I may lose the use of a few beloved plugins, but I’m seeing it as an inherent part of the Faustian bargain of using computers.
And I’ve tried to keep that in mind for every purchase I make. Software and computer hardware is often a more fleeting acquisition than much beloved music hardware. – But the cost differential is amazing. And the savings in rent on a huge studio space, because how many people could realistically house the hardware equivalent of the instruments and fx they routinely use in software? Not to mention maintaining tape decks, swapping tubes and fixing cables and so much more.
Also: If Steinberg would make me king for a day and ask, "Hey Nico, it’s your decision: We can give you 5 years longer VST 2 support or we can make midi remote control and midi comping better 2 years faster. Choose one. " – I would give up those VST 2 plugins in a heartbeat.
But I also appreciate, those are my subjective priorities based on my current use case and emotional attachments and others would chose differently.
If I ran a professional studio with a significant back-catalog of projects potentially needing to be restored, I’d not only print everything to audio, but also keep older computers, DAWs and plugins vaulted away somewhere just like they used to do with tapes. – And if there wasn’t enough future money to be made by doing that, I’d make lower cost compromises.
And that’s the key: Life generally demands imperfect compromises. Unfortunately that’s not painless, and the pain will be experienced differently by different individuals and companies.
Thank you so much, unfortunately, nothing will bring back the thousands of pounds I have lost, I also appreciate other user’s sentiments, i.e. we all need to move on, but this is an excuse of being a victim of corporations.
When all things become obsolete is down to costs, then greed is involved, in particular when things become impossible to work on any more, forcing people to spend ridiculous amounts of money over and over again,
Sorry if this finds people disagreeable, it’s my opinion,
You have yet to show, rather than merely assert, that the motivation for dropping VST2 support is financial. Indeed, Steinberg is very poorly placed to make money out of dropping VST2 support, as it does not charge licence fees for the VST3 SDK and its own plug-ins have been VST3 compatible for so long that few if anyone will need a paid update. I believe Steinberg’s reasons for wanting to discontinue VST2 support are primarily technical - it will be easier to evolve the audio engine if VST2 support can be dropped.
I do accept that obsolescence is frustrating and expensive to deal with. Even so, I struggle to understand why you are repeatedly asserting that you have lost thousands of pounds through Steinberg’s decision to drop VST2 support. The money you spent on software licences and equipment is a sunk cost - you cannot recover that money (other than by resale, likely for a small fraction of what you paid).
There are two main ways to handle software obsolescence.
Option 1 is to stop updating if you have everything you foresee yourself needing for work and personal projects. This might be attractive if you are currently running on modern hardware. Eventually, hardware obsolescence will force you into software updates unless you can run your old software on new hardware using virtualisation. Once you reach the point of needing to update, you will probably have a lot of software to update or replace.
Option 2 is to deal with obsolescence on a rolling basis, keeping all your software up to date. This means that you should always be in a position to replace hardware without significant additional software costs on top.
You can blend these approaches, going mostly for a “stop updating” approach whilst updating software in isolation when the new features justify the upgrade and it does not cause an unacceptable consequential need for updates.
There are cases of financially driven obsolescence. Perhaps the most (in)famous was Adobe discontinuing perpetual licences of their products and forcing everyone onto Creative Cloud if they wanted updates. I was a Creative Suite user who updated every time a new version was launched. I bought Creative Suite 6 Master Collection - then Adobe went subscription only, meaning I was left at a dead end. My response was to stick with what I had for as long as I could. CS6 was written for Windows 7 and I skipped Windows 8 and 8.1 entirely. Eventually, obsolescence caught up with me - I moved to Windows 10 and my new laptop had a HiDPI screen, then I changed my camera to one that wasn’t supported in CS6. By this stage, I had to accept that I had had the value from my CS6 licence and subscribe to Creative Cloud as no competitor product made sense to me. In effect, I wrote down the cost of the CS6 licence over the approximately five year period that I was neither paying for perpetual licence version updates nor a subscription.
