A sort of follow-up question, if you don’t mind:
Is there any license-approved way to create a host that can load VST2 plugins? I’ve been evaluating adding VST support to an in-development piece of software, and the whole reason to do so is to gain access to the wealth of existing plugins. Being unable to get VST2 support would be a big impediment to that - given that, of all the plugins I have on my machine (about 80) only 5 of them are available as VST3s, it would be really nice if there were a way to support loading the ones that aren’t, still.
So, I guess, here are my questions:
- Is it still possible to license the VST2 SDK for host applications only (i.e. a license that does not allow plugin development but still allows host development)?
- If not, would it be possible/acceptable to the license to write a host-side VST2 wrapper (similar to the plugin-side VST2 wrapper) that wraps a loaded VST2 plugin and exposes it as if it were a VST3 one?
I understand why the restriction for creating plugins (because the VST3 interface is clearly better and you want to move people to it), but it would be nice if it were still possible to support VST2s in new hosts - otherwise it’s basically saying that we can never support the breadth of plugins that existing hosts already support, simply because we started later, and that’s really unfortunate, and it ultimately would make our product a harder sell to customers if we only support a fraction of the plugins they’re used to dealing with.
Thanks!