The case against 3rd party software...

So I was working on a song, things were going great and decided that I could maybe use a patch from Sampletank. That was the end of my evening of creativity.
 
For no apparent reason, Sampletank crashed my DAW. It was working fine the last time I'd used it. As for the rest, my DAW is a dedicated machine with only the strict essential on it, and I usually steer clear of updates. I do my best to avoid creating conditions which can cause problems like this.
 
Anyway, as I've learned from experience, ST will crash the host if it can't locate the sample library - which in my case shouldn't really happen because my sample library has not moved since I first installed ST. And yet, it is not the first time that I have to go through the tedious process of re-pointing ST to the directory and watch it take its sweet time to rebuild the library...
 
In order to do that, the solution is usually to open ST in standalone mode. However, that didn't work tonight. It crashed immediately. So I switched to my laptop and verified on IK's website and saw that there was indeed an update.
 
Reluctantly, I enabled internet on my DAW and downloaded the update. Installed it. Launched ST in standalone mode and went to feed the cats while it was rebuilding the library yet again...
 
The good news is that ST no longer crashes Logic. The bad news is that I lost another 10 minutes trying to figure out why I couldn't play it with my MIDI controller. I could "play" it with the mouse and the GUI's keyboard, but that's it. Yet, my controller definitely works, as I could control other instruments.
 
That's when I noticed that whenever I pushed a key on my controller, the channel number 8 on ST's interface blinked. As it turns out, for a reason unknown to me, the newly updated Sampletank suddenly communicates with my controller on channel 8.
 
At that point, I simply gave up troubleshooting. My job is to write music, not to waste my time trying to figure out why some lousy piece of software repeatedly hijack my creativity.

On the other hand, I may just have saved some money - it had been a while since I'd checked IK's web site and I saw some cool things - upgrading Miroslav could have been an option at that point. Not anymore I'm afraid.

Sampletank 3's VST3 seems to have a lot of problems with Sonar, problems the VST2 version doesn't seem to have.  I finally gave up and just removed the VST3 version from Program Files and I'm only using the VST2 version.

I don't believe there are any feature differences, at least not with Sonar.  Perhaps vstpreset load/save support?  Not sure, never bothered with that.
 
Some versions of Sonar and some versions of Sampletank's VST3 were better than others (over the last year).  The most recent versions of both (2016.04 and Sampletank 3.6.5) right now started crashing more often than ever.  Crashes the VST2 version doesn't seem to have.  The callstack on the crashes were all Sampletank but getting IK to look at or fix something is a futile quest.

VST3 offers almost no benefit over VST2, certainly not in sound quality. It has a few new features that are unnecessary and largely irrelevant unless you have sample libraries that can utilize note expression. It means you can use your new plugins with Cubase. Beyond that, I really don't understand the rush to embrace VST3. I guess it's because 3 is a bigger number than 2?

bitflipper
VST3 offers almost no benefit over VST2, certainly not in sound quality. It has a few new features that are unnecessary and largely irrelevant unless you have sample libraries that can utilize note expression. It means you can use your new plugins with Cubase. Beyond that, I really don't understand the rush to embrace VST3. I guess it's because 3 is a bigger number than 2?

Good to know VST3 vs VST2.
 
I haven't bothered with ST3 VST3 and I haven't had any problems.  I've imported all of the sounds from the Total Studio 2 bundle and they all work as expected.  I do NOT however do any classical instrument articulations and such.

 I've had issues of IK stuff not working well in Sonar but the problem did not exist in Reaper.  Just what exactly are you doing with ST to make is crash?

bitflipper
VST3 offers almost no benefit over VST2, certainly not in sound quality. It has a few new features that are unnecessary and largely irrelevant unless you have sample libraries that can utilize note expression. It means you can use your new plugins with Cubase. Beyond that, I really don't understand the rush to embrace VST3. I guess it's because 3 is a bigger number than 2?

much like going from windows xp --> 7 --> 10...
i expect that in the future more sample libraries will take advantage of the new features of vst3