Time for VST2 to get its pipe and slippers?

Towards the end of last year I made the decision to completely drop VST2 support from Bom Shanka Machines plugins, something that was a little unpopular with a small number of our customers. More on that later, but the point of this blog post is to go into the rationale behind that decision.

illegalMachine was the first plugin to drop VST2 support way back in April of 2024, and it was mostly because supporting CLAP was incompatible with continued VST2 support. This didn't really seem to register as a problem for anyone. Perhaps most illegalMachine users have already given up on VST2 when there are better plugin standard versions available, or perhaps there just aren't that many illegalMachine users! Whichever it was, this was my first data point that VST2 support probably isn't so important to our customers.

Supporting an out-dated and legacy format like VST2 is quite a burden for a small company such as Bom Shanka Machines. The amount of faffing around trying to accommodate code to maintain compatibility was too great. The amount of extra testing required whenever updating or making new plugins was onerous, and the extra support that I need to provide for a dwindling number of users was just not sustainable.

Since VST2 has now been entirely sunsetted by Steinberg, with no development of the standard happening for 13 years, no new vendors being legally allowed to start producing plugins or hosts using it since October of 2018, and now even Cubase 15 on Intel Macs comes with VST2 support disabled by default, and has been completely missing for Apple Silicon machines since 2024, it's finally time for VST2 to go gently into the good night and have a well earned and dignified retirement.

So to cut a long and boring story short, this is why in November I went about removing VST2 support from all of the plugins. However, as an experiment this past weekend on how well an LLM could perform with a boring and time consuming task, I went about restoring VST2 for one final build! It did a pretty admirable job, allowing me to complete with fairly minimal effort in a single weekend something that would have taken at least a week of my time otherwise, and it made only a single mistake (something I don't think I would have managed for a task of such repetitive drudgery). Customers can find the final builds available in the user area of the site. Unfortunately for some, they will no longer be supported or updated though, for the reasons outlined above!