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I'm going to file this under "examples of Yamaha doing the right thing" (Steinberg is owned by Yamaha)

previous examples:

* Yamaha saved Korg by buying it when it was in financial trouble and giving it a cash injection, only to then sell it back to its previous owners once they had enough cash[1].

* Yamaha in the 80's had acquired Sequential (for those not familiar: Sequential Circuits is one of the most admired synthesizer makers). Many years later, Sequential's founder Dave Smith established a new company under a different name and in 2015 Yamaha decided to return the rights to use the Sequential brand to Smith, as a gesture of goodwill, on Sequential's 40th anniversary (this was also thanks to Roland's founder Ikutaro Kakehashi who convinced Yamaha that it would be the right thing to do) [1][2][3]

[1] https://www.soundonsound.com/music-business/history-korg-par...

[2] https://www.gearnews.com/american-giants-the-history-of-sequ...

[3] https://ra.co/news/42428

Congrats for making it but it feels like being pushed to do it since CLAP was brought forward quite successfully [1]

[1] https://u-he.com/community/clap/

dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45665752

This is technical people at their finest! There couldn't be any news more important than this—or more anticipated by the community. For so many years people wished for this, and they announce it this low-key in a forum! This is so awesome. Thanks to Steinberg & YAMAHA, I guess so much good is to come out of it.

The direct result of the newer, open CLAP format being objectively better in every way. Steinberg has gone to great lengths to force adoption of the trash that is VST3 and retain it's stranglehold on the audio world, including but not limited to, takedowns of distributors, takedowns of VST2.4 SDKs, constant threats of legal action against independent VST2.4 developers forcing them to remove purchases from customers, and funding particular plugin frameworks & daw developers to slow CLAP adoption.

The shift away from proprietary formats is long overdue.

As a composer and arranger working with different studios, I need multiple DAWs installed for compatibility. Every time I open my DAW or Gig Performer after a few days, it rescans all plugins. With around 800 installed, that happens across AU, VST, and VST3.

I hope Apple and Avid are holding meetings after this decision to help simplify the life of library/plugin makers. As an example AAX requires a complete mess to compile and test their plugins, and several AU plugins are just wrappers aroud VST that add another layer.

I really hope the next five years bring real standardization and smoother workflows.

As a complete audio outsider, my observations are:

1. Great news! VSTs seem to fill an important role in the audio-processing software world, and having them more open must be a good thing.

2. From the things they mention, the SDK seems way larger than I had imagined, but that is normal for (software) things, I guess. "This API also enables the scheduling of tasks on the main thread from any other thread." was not easy to unpack nor see the use of in what was (to me) an audio-generation-centered API.

3. The actual post seems to be somewhat mangled, I see both proper inline links and what looks like naked Markdown links, and also bolded words that also have double asterisks around them. Much confusing.

There is a lot of good news in open source audio these days. Also see this video presenting the work done and planned for the future version 4 of Audacity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38

Can anyone fluent with all this tell me whether that will make the usage of Arturia [zillion of] plugins trivial in Linux distros?

Wow, after all these years. This is a very Good Thing. You could get access to it before but you had to sign a very long agreement and it was always a PITA.

Steinberg is only going to benefit from this, I think.

This is fantastic.

Audio programming is still low level and difficult, but I'm looking forward towards vibe coding some experiments with this.

I like to work privately on my open source projects, and then push it to a public repo after deleting my git history ( for the public repo anyway).

Since I never agreed to the VST3 SDK terms, which required you to give up your license to VST2, does this mean I can finally make VST3 plugins without losing the ability to publish VST2?

I still get customers requesting that I distribute VST(2) builds. Some old DAWs and apps still can’t load VST3. Thus far it hasn’t been possible due to licensing restrictions with commercial plug-ins, imposed by Steinberg.

I wonder if that will change as well..

Having only used VSTs but never even looked into how they're actually built - what does this now mean in simple terms? Did you need a specific closed source framework to build them or something like that? What has changed now?

