Steinberg has announced that it will no longer continue to develop and maintain the VST 2 software interface.
Steinberg’s host applications, such as Cubase, Nuendo and WaveLab, will continue to support VST 2, but the SDK for VST 2 will be made unavailable by the end of this year.
Steinberg is now focusing its efforts on the Software Development Kit, or SDK, development of VST 3. The VST 3 development kit not only generates VST 3 plug-ins, but also is capable of rendering to VST 2 and AU formats.
Well, now I can sleep at night.
To me, this is another example of the downside to software synthesis: a piece of music you create with a specific DAW on a specific OS may not be playable or editable on later versions of the same OS and DAW because the newer OS & DAW combination doesn’t support the VSTs and plugins that were used to create the piece.
I get what you’re saying. After my track is mixed-down and rendered, I don’t really care about the DAW project file though.
It’s not really any different to non-preset instruments though – you record the audio in, sometimes with MIDI if the synth supports it, and then once it’s down you have to rebuild the patch from scratch if you want to do anything else with it. At least most manufacturers support importing patches from older versions, like NI with FM8.