Juce plugins in bridged mode (pvst)

[Joachip]

When running Juce plugins like Valhalla SuperMassive or Rhizomatic Plasmonic, the drop-down menus appear for a fraction of a second and then disappears again before you can make a selection. This is a known bug: https://github.com/juce-framework/JUCE/issues/401

So having read up on the problem, I found out that by disabling "Run in separate process" --> "Embedded VST GUI", the dropdown start working.

But this leaves a new problem: The plugins cannot be closed again. So their UIs are left visible until you close Buzz. Everything works alright, but it just really starts taking up a lot of screen space.

I tried messing with the "Auto-close GUI" and "Force close" settings, but I can't find out a set of settings that allows both the dropdowns to work, and the UI to be closable.

[HerrFornit]

Usually you can close the "bridged GUI" by closing the extra PVST window.
https://forums.jeskola.net/viewtopic.php?p=14977#p14977

[Joachip]

Yup, but it only works about half of the times. I often end up with a "stuck" plugin open, and re-opening the corresponding pvst doesn't seem to "catch" it. Once stuck, always stuck.

I guess it's actually the Juce people who need to do something about this.

[rav]

I tried messing with the "Auto-close GUI" and "Force close" settings, but I can't find out a set of settings that allows both the dropdowns to work, and the UI to be closable.

I think this is broken in polac addapter:
https://forums.jeskola.net/viewtopic.php?p=15303#p15303

...but you can set it manually:

you need edit config.xml manually and edit or add Bridge_Gui_Show_Always="0" to vst settings

[Joachip]

I don't know the format of the file so I tried this, but I don't really see any difference:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<PVST Version="1000">
	<Global>
		<Settings Plugin_Path="C:\Program Files (x86)\Audio\Buzz\Gear\Vst;C:\Program Files (x86)\Steinberg\VSTplugins;" Ladspa_Path="C:\Program Files (x86)\Audio\Buzz\Gear\Ladspa" Bridge_Gui_Show_Always="0" />
	</Global>
</PVST>

File location: C:\Users\<bla bla>\AppData\Roaming\Polac\Vst Loader\1.1.10\config.xml

[rav]

I think it is not the right place - "Plugin_Path"
Don't you have any saved settings per plugin? I edited the file for show just Supermassive and Global settings

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<PVST Version="1000">
    <Global>
        <Settings Plugin_Path="C:\blablabla" />
    </Global>
    <ValhallaSupermassive__x64__8859A849>
        <Settings Bridge_Embed_Gui="0" Bridge_Gui_On_Top="0" Bridge_Gui_Show_Always="0" />
    </ValhallaSupermassive__x64__8859A849>
</PVST>

Try to add some setting lines by polac addapter, beacause you may have different plugin ID on your PC - "8859A849" is for Supermassive here.

[polac]

It is known that plugins done with JUCE have problems with the embedded gui setting, you can fix the vanishing window problem by disabling embedded gui.

Also I tried Valhalla Supermassive here, no problems here with not closing guis if embedded gui is disabled. Tried to load a new bmx, or tried to delete the Supermassive instance, all guis closed nicely.

Sounds as if the process vst.x64.exe is not closing for you for some reason, try to kill the process in the taskmanager.

[polac]

Ok I think a was able to reproduce it. If you delete the instance the gui does not close properly. This has something to do with the undo/redo hanlding of Buzz. You can fix this by enabling "Unload VST on Buzz undo action" in global 2 preferences for now.

[polac]

If unload is disabled it just hides the vst gui but not the child windows. Don't know if this can be fixed though.

[polac]

Ok I think I have it fixed, instead of hiding the window I'm closing it now, it should work then. Will update soon.

[Joachip]

Wow, thanks for the quick response. I haven't tested Undo though (believe it or not, but i rarely use undo). However, I think I've found out in which cases the problem occurs: If I load one instance of Plasmonic, closing the "pvst" window also closes Plasmonic. But if I have two or more instances of plasmonic, I can only open and close the 1st one. The 2nd one can be opened but never closed again. Example: I just tried with 2x plasmonic and 2x supermassive:

Plasmonic 1: Can be closed
Plasmonic 2: Cannot be closed
Supermassive 1: Cannot be closed
Supermassive 2: Cannot be closed

Also, closing the plugin using the close icon on the plugin window itself doesn't work at all. I have to close the parent "pvst" window instead, which feels odd. My suspicion is that the problem happens when more than one bridged Juce VST is used.

I'm also chasing a different problem with (at least) Rhizomatic Plasmonic and DiscoDSP Corona and even the SuperMassive effect where these plugins sometimes do not recall their settings correctly when loading a bmx file with more than one instance of the same VST. I haven't yet figured out exactly what the problem is. I'll report back if I found out more. It's pretty problematic though, as I can't easily use VSTs in my songs if there's a such a big risk of losing my presets.

[rav]

I'm also chasing a different problem with (at least) Rhizomatic Plasmonic and DiscoDSP Corona where these plugins sometimes do not recall their settings correctly when loading a bmx file with more than one instance of the same VSTi