RareBreeds Eugene not working - solved

[Yeager (Peter Vos)]

When you right-click on the (shape of) the module like this:

and click on Open plugin folder, you should see this :

Inside the res folder is this :

Yes ?

[mzikutko]

Yes

[Yeager (Peter Vos)]

Is it the only plugin not showing the faceplate in the module browser ?

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

No, the OP showed pics of the missing panel in both the browser and on the rack.

[mzikutko]

Yes

[Yeager (Peter Vos)]

My guess is your username has some weird letter in it and this plugin does not like that :

LowFatMilk Updates

try, Shut down rack, if it’s running. make a copy of “C:\Users\Vašek\Documents\Rack2” to "C:" add a user environment variable to point to the new user dir. Win+X → Settings → Advanced System Settings → Environment Variables under “User variables for user …” → “New” [image] Start rack If it works, you can delete C:\Users\Vašek\Documents\Rack2 docu link

But maybe Paul has a better solution ( he is still typing).

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

I have seen a similar problem with other plugins. There is a bug somewhere that causes some files to not get unpacked from the newly downloaded plugin package. For some modules this results in a missing panel image as in this post but can also manifest as a crash.

The workaround solution to this ‘incomplete install’ issue is to delete the entire plugin folder, restart Rack, and update modules again.

Examining the files as indicated by @Yeager will tell you if it’s this missing file issue. If not, then it’s time to report the bug to the plugin developer.

[mzikutko]

I did everything as written, but rack automatically creates a new folder in the user’s folder

[Yeager (Peter Vos)]

So you have made a copy of the rack2 folder on your C drive like C:\Rack2 and you added this to the variables

And when you start Rack2 it does not look in C:\Rack2 but in the “old” folder in documents ?

If so could you try this :

Change user folder location

Just in case readers are not familiar with the syntax (we don’t need to do this sort of thing very often nowadays…), this is a complete shortcut example where I wanted to set my user folder to D:\Rack2, and the Rack program is installed in C:\Program Files\VCV\Rack2Free\Rack.exe. Note the use of quotes to set folder locations in each case. To create a shortcut, right-click on the Rack program file and create a shortcut on the desktop. Then, go to the properties for the shortcut and edit the Shor…

“C:\Program Files\VCV\Rack2Free\Rack.exe” -u “C:\Rack2”

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

Before doing all that, it would be good to verify that it is indeed the case that the path to the plugins folder contains non-ASCII characters. I haven’t seen anything in the thread yet that shows the full path to the plugin folder.

Moving the rack “user folder” (-u) to a path that contains only ASCII is a workaround. If this is the issue, the bug should be reported to the plugin developer (and then do the workaround ;-).

[mzikutko]

the path does contain characters that shouldn’t be there, but I can’t change that unfortunately.

[mzikutko]

I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand. The program itself is located in D:\Rack2. How does this relate to plugins?

[pachde (Paul Dempsey)]

Rack doesn’t install plugins in the same folder as the program. It uses the Rack “user folder”.

The Rack user folder is one of:

• folder specified with the -u command-line parameter (which @Yeager showed how to do using a shortcut for launching Rack).
• the USER_DIR environment variable (Which @Yeager shows using the Windows settings)
• or, if neither of those is in effect, the default rack user folder, which on the last couple of major Windows versions is C:\Users\<user name>\Documents\Rack2 (where <user_name> is your user name).

(Plugins go in <rack user folder>\plugins)

To workaround the issue with “problem” characters in the plugins path you can do what @Yeager has described. This will move your rack “user folder” to somewhere else (which will need to have a path containing only ASCII characters).

After you do that, then next time rack launches, it will reinstall all your subscribed plugins to whatever new user folder is in effect, if you haven’t moved the plugins folder there.

[mzikutko]

I figured it out, I did everything as said @Yeager . Looks like I did something wrong the first time. Now everything works. Thanks a lot!

[Yeager (Peter Vos)]

And now you see this ?

[mzikutko]

Yes. Thank you so much!

[rare.breeds]

Thanks for reporting this mzikutko, and for trying out Eugene!

I might need to find a Windows laptop. My code does pass file paths to json_load_file which calls fopen. Apparently fopen doesn’t like utf-8 on windows so I may need to re-encode the string first, or find a different function to load the file.

[Squinky]

It’s a huge pain on windows. I think I used the stuff that’s part of flac:

FLAC_API FILE* flac_internal_fopen_utf8(const char *filename, const char *mode);

[rare.breeds]

I don’t depend on Flac at the moment, but it looks like openssl_fopen has a bunch of code for handling this on Windows.

VCV Rack also overrides fopen in common.cpp so I’ll try using that first rather than leaving it up to the json library.

[Squinky]

@rare.breeds

VCV Rack also overrides fopen in common.cpp

Oh, that’s cool! I assume you mean #define fopen fopen_u8 in common.hpp? Is that enough to make something work if you need to combine two paths, like a path, a separator, and a filename? I don’t really know - I just bash away until it works!