End User and developer here. Steinberg is EXTREMELY short sighted to remove midi CC from VST3. There are many uses for these other midi besides the limited cases that have been outlined here. They are useful messages for various reasons, such as articulation management in numerous DAW’s and instruments and many other reasons. It is fine and good that CC’s are mapped directly to parameters for those cases where people are using sliders to control parameters. that is the simple obvious case, but this message, as well as PC, PitchBend and Aftertouch are used for all kinds of purposes to trigger things to happen in both plugins and external devices. It should very well be possible to allow these other kinds of midi events to appear in the midi buffer of the plugin callback. That fact that Steinberg has removed it is absurd.
I am trying to develop a midi plugin with VST3 and its causing so many headaches because of this.
Also, the sequential ordering of midi events has been, for decades, serialized, so that a sender could send a series of midi events in a certain order and be sure the consumer at the other end would receive those events in the same order. Even with the parameter hacks that people are using to get around VST3’s severe deficiency in this regard…that hack loses that ordering of events that have the same timestamp. For example of the event list has a sequence of cc-note-cc-note-cc-note, all on the same timestamp…what will show up inside VST3 plugin will not have this ordering still intact because the CC’s will have been abstracted out of that serial stream into parameters…and that inherent serialized ordering is lost!! Many people have been working with midi for decades and relying on that.
With articulation management in numerous hosts, including Cubase, it can be beneficial to have a VST plugin to assist in ways that ExpressionMaps fall short, for example. But here again is a situation where VST3 cannot handle it because CC’s are stripped out of the stream…and even if we hack them back in, the original order is lost. VST3 has cut off many creative uses for midi messages from even being possible. This is particularly problematic for articulation management.