32bit AAX vs RTAS

[Carl Kolchak]

So, when PT11 drops, many of us will be taking advantage of the included PT10 license, for reasons of backwards compatibility.

My question to current PT10 users :

Is the 32bit AAX version of a given plugin any more efficient than the RTAS version?

Obviously PT11 is an entirely different ball game, but if we're going to have a dual installation of PT10 & PT11, it would handy to have as efficient and streamlined a system as possible.

If there's no difference in terms of efficiency, bloat, or stability, between the 32bit AAX & RTAS versions of a plugin, it may be simpler to just stick with the RTAS versions. But if there is a benefit to using 32bit AAX, where available, I may as well start downloading ,and installing those.

I appreciate any insight / experience anyone can offer.

[Drew Mazurek]

My experience is that there is NO difference between RTAS and AAX 32bit versions of the same plug.

[Mista Min]

I would love to know why Real Time Audio Suite is quoted as inferior or buggier than say VST 2.1 or 3.0 or AU or AAX.

I wish someone would explain the geek side of it all or give me a link that explains the differences between these standards.

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by Mista Min

I would love to know why Real Time Audio Suite is quoted as inferior or buggier than say VST 2.1 or 3.0 or AU or AAX.

I wish someone would explain the geek side of it all or give me a link that explains the differences between these standards.

No offense (honestly) Mr M but who cares - RTAS is the road block (real or imagined) to a Pro tools 64 bit - so kill it but bring me 64bit unlimited native power - what's not to like about that ?

[cjguitar]

I do find some differences between RTAS and their AAX equivalents. Some AAX perform significantly better (like EQ3 and Dynamics3, I see as much as 2x the instance counts with the AAX version). There are some that I've found to perform worse. You'd have to do some tests to find which plugins work better on your setup.

[CME]

Originally Posted by Mista Min

I would love to know why Real Time Audio Suite is quoted as inferior or buggier than say VST 2.1 or 3.0 or AU or AAX.

I wish someone would explain the geek side of it all or give me a link that explains the differences between these standards.

While I can't get geeky with the description. Some of the basics do make sense. Back when pro tools required DSP cards there were only two types of plug-ins used in pro tools. DSP and audio suite. DSP ran on the cards and audio-suite was as it is now. They processed the actually audio file in non-realtime. Worked fairly well.

Then digidesign came out with pro tools le for native systems. But it couldn't use DSP plug-ins obviously, but they needed some way of having native plug-ins. So they found a way to modify the audio-suite structure to become real-time audio suite. So even from the very beginning it was a bit of a hodge podge. They took a format initially intended to be non-realtime and shoehorned it into a real-time format.

I don't remember where, but I know I've read of some plug-in developer saying RTAS is the hardest of all native plug-ins to work with. Why exactly that is, I don't know. But I believe there to be some truth just based on how RTAS came to be.

[Mista Min]

Originally Posted by YYR123

No offense (honestly) Mr M but who cares - RTAS is the road block (real or imagined) to a Pro tools 64 bit - so kill it but bring me 64bit unlimited native power - what's not to like about that ?

It's not about liking something or not. It's about understanding more of how our tools are coded.

I could careless about which format is x, y, and z, but this is a question I've had since I started mixing. "What are the differences between plugin formats?"

[Carl Kolchak]

Thanks guys.

I'm assuming the stock plugins get replaced by their AAX counterparts as a matter of course with PT10.

As for 3rd party, I'll probably just stick with the RTAS versions, unless there's an update / fix that is 32bit AAX only.

Cheers!

[Pinball Wizard]

This is very interesting to me. I just don't understand why there is any need for 32bit AAX plugs at all. I did some experimentation with the Bomb Factory AAX vs RTAS plugs back when they came out. Yes, the AAX did have a slightly lower cpu load than the RTAS equivalents but the differences were VERY small. I also could not detect any audio quality differences. So, since these 32bit AAX plugs are PT10 only, what's the point?
Please, I too would appreciate a geeky explanation of what's up with this.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Pinball Wizard

This is very interesting to me. I just don't understand why there is any need for 32bit AAX plugs at all. I did some experimentation with the Bomb Factory AAX vs RTAS plugs back when they came out. Yes, the AAX did have a slightly lower cpu load than the RTAS equivalents but the differences were VERY small. I also could not detect any audio quality differences. So, since these 32bit AAX plugs are PT10 only, what's the point?
Please, I too would appreciate a geeky explanation of what's up with this.

There is no deep mystery here. The 32 bit AAX native plugins are/were a stepping stone for developers to port to AAX 64 bit, and may have especially made sense to ship if those developers were also doing an AAX-dsp port. Moving forward 32-bit AAX is really no longer interesting to anybody.

Its also likely pointless to talk about generic behavior/performance differences between AAX native and RTAS, and differences observed by end users are so dependent on the coding of the plugins.

Darryl