jamcat wrote: ↑Mon Mar 18, 2024 11:15 pm With the rumoured cancellation of all legacy VST2 developer licenses from this point on, choosing a DAW has gotten a little easier.
DAWs with poorly implemented VST3 hosting should be avoided. That appears to include:
Ableton Live, Bitwig.
DAWs with solid VST3 implementation should be sought. That includes (but is not limited to):
Studio One, Cubase.
DAWs that don’t support VST3, but host other widely supported formats (AU, AAX), so are unaffected:
Logic, Pro Tools, LUNA
Maybe users of other DAWs not mentioned could chime in with their experiences with VST3 plugins in their respective DAWs.
Let's correct this shall we?
Live, AU is fine on Mac. VST3 seems to be slightly more stable on Windows than Mac. So Live is at most slightly affected.
Bitwig has plugin sandboxing, it hardly matters if a plugin is stable or not, you can still use it in the composition process, and since it has CLAP support you could do worse than it's built in instruments and U-He in a live situation. At least on Mac here, I don't really have any problems with 95% of VST3s so it might be a Windows thing.
Reaper, DP, and the various Other DAWs that host both AU and VST are not really that affected and in Reapers case you can turn on sandboxing for some dodgy VST3.
I would say probably Live and DP on Windows are the most affected by errant VST3's from reports in the field. In the case of Live the Suite is insane, if I was a Live Windows user I would be likely to mostly stick to M4L and the Suite instruments if some VST3 was being a trash heap. In sumary, there's nearly no reason at all to base your DAW choice on whether or not VST3 support is good or bad, most DAWs are offering solutions, and I will bet that solution is going to grow with CLAP.