VST3 audio plugin format is now MIT
57 comments
·October 23, 2025mastazi
bayindirh
Yamaha is an old company found on very different ethos compared to others. Their history is interesting, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6t5F3cb810
It's worth a watch.
On another note, it's very telling that companies that protect their "hey! we do this interesting thing, gonna buy?" character survives for much longer compared to companies which say "we can earn a ton of money if we do this".
The companies in the second lot does a lot of harm to their ecosystems to be able to continue existing.
TazeTSchnitzel
Yamaha still document their products properly and provide very long driver support. I currently have a Yamaha product with USB from 1999 and there is still a maintained driver for it 26 years later, for Windows 11 and modern macOS versions.
sim7c00
interesting stuff. I love Yamaha for audio stuff for sure, didn't know they owned Steinberg though.
Their speakers i think are lovely examples of their engineering quality. Great and honest sound, some of the best out there, and they are not super over-priced. Also ,they are super repairable. Had some really bad experiences with other brands which were, more expensive for a more biassed sound, had 'black gunk' over the PCBs as some kind of anti-repair mechanism. (overheats the boards too! ew!) and other crappy issues.
Cool to hear there's such a story behind the quality. Makes sense!
coldtea
customer: hello, I want to buy a piano please
yamaha: sure, here you go
customer: great, thanks! lol, I also need a motorcycle. Do you know where I can buy a good one?
yamaha: you're not gonna believe this...
sparky_z
Completely separate companies, both called Yamaha. One was spun off from the other, but I don't think there was ever a time when the same company sold both. (Basically, the musical instrument company was redirected to making war materiel during WWII. After the war, they didn't want to just throw away all of their new industrial capacity so they spun off a company to make use of all their new equipment and expertise and then went back to making instruments.)
tessierashpool9
The OG Yamaha produced a motorcycle in 1954, the YA-1. That success then led to the spin off.
cisophrene
I don't think Yamaha Motor is producing any large trucks. They do a lot of things but mostly motorcycles, atv, boat engine, even car engines but not the whole car.
Also, you should note that Yamaha Corporation, the musical instrument maker and Yamaha Motor are now 2 distinct independent companies, even if were originally part of the same group.
coldtea
They are independent yes, but originally the motor company was an affiliate spin-off. They do have an agreement and share the same logo, and Yamaha Corporation has some shares in the Motor one tho.
pantulis
Great recap!
keyle
Congrats for making it but it feels like being pushed to do it since CLAP was brought forward quite successfully [1]
stuaxo
Very useful for all the existing plugins though, especially if any want to become open source.
dsp_person
how has CLAP adoption been? do the popular plugins out there generally provide a CLAP version nowadays?
bandrami
All the commercial ones I've bought in the past year or so do, and ever since I think JUCE 7 there have been good libraries for open source projects that want to add the format.
I think there's still a lot of bad feeling about the fact that there are many VST2 plugins that are open source but nonetheless illegal (or at least tortious) to build.
stuaxo
Hopefully this provides a path for those VST2 plugins.
rebolek
I see more and more brands not only adopting CLAP but also offering Linux versions of their plugins. The adoption is slow but that's expected with a relatively new format but it certainly grows.
itsgabriel
There is a list of software with support here https://clapdb.tech/
Polarity
clap is way better
codedokode
Clap doesn't allow describing plugin in a manifest (like VST3 and LV2 do). This allows to scan for plugins faster.
Also, CLAP uses 3 or 4 methods to represent MIDI data (MIDI1, MIDI1 + MPE, MIDI2, CLAP events). This requires to write several converters when implementing a host.
But, CLAP is much simpler and doesn't use COM-like system (VST3 resembles a Windows COM library with endless interfaces and GUIDs).
Also, VST3 interfaces in SDK are described as C++ classes with virtual functions (example: [1]), and I wonder how do they achieve portability, if the layout for such classes (vtables) is not standardized and may differ across compilers.
[1] https://github.com/steinbergmedia/vst3_pluginterfaces/blob/3...
Zoadian
they are com classes. the vtable layout for them is specified.
pjbk
You would have thought they learned from their mistakes implementing VST2, but they doubled down going even further basing VST3 on the Windows Component Object Model. I guess it was a decision to avoid reinventing the wheel, but you can quickly realize it is a very bad model for real time audio plugins and audio host support. The API just exploded in complexity, and testing was a nightmare. In contrast you can tell the U-He developers have all the experience from the trenches.
null
pmkary
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.
junon
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.
p4bl0
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
dtf
Funnily enough, that video talks about the pain of implementing a VST3 host at around the 25 minute mark. "If you're planning on doing it, set aside a lot of time."
Zoadian
i have my own vst3 host. it's not really that difficult. the real problem is that theres a lot of plugins that do some random thing that wont work becasue it's not standard.
sim7c00
try implementing the same without VST3 technology.
If you're planning to do that. Set aside a lot of time.....
junon
I just hope they don't try to sneak in Google Analytics again.
unwind
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.
swiftcoder
> 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
VST plugins almost all have a GUI, thus the VST SDK has to support an entire cross-platform UI framework... This threading functionality is mostly about shipping input events/rendering updates back and forth to the main (UI) thread
codedokode
There is no single UI framework in VST. The plugin API only has interfaces for creating/destroying/resizing a GUI window. You are not required to use VSTGUI.
junon
Correct, it just hands you native handles. What you do with them is up to you.
JUCE is a popular UI framework (at least it was 10 years ago). But I've seen people put electron apps somehow into a VST.
CapsAdmin
For context, the variation in UI between VSTs is pretty large and tend to be very creative, much like UI in games.
junon
Audio is often processed on a separate thread than the UI. If memory serves (been a while) there's the UI portion and the audio engine portion of most VSTs, which can be booted together or independently. So threading is very important.
unwind
Yeah, I realized that once I finished writing my comment, that it might be about communicating with the UI since UI toolkits are usually not thread-safe enough. Thanks.
sagacity
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.
coldtea
Like 1 in 200 plugins supports CLAP, where 100% support VST, so if they can do it more easily and with less licensing burden, and even have some community contribution, that would be big.
It will be a while, if ever, before most plugins get the CLAP (pun intended).
odiroot
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.
codedokode
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.
dramm
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.
WhereIsTheTruth
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?
matkv
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?
cdavid
You had to accept some license terms before you could download the VST SDK. When linux audio started to get "serious" 20 years ago, it was a commonly discussed pain point.
Concretely, it made distributing OSS VST plugins a pain. Especially for Linux which generally will want to build their packages.
TonyTrapp
Note that his was the VST2 era. VST3 was commercial license or GPL 3, which was an improvement, but only slightly, because it excluded open-source software released under the GPL 2, and also MIT/BSD/whatever-licensed software couldn't use it (without effectively turning the whole software into GPL-licensed software).
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