[drchopchop]

Ableton does allow you to easily export sessions, and freeze tracks that have custom plugins. Their stock plugins are now good enough that they can rival commercial ones for many use cases (which is often good enough to the track to the final mixing stages).

Definitely agree re: VST format - PC/Mac/Linux fragmentation is annoying, old plugins often can't even be loaded, and sharing presets is a pain.

[disintegore]

I just don't think an audio plugin should be able to bring down the entire host application due to bad memory management.

[_flux]

Bitwig actually has this figured out: all audio stuff is already its own separate separate process and you can even further isolate plugins to separate processes.

Probably they key reason why they get to support X86 plugins on M1.

[disintegore]

That's extremely interesting. When a plugin crashes, what happens to the rest of the signal chain?

[_flux]

The track goes quiet, other tracks keep working. I suppose if the track has other ways to make sound (e.g. the plugin is just one of the many instruments it's playing) then it's just that part of the processing graph, but I haven't tried experimenting with that so deeply.

You need to restart the plugin manually.