Just a point. Nobody is losing the use of their VST2 plugins. You will only, sometime in the future, not be able to use VST2 in a version of Cubase yet to be determined. You can still use previous versions of Cubase to the ANTI VST2 version and happily play with your VST2 if you so desire.
The only thing you will need to decide is whether you want to have the new toys in newer versions of Cubase or whether you want to stick with VST2. If your workflow is working fine as it is then you don’t need an upgrade for all the new bells and whistles. VST2 and no money lost. Everybody’s happy.
That would be true if other DAW’s were dropping VST2, but they’re so far not. The third choice is to use something that you CAN update, use newer toys, and still use VST2 plugins.
Let’s ditch this conversation about old VST2 and support and focus on a new development of VST3.
Like any technology, things move forward and we just have to adapt to it.
Just digest and accept it. I just can’t be bothered reading all this no sense about a past tech.
If you didn’t make your money worth while using VST2 plugins then is because you still a newbie and became lazy with 20+ years old VST2 plugins.
Dongle-free Cubase 12 with VST3 only. Period ®️
I wonder how many here are using Cubase with 64 bit fp processing and have a lot of VST 2 plugins in use in the mix, or just used the option in the vst manager to check how many plugins you have that support that.
90% of my projects has a Battery instance haha. Perhaps I should’ve been using groove agent all this time.
When I think of all the people who have Komplete Kontrol wrapper saved in their projects too, which is VST2.4 - What happens when that updates to VST3 and VST2 version can no longer run? Are those projects going to open, or will the VST3 version have a different ID?
This could cause mass carnage for people running Komplete controllers, just one example. As not only does the wrapper have to load, but the contained plugins and settings as originally set in the VST2 version need to be recalled and aligned to any automation saved in the DAW. Even if you only used KK for preset browsing, those projects are now anchored with VST2.4 wrappers, hosting bizarrely VST3 plugins in some instances
Not to mention the intricate MIDI routing that can exist with that or a Maschine instance (Also VST2 btw). This is a workflow that’s going to be destroyed.
KK and Maschine are both plugins which transport MIDI data, and something the VST3 standard fails to support as well as VST2. So it’s not just a simple case of people dragging their feet, there’s technical issues at play here also.
As App developer I understand how brave is Steinberg
If you love them Software and DAW, you should show your support and let them drop outdated VST2 dev. kit
Do you still use Windows Phone or Android 4.1?
Steinberg does big things, you will see how good new features for Nuendo and Cubase will work with up-to-date VST3
Yes, VST2 is an old standard but is a standard that works very well and more importantly is ( like it or not ) intertwined with the system/users in many ways.
This is like releasing a photo app with no JPEG format support.
No, very bad example with Jpeg. And they give alternative VST3
Do you still use iOS 9.0 or Android 5.0? No, but did you see how many times they added new features? Well, you can’t imagine how many times Google & Apple updated API for developers and App’s devs were angry about it.
This is not Steinberg problem. If you want the best software let them drop outdated stuff to be more stable, can you imagine using new and fresh Dolby Atmos with outdated VST2?
C++ ain’t easy, you can’t use frameworks, this is how DAW works.
Better drop outdated VST2 and get new features instead of seeing threads complaining about crashes with some old plugins! This is 2022
I’m not sure what kind of app developer you are but I assume it’s not a VST plugin developer.
The world of pro-audio and phone apps isn’t the same. We expect lots of backwards compatibility - MIDI 1.0 would be a good example. …that old protocol…it’s 40 years old…we don’t need that.
In this instance Steinberg are REMOVING functionality - it may not matter to you and that’s fine but it does matter to some, myself included.
Is it Steinberg’s problem ? well that depends on how you see it. They certainly they are making it the customers problem IMO. It’s their call, they can do whatever they like. Personally I think it’s bad decision.
