Difference between VST/VST3 & Audio Units

General discussion about Gig Performer
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Why use VST3?

  1. Improved Performance and Lighter on the CPU
    The biggest advance with VST3 is that it only applies processing if there is an audio signal present. This reduces that weight on the computer’s CPU, allowing greatly increased performance.

Let’s say that you have an acoustic guitar that comes in 1 minute and 30 seconds into the song. You’ve applied an eq, a compressor, and some light reverb to that channel. With VST, your computer would process the channel throughout the entire song. With VST3, it would only process it while the instrument is playing.

  1. It also allows for 64-bit processing.

  2. Route Audio Through VST3 Instruments

With VST3, you can route actual audio through your instruments, not just midi signals. Given the range of possibilities with the human voice, this opens up limitless possibilities now that actual audio can be processed by virtual instruments.

  1. VST3 Plugins Are Surround-Capable

This is going to make life easier for sound engineers that often have to switch between 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround sound, i.e. people that work in movies and television.

  1. It Has Much Higher Capabilities for Event Handling

Steinberg explains:

“VST3 has a dedicated interface for event handling that carries a much wider range of functionality than standard MIDI events would be able to provide. This opens up a big range of opportunities for musical use cases with very high potential for innovative product design. For example with VST3 some controller events (for example, pitch) can be referred to a note event (using a note unique ID). This offers the possibility to e.g. modulate only a single note which itself is part of a chord.”

  1. VST3 Allows For Multiple Midi Inputs

This should really open up the floodgates when it comes to the sounds that you can get out of this new generation of plugins.

From personal experience using a number of VST3 plugins from certain developers, like WAVES as one example (many of their plugins are supplied with both VST and VST3 versions), I can see a huge difference in CPU loading which in turn allows for a significant increase in ability to use more CPU intensive plugins with VST3 than VST plugins making VST3 my primary choice if it’s available.

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