No, not linking to plugins (jesus, people, haven’t you all downloaded everything already? There not hard to find.)

What I’m saying, “Free plugins!” as in, “Free the Chicago Seven!” or “Free Tibet!” or “Free Keith Richards!” Isn’t it time we got beyond this whole VST/DX/RTAS/AU bullshit?

I won’t get into the whole “native” VST integration of Sonar, but with Sonar 6 now promising to do away with the adapter altogether, it’s a subject that got me thinking once more about this whole VST/AU quandry. I’m not a developer, so I am not qualified to speak on the matter, but for the best explaination of the situation you can turn to the man who sold Cakewalk their VST adapter (in its early incarnations) and I seems to have wrapped at least half the plugins in your folder, Angus at fxpansion. Here’s what he said in a fascinating thread on their company forum @ kvr. (I’m going to write him to see if I can quote him in full – it’s quite long – but I really want to get his okay before I do this.)

It is my humble opinion that what needs to happen is that independent developers & interested larger companies need to get together and agree upon an open-source cross-platform plugin standard. It doesn’t have to replace VST, AU or DXi but rather offer an alternative to them; one would hope, as it gains strength it could slowly overtake those standards. The plugins themselves can still be closed, with all the restrictions & dongles devs want to bog them down with, but the development kit would be open to a team of developers and public beta testers. I truly believe, if there was a viable alternative to VST et at we would see plugins filling that market.

It has just been pointed out to me that my buddies at Cakewalk and some like-minded folk were trying to float something like this a few years ago: GMPI. In fact, it was this announcement that really got me thinking about an alternative to VST; I wonder what happened with it?