# Using VST Plugins

## Why is this harder than it should be?

The owners of VST (Steinberg Technologies, now owned by Yamaha) give VST away to developers for free. Sounds great, but they do not those same developers the ability to pass what they get from Steinberg on to other developers.

This conflicts with the terms of the license for Ardour and several software libraries used by Ardour. Steinberg have said quite often that they are not opposed in principle to changing their license to allow redistribution, but as of mid-summer 2006, it has not happened yet.

All of this means that it is illegal for anyone to distribute a binary (ready-to-run) version of Ardour with support for VST plugins built in. If you want to use Ardour with VST plugins, you must compile it yourself.

This is not a trivial undertaking; see our build page for a full explanation even without VST support. This page documents some more required steps for the build if you want to include VST support.

## Getting a version of Ardour with VST support

... to be completed.