Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmicah | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if Bitwig would support existing plug-ins formats like AU.

Why would they want to support AU? The only reason to use AU is Logic. Everything else (Protools excepted) supports VST, and all the plugin devs release in VST and AU, so it would be a waste of time. Bitwig is putting their time into CLAP, and for good reason. It's cross-platform, much easier to develop against, and much more advanced that all the alternatives. Even Avid has shown interest in CLAP. So has Image Line. I expect Studio One to support it in v7.

For starters, AUs are "easier" to run under Roestta than VSTs since AUs run out-of-process by default. This means you can use a x86_64 AU without running the entire DAW under Rosetta on Apple Silicon.

It hadn’t occurred to me that AU run out of process, but this makes sense. Does this mean an AU crashing in theory won’t take down your DAW? (The same thing that Bitwig has it’s own isolation feature for)

I always default to AU just because I’m on a Mac and I arbitrarily decided to do so long ago. The Rosetta thing has been a nice bonus. Not sure what the other (dis)advantages are, these days I try to focus on using native Ableton and M4L stuff anyway!

> Does this mean an AU crashing in theory won’t take down your DAW?

Yes, this has been my experience with AUs in Logic Pro, at least. You simply get a message saying a plugin failed and that you can try reloading it if you'd like.

In other words, just like VSTs on Bitwig. Even if the entire audio engine crashes, you just restart it with a click.

bitwig already does this with vsts because plugins are sandboxed

Do you encounter many AU-only plugins? From what I can tell, the limitations of VST/AU/AAX are more pressing and Bitwig are working to address that with CLAP: https://u-he.com/community/clap.

Man i hope more people (plugin developers too) embrace CLAP or something open. I'm writing a Rust program and i really want to allow for Modart's Pianoteq plugin and VST just makes it feel so difficult.

There have always been plug-ins, especially by small developers on the Mac, which are AU only.

Apple Silicon macs can now run iOS / iPadOS AUs as well, so there are a ton of plugins from that world that are not available as VSTs.

Apple Logic can't load VSTs, so typically on the Mac it makes sense to just have AUs. Ableton Live on the Mac can load VSTs or AU, but there isn't really a reason to keep the VSTs around.

Or LADSPA/LV2 which is actually free.

Fewer hosts should use AU

Reply on news.ycombinator.com