to your subcategory of your plug-in so that it can be used as a FX plug-in.

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Thanks @Arne_Scheffler. Just to clarify: A plug-in can either be an instrument or an Fx, or can it be both? What do you mean with subcategory? What’s the minimum version of Cubase which supports audio sidechains on instruments (would be useful to know for our system requirements list)?

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You can combine categories:

const CString kFxInstrument = “Fx|Instrument”; ///< Fx which could be loaded as Instrument too

For side-Chain support for instrument i do not remember when we add it in Cubase… maybe since Cubase 9 (~2017)
Since Cubase 11 we have multiple sidechain inputs support for Audio Fx and Instrument

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Actually we’ve had some problems with making a plugin both an instrument and an audio fx. On Steinberg hosts, it works just fine but other hosts (i think e.g. Ableton) seem to be not aware that this is possible and didn’t handle it correctly. Tell me if you can make it work whatsoever but that was our experience.

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Thanks for the heads-up. Testing all the possible hosts on 3 OSs can be a full day of work, but I guess we will give it a try. If in the end it comes down to the pick between a Live or a Studio One- incompatibility - I am pretty sure which DAW has the larger user group, even though we don’t do any telemetry.