AU or VST?

[dewdman42]

We're wildly speculating now I guess as to why, but I doubt the blame is on MOTU. More likely the plugins themselves have issues in the way they are programming the VST or AU api to interface with the host. Could there be a trend where plugin developers are somehow more careful about their VST's then their AU's? Perhaps. There are more hosts supporting VST then AU, by a long shot. Perhaps the VST api itself is just less complex then the AU api. Again I'm just speculating. Also, the AU leaves room for apple to do hidden things under the covers, we don't know what actually happens when a plugin calls an Apple AU function, which is part of coreaudio. For all we know Apple is doing some crazy under the covers caching this and that or the other thing.... again...just speculating.

I very much doubt that MOTU is doing anything sloppy related to handling their side of the AU plugin handling, not any more sloppy then VST's. But...you never know.... Bottom line, if this is in fact a trend, that some plugins are statistically more often having problems with their AU version then their VST version...then it is what it is.....

[MIDI Life Crisis]

We're wildly speculating now...

I beg to differ. I see it as we're crazily conjecturing and goofily guessing.

[bayswater]

We're wildly speculating now...

I beg to differ. I see it as we're crazily conjecturing and goofily guessing.

That's what we're good at. You should do what you're good at.

[James Steele]

Well as far as AUs being more prone to crashing, I can't say I've observed that. I really don't have enough experience. Oddly, Final Cut Pro X seems WAY more sensitive to problem AUs than DP. DP loads all of mine fine... but FCPX has a hard time with one or more of them. It's not an uncommon problem in the FCPX world to have to try and track down bad AUs, which can cause very bizarre behavior in FCPX but be just fine in DP.

[bayswater]

Oddly, Final Cut Pro X seems WAY more sensitive to problem AUs than DP.

I find the same thing with Logic. In addition, the AU validation run in Logic rarely passes all the AUs. Sometimes, you can just mark those that fail and rerun the validation and most of those that fail will pass. In my case, for example Nomad and Korg will fail the first run and pass the second. Makes no sense.

[Michael Canavan]

I would say from what I've learned from developers is that AU is at times a VST wrapped in AU GUI code. VSTs have been in the past more prone to GUI problems since VST GUI code isn't as strictly tied to Apple and OSX resources as AU is.
That said AU's can have problems because the developers went with a wrapper, (Fxpansion offer this service to developers), and then an issue becomes a game of who's at fault. Plus VSTs in general are more stable now than ever.

All that said, Yosemite offers some AU improvements, mostly on the developers side, so AU plug ins should become more stable because of that.

Personally I use mostly AU's but not for any MIDI capable VST plug in. AU spec supposedly allows for the transmission of MIDI between AU plug ins, but no developer has implemented it yet. Probably because Logic is crappy at that. Hopefully that's something that changes with the new improvements in AU in Yosemite.