Yeah mostly assumptions, there’s clearly many developers on here who have music as a hobby and have their input, but collectively it’s a perspective from end users formed from assumptions- If Steinberg are giving off these vibes, it very much matters from a userbase stance, does it not?
If they’re not filling in the gaps of knowledge by communicating to ourselves then it allows a pool of assumptions to fill that void.
Therefore my suggestion that a clearer plan presented to end users would’ve been a more ideal approach vs a user announcement which is more a blanket statement which also takes aim at third party developers.
However, I totally appreciate that it’s ultimately down to the third party vendors to make this roadmap clear or be open to discuss it.
If you’ve been heavy into VST discussions and not come across this, then I don’t know what to say really. Here’s one example of a discussions between SB and bluecataudio:-
Bare in mind that Cubase’s core MIDI INSERT system sits on MIDI CC as it’s foundation, yet developers are being told that musicians don’t understand MIDI, and it’s a “bad user experience” it’s really quite hypocritical (imo).
Regardless of all that talk though, the biggest concern for me, are the vast majority who don’t spend time reading/posting to places like this, who do own Komplete keyboards, who may have 5 years of projects with VST2 KK instances in their projects - may find themselves cut adrift when the time comes.
Dom Sigalas has a KK hooked up to Cubase, Junkie XL has a KK hooked up to Cubase, Guy Michelmore has one - They’re key supporters of the DAW and anyone following their lead will be feeling that buying one of the leading controllers on the market with Cubase is a ‘safe’ buy.
However, as it stands KK (As a plugin to support the key switching/light guides/preset browsing/VST controls/Scale modes/Arps) should be presumed dead in the future until we hear otherwise. That means current users should today be thinking about how they archive their projects and to be mindful of VST2 instances in their projects from this point on.
Even when/if KK went VST3, there’s no guarantee’s it will automatically load in place of the VST2 version for existing projects. Somewhere between NI & Steinberg this hopefully has been factored in, There’s no guarantees that SB will make this a requirement of VST3 licensing to support it’s end user experience either.
UAD users, I don’t know how that’s going to pan out as they have their own DAW to push, plus there’s CLAP hovering as an open source alternative that may just find itself right place, right time to make a dent. I really don’t know on that front though - unlikely you’d expect.
Me personally, I want VST3 to be ‘the’ standard, and I want the MIDI Inserts to be improved to support automation/parameter ID’s rather than internal MIDI CC mappings. Maybe I’m naïve in thinking these changes will allow for that, but we’ll see.