How to use VST3s in SAW Studio

[Dave Labrecque]

Sorry I just had to chime in and say my DX plugins on my Retro Build still run as great as they did when they were new

I wish I had the money back on the amount of plugins and upgrading I have done over 20 years and here I am running all my old stuff and loving it.

Wow. What would be some DX stuff that you still value? All mine are pretty much Sound Forge and/or Vegas hold-overs. I almost never use them; they just seem to 20th-Century. I probably value the look of the interface more than the sound of the plugin.

[MMP]

So I gave this a shot using the 64bit version of SawStudio. The VST3 plugins all got wrapped OK. But, in using them in Saw, things were not ready for prime time on my machine. Each wrapped VST took about 30 seconds to instantiate. And, if I cleared a wrapped plugin from the FX window, SAW crashed.

Back to Metaplugin, for the time being.

You will need two (free) pieces of software:

vst3shell - https://www.xlutop.com/buzz/zip/vst3shell_v1.3.1.zip
shell2vst - http://www.xlutop.com/buzz/zip/shell2vst.zip

That's sufficient to create 64-bit VST2 plug-ins from 64-bit VST3 plug-ins. To transform these into 32-bit you will also need something like J-Bridge.

Create a folder to be the home for your new VST2 plug-ins - it doesn't seem to matter much where you put it, but it seems best not to use an existing VST plug-ins folder.

Extract the contents of vst3shell to this directory, followed by the contents of shell2vst (which has 64-bit and 32-bit versions).

Drag vst3shell.x64.dll and vsti3shell.x64.dll (for any VSTi's) onto shell2vst64.exe. All being well, that should create a subdirectory called (slightly confusingly) "VST3", containing 64-bit VST2 dlls for all of your 64-bit VST3 plug-ins (all of them ~5kb).

If you have 32-bit VST3 plug-ins, then dragging vst3shell.dll onto shell2vst.exe should do something similar, though I've not tried it.

You might be able to move the new plug-ins into SAW's VST folder, but I felt it safer to use "ini" files to point to them where they were created.

I've used this to get IzoTope Ozone 11 (64-bit, VST3 only) working in 32-bit SAW (with additional help from J-Bridge).

[Microstudio]

Wow. What would be some DX stuff that you still value? All mine are pretty much Sound Forge and/or Vegas hold-overs. I almost never use them; they just seem to 20th-Century. I probably value the look of the interface more than the sound of the plugin.

I bought Wave Platnuim 4.0 and installed them all in DX format for SawSrudio worked great back then and even now.

[Dave Labrecque]

So I gave this a shot using the 64bit version of SawStudio. The VST3 plugins all got wrapped OK. But, in using them in Saw, things were not ready for prime time on my machine. Each wrapped VST took about 30 seconds to instantiate. And, if I cleared a wrapped plugin from the FX window, SAW crashed.

Back to Metaplugin, for the time being.

Yikes. Thanks for the report, Michael.

[Dave Labrecque]

I bought Wave Platnuim 4.0 and installed them all in DX format for SawSrudio worked great back then and even now.

Nice. What year are we talking?

[andy cross]

So I gave this a shot using the 64bit version of SawStudio. The VST3 plugins all got wrapped OK. But, in using them in Saw, things were not ready for prime time on my machine. Each wrapped VST took about 30 seconds to instantiate. And, if I cleared a wrapped plugin from the FX window, SAW crashed.

Back to Metaplugin, for the time being.

That's curious - not sure what might be happening there. I've had no problems with any VST3s in SawStudio 32-bit, including being able to run the very CPU-intensive (and VST3-only) IzoTope Ozone 11.

[MMP]

I was really hoping this would work well. I might try it again and see if I get different results.

[Dave Labrecque]

FYI, while setting up my new NAS today, after starting a backup operation (PC to NAS), Windows threw this up on the screen:



Thoughts?

[UpTilDawn]

I'm certainly no expert on this, but if you click on Learn More, are you given the option to have it not quarantined and/or add it to an exceptions list?

[John Ludlow]

Well I'll bet that'll wake you up! I don't know anything about it in particular, but I found this, which may be helpful:

https://windowsbulletin.com/files/ex.../shell2vst-exe

There are times when an antivirus/antimalware program triggers on something that isn't really a problem. But how do you know which it is? That page has some ideas about how to figure it out. They say that only 5% of users ultimately delete the file - which is promising. And I like their idea of comparing the size to what the size of the real file should be because it's easy. But comparing the MD5 hash of it to the known correct one would be even better. Here's a file MD5 hash generator that I just found that might be handy:

https://www.winmd5.com/

My other idea is to contact the software manufacturer with the name of your antivirus/antimalware program and see if they've seen this problem before.