VST3 only?

A few years ago I heard that Sibelius laid off most of their best programmers and Steinberg hired them.
I think this is the result. Dorico we’ll perhaps be better than Sibelius. I can’t wait! :smiley:
…but VST3 only? is that right?
And what about VST2 or AU?

We are using the Steinberg audio engine that is at the heart of both Cubase and Nuendo, and since neither of those applications support Audio Units on Mac, neither will Dorico. I hope this will not be a problem in practice as, to my knowledge, most virtual instruments are provided in both VST and AU formats.

As for VST 2 support, we may whitelist a few VST 2 instruments that we know are well-behaved, but my colleagues in Hamburg tell me that one of the leading causes of crashes and other problems in Cubase is due to VST 2 plug-ins. Across Steinberg we are really strongly trying to encourage adoption of VST 3 and so we want to set off on the right foot with Dorico.

That seems dangerous, as there are still a lot of instruments out there that support VST 2 only, all from major vendors.

Thanks for the explanation, Daniel!
VST3 is the future - I agree with this absolutely.
But…
I see a big problem with Native Instruments kontakt sampler and thirdparty sample libs, because these are in > VST 2.
As far as I could read, Native Instruments is NOT willing to port their plugins to VST3… (!)

I think Kontakt is the canonical example of a well-behaved VST 2 plug-in, so it would be on the short whitelist of VST 2 plug-ins that Dorico would load without complaint. This, at least, is certainly what I have discussed with my colleagues who are working on the audio engine for us.

Critical stuff would include things like Pianoteq and Hauptwerk.

@Daniel: Great ray of hope! But it would be nice if you could expand these “special” list. Thanks for your quick reply!

VST 3 is supposed to be the future, but the reality is: VST 2 is still widely in use, even for new products. And it is not likely that plugin developers will revisit their choice for a notation program. All DAWs still support VST 2 and probably will for the foreseeable future, and that is the focus for plugin developers.

Hosting VST2 plugins in Vienna Ensemble Pro would also be a solution for non-white listed VSTi

Should we really start out with workarounds? Not a good message to potential customers…

VE Pro has many things to offer, and is hardly a workaround

Ok, but should everyone needing VST 2 plugins have to buy VE Pro?

Certainly not. But I’m trying to think pragmatically and realistically here: out of the myriads of different VST2 instrument plugins, the one that probably will get most use of all in the context of very “classical looking” notation is Kontakt — which can host another plethora of “realistic” instrument sounds as sample instruments. I’m finding it hard to believe someone would definitely need to load, say, Sylenth1 in Dorico? Or am I totally mistaken here: which VST2 instruments would absolutely be needed, when the host is a notation software instead of a DAW (where all the production/mixing/etc. would still be easier and more flexible)?

If someone is using notation software as their main sequencer (I understand that as well) and they needed all their sounds to be available for any staves as they wanted, then I would recommend VEP to them in any case.

Spontaneously, I can think of

  • Pianoteq
  • Hauptwerk
  • ARIA
  • Synful

If at least the first two wouldn’t work, Dorico basically would be completely unusable for me, as they are essential for me.

I hope Im understanding all of this correctly…ie that AU is out for Macs, and VST will be VST 3 almost totally with a few VST 2 exceptions?

I have stopped using any DAW, and do all my work in a notation program, and depend on the best playback I can get there to compose–for example with Ivory II and XCE, and it has worked out really well for me. The added expense of something like VE Pro , or other programs starts adding up…

Also do soundsets figure into this at all?

Thanks for any and all help!

Furthermore, running a VST 2 in VE Pro just for the sake of being able to run it at all, most probably consumes considerably more CPU power. Yes, I know, one can run VE Pro on a different machine, and that is nice. But, it no longer would be nice if you would have to run it on a different machine because of the overhead

Actually, many Cubase users use VE Pro because it’s more CPU efficient than using the Plugs directly.

Interesting. How can this be technically?

For myself I think as long as Kontakt and the major EastWest libraries are covered I’ll be happy, I guess I’m lucky in a way that I don’t have mountains of disparate libraries/engines to work with though.

I’m not a computer expert in that sense, but I think it’s all about distributing the CPU load between multiple cores found in modern computers more efficiently. VEP is apparently optimized to be very lightweight program in itself, and even though many people use it on remote slave machine(s) via Ethernet connection, many also opt to run it on the same computer as their sequencer/DAW. Someone can probably explain that better.

The advantage is obvious: when working on multiple projects that all use the same palette of sounds (e.g. film music cues all written for the same orchestral lineup for recording session), the VEP needs to load all the sounds only once when instantiated. After that, the DAW/notation program can very quickly switch between projects when the massive amounts of plug-ins/samples don’t “live” in the DAW projects themselves, but instead they have only the VEP connection plug-ins that load fast and just access the VEP host running in the background.