Wow!! What a huge and wonderful change. Hats off, Steinberg.

That's very interesting news. Definitely brought on by CLAP as others have mentioned, but it's interesting to see how this evolves. VST is a pretty complicated standard to support whereas CLAP is much simpler, although the former is much more widely used.

Why are we still centralizing open source on Microsoft's GitHub? Haven't we learned the risks of giving one corporation, especially one with a such a shady history, exclusive control over the world's open source activity?

Most probably a response to CLAP gaining popularity. But they buried a lede with Wayland support. This puts VST3 ahead of CLAP in that regard.

In principle this is a great thing -- but in reality this will only continue to exacerbate the monoculture of 1970s era musical metaphors in digital music production. The VST3 format is confined, much like MIDI 1.0, to provide extremely opinionated and limited instrument and sound processing designs. If AudioUnits were suddenly MIT licensed I would react very differently.

Before VST3 code was under GPL3 license and GPL2 software (like LMMS) couldn't use it.

Also the license change could be caused by competition from CLAP which is very openly licensed.

This simplifies a ton of things.

CLAP supports polyphonic modulation

I’d really like to see more plugins available in the LV2 format for my Ardour RT DAW. Also, a quick recommendation : LSP (Linux Studio Plugins) an excellent collection of several open source plugins supporting CLAP, AU, LV2, VST2, VST3, LADSPA, and a standalone Jack versions https://lsp-plug.in/

No more takedown notices for including legacy VST SDK in your github project? Wait, mine was 2.4, so I guess steinberg would still chase me down if I hadn't complied already.

If someone at Yamaha is reading this, could you please release a firmware update for the Yamaha Reface CP so that the toy piano setting plays the hidden grand piano sound instead?

To get the hidden piano sound:

1. Turn Reface CP off.

2. Turn piano sound knob so it rests in between any two settings.

3. Turn Reface CP on.

The Reface CP is one of my favorite small keys piano instruments, and I got one specifically for the hidden piano sound, but it’s annoying to have to go through the above steps and I’m not experienced enough to mod the circuitry.

This is great news!

At the same time it's too little too late. I still won't forget how they killed the VST2 SDK and came after people who hosted copies. This was terrible for people who tried to build existing open source VST2 plugins. It was even worse for people who wanted to write a VST2 host, but couldn't get a license anymore. This was at a time when VST3 support was far from universal and many plugins didn't ship VST3 versions. (Not to mention all the existing plugins that never will.)

I mean, these "SDKs" are just goddamn header files! *) They shouldn't have been proprietory in the first place. Now, if they also re-release the VST2 SDK under the MIT license and apologize for their crass behavior, then I will actually give them credit.

/rant off

*) Yes, the VST3 SDK is huge, but the only things you really need are the headers in https://github.com/steinbergmedia/vst3_pluginterfaces/tree/m.... The VST2 SDK only consistet of two header files (aeffect.h and aeffectx.h)

Well done Steinberg/Yamaha.

At the same time Steinberg also open sourced their ASIO audio hardware interface standard but under GPL3. GPL2 here would have made more sense to me to align with the Linux kernel GPL2 only licensing. So why GPL3? Other commenters here have mentioned OBS, and OBS is "GPLv2 or later" so sure that works for them. Not being GPL 2 and missing on the Linux kernel just surprises me.

I have been using the nice cwASIO (https://github.com/s13n/cwASIO) re-implementation of the ASIO SDK, it's MIT licensed. https://github.com/s13n/cwASIO. It's nice there just to see something more up to date than the ancient ASIO SDK documentation. I would love to see the Steinberg ASIO SDK updated and improved, if you are listening Steinberg folks: nobody cares about the history of ASIO on Macs or Silicon Graphics Workstations, just dive in and get deep into the weeds of ASIO on Windows, and include lots more sample code, especially covering the ASIO device enumeration mess on Windows.

Oh wow, finally! They should have done this 20 years ago but this is awesome news.