Plugin successfully instantiated. Work done within plugin. Then a DAW crash. Document becomes unopenable, crashes every time. Will have to give up on VST for now and use the standalone until I can trust the VST.
It’s most likely one of the VCV plugins crashing.
1 Like
Though that’s possible, if that were the case it seems surprising that the patch in question wouldn’t crash the standalone as well. While I wasn’t able to save that particular patch due to the crash, it didn’t use any modules that aren’t my tried-and-true standbys that appear to be working OK in the standalone.
Many modules will crash in vst but not stand alone. Trust me, or search here more.
There are differences between VST and standalone in the sequence of various calls into a module. This is necessitated by the realities of running as a VST. Some modules have built-in assumptions on the order of execution that are not true under VST mode, resulting in crashes when something expected to be present or initialized isn’t.
This is most often a bug in a particular plugin (rather than Rack VST). Once identified, these issues are usually simple to fix by moving a bit of code or using lazy initialization.
It would be great to have a guide somewhere on how to identify the flawed plugin so that a bug report can be routed to the right place. I haven’t done much of this, but rack logs usually identify the problem, and you can also use a process of elimination to identify which plugin is broken: rebuild the patch a module at a time until it starts crashing. Once you’ve hiit a crash, remove the last module and verify that crashing stops. At this point you know which module is broken and can report the bug to the right owner.
That’s certainly a thing given world enough and time one can do. But perhaps not time effective for me.
I wonder if some future release of the VST will have a global solution that prevents users from innocently tripping over crashes of a sort they’re unaccustomed to in the rest of their pro plugins. Here’s hoping.
I do trust you, absolutely.
Since I don’t want to be constantly looking over my shoulders for possible crash-causers, I think I’ll be stuck waiting for some future release of the VST containing a global workaround that will crash-proof it and make it as work-safe to use as the rest of one’s pro plugins.
Sure. but don’t hold your breath!
When you say “the rest of one’s pro plugins”, I don’t know if there is another “pro” plugin that lets you easily load thousands of free third party plugins. What are you comparing here?
VCV could try to build a sandbox for every third party plugin so that one crash wouldn’t take VCV down. Sort of like what “pro” DAWs allow in some cases with individual VSTs/
But a) I don’t know if that would work with a modular that only has a one sample delay between modules and b) even if it could work whether VCV would spend that much resources to do it.
We will see - I’ll bet you they don’t do something like that in the next two years.
1 Like
No idea whether it’s possible, right. May be comparing apples and oranges. Don’t suppose it’s possible to compare with Reaktor, for instance. No idea what would be required to render the VST comparatively safe from crashes.
I just know that from my user perspective the advantages of a VST are somewhat lost on me if things get all weird and crashy on me. Standalone with audio routing from Loopback will have to do.
1 Like
makes sense.
1 Like