I am struggling to understand what on earth is going on with Steinberg?
Are we to be OK in ditching, in some cases, hugely expensive plugins!!!??!!
The announcement doesn’t elaborate at all on many issues and one cannot even reply…
is this for future upgrades? 12 and onward??
If so, a lot of people will stop upgrading.
People are to lose a lot of money because of this move. Perhaps it’s time for Steinberg to set up a refunding scheme for people who will be losing all their hard earned cash due to what seem to be hard-nosed upgrades…
A lot of industry/manufacturers offer vst3 plugin alternatives don’t they?, But I suspect this could be used to force upgrade payments from us from those that don’t yet however if we want to continue to use them (cynical view I know)
Well, you can just stay put on your current system, or the last version before the VST2 disaster. It’s not the end of the world. Your plug-ins will not stop functioning. It’s just that you won’t be able to use the Cubase Pro version of 2024 and later with your current plug-in collection. Cubase Pro of 2024 might also have a minimum requirement of an Ω-99,999 processor costing about 2,000 digitaurumia, so we wouldn’t upgrade anyway.
Not that it doesn’t suck to choose between perfectly fine plug-ins on the one hand and a modern updated DAW on the other, it surely does. I’m just saying.
Sure. I don’t quite understand why plug-ins are deemed fit for deprecation. They are musical tools. People are still asking about Embracer, the old vocoder, first gen Quadrafuzz. I don’t think those people are all skinflints that simply cannot afford new plug-ins, rather they appreciate some quality of the sound they can easily attain using said plug-ins.
The non-solution is to keep a zoo of old systems around, hope they keep working, perform sanctification rituals and bless the motherboard and the DDR2 DIMMs each dawn.
Of course, it’s a matter of choice. People who rely too much on vst2.4 plug-ins will not move to DAWs that do not support vst2.4. It’s as simple as that. People that don’t rely that much on them will upgrade to the new version, and plug the .6 holes (2.4->3) with money so that they can preserve the status quo.
Absolutely ridiculous! I am concerned about some plugs I use also but to suggest they reimburse a user for plugs that won’t work with a future product that you haven’t even bought yet is nonsense. Just don’t buy the new version if I doesn’t do what you need it to do.
I saw the coming death of VST2 a couple of years ago and began transitioning to VST3 then, so I’m not traumatized by Steinberg’s move. Spectralayers, which I use, is already VST2-incompatible.
Nobody is forcing you to upgrade to the new versions of Cubase. You can still use your VST2 in your current version as per the agreement you made when you bought it. Companies do need to go forward and at some point they would have ditch old tech. It seems to be a 2 year process to allow software developers to catch up. I’m sure there will be some VST2-VST3 wrapper that you can use if your really need to.
Not Possible, and honestly not fair. The only constant is change. Like I said, a lot of wrappers if needed. Sure you will find something that will work.
I wonder what people thought was going to happen when Steinberg announced it had quit offering VST2 dev kits a few years ago. Even I caught the meaning in that, and I don’t consider myself particularly tech-savvy.
The problem here is quite deep, and it extents to a bizarre culture of being OK to upgrade and being ‘in’ with the latest thing, even if this means that one is potentially in danger of losing a ton of hard earned cash, because a corporation decided that they just don’t want to continue supporting VST2s or whatever software or hardware becomes obsolete, and let’s just be honest, for no other reason other than to keep the industry going…
If the perfect program and computer was available, nobody would bother buying anything ever again…
This blind support for the latest thing, no matter what cost involved is really going over my head.
I personally find the whole thing borderline immoral, we are talking about people’s money here, potentially thrown in the bin.
Money, Time, Resources - Moving Forward. Paying people to support old technology. You phone customer support for something not working in VST2, and they have to spend time and resources answering your questions for stuff they “dont support”
Great, so Cubase will be - apart from Logic and Protools - the only DAW that doesn’t support VST2 any more.
Most of my plugins are already VST3, but there are still several that are not - notably lots of Native Instruments, and Soundtoys.
Guess I won’t be upgrading Cubase from now on then. Or be looking at S1 again…
The shortcomings of VST2 are obvious, but VST3 was obviously not the solution, as can be seen by the fact that over fifteen years there is still a lot of VST2 around and migration to VST3 isn’t remotely finished, even after drastic measures from SB like removing VST2 SDK and stop licensing it.
It seems to me that instead of working together with the plugin developers and addressing the shortcomings of VST3 that hindered the acceptance (only C+±bindings, a big, overcomplicated framework instead of an API, lack of proper MIDI support), they took a “my way or the highway” stance and ignored/rejected any criticism.
SB had the chance to create a universal, platform agnostic, open source plugin standard… but you need good communication to achieve that goal, not brute force.