Writing a VST plugin Host program - a video tutorial

[Dewdman42]

I basically like what you are saying and it will be interesting to see what happens if any of this ever goes to court. For the most part I think Steinberg is attempting to use strong arm tactics...it would be difficult and expensive to fight them in court if it ever came down to it, but I tend to agree, reverse engineering an interface or using a reverse engineered header file to do so...i can hardly see how that violates anything unless you previously signed a contract with Steinberg. I don't know if you used their actual header you found on the internet somewhere to built a VST, they couldn't prove you used that, and if you didn't sign anything, I don't see how they have any leg to stand on. But still you are taking a chance without some actual legal exact precedent to happen, an actual lawsuit that steinberg either wins or loses...then the fight would be over for everyone else.

I never did sign anything with them and never will. It's just strange to me why Steinberg even goes down this road, why do they want to discourage people from developing plugins for their platform? It has not made any sense to me whatsoever. If I were going to make plugins now I would target CLAP and find a way to wrap them as VST or whatever..If they want to sue me they can sue me... As if I a was doing anything to hurt them as a company... The only reason they even went down this road was because they made VST3 too difficult, complicated and limited compared to VST2. Yea it offers new functionality that almost nobody uses now after more than a decade. It also diminished some midi features and they have flatly said, "Vst is an audio api, not midi". So they are trying to force everyone to use VST3 anyway. Why would they want to force everyone to use it anyway? So that they can improve their own DAW with VST3 based features and know there might be many 3rd party VST3 plugins making use of features that currently only Cubase (and possibly Studio One) provides in a host. But jeez steinberg give it up already...

[Dewdman42]

Really this whole situation though, is not steinberg's complete fault. Microsoft failed to deliver a satisfactory audio midi engine on par with Apple's. Steinberg stepped in and did it much better and hoardes of developers jumped on to the steinberg ship to use their proprietary API for creating both hosts and plugins. But they did not pay attention to the fact that steinberg had specific conditions and would someday come back to haunt everyone with it. steinberg had every right to do that, but anyway, the fault lies also on all the developers that had some blind faith that these kinds of shenanigans from Steinberg would never happen. After a few decades it just became an industry "standard", but still Steinberg holds the lock and key on how it can be used. That's why CLAP needs to become the way, support it. Eventually hosts will embrace it they will have to. Perhaps even Apple and steinberg will some day too, but I doubt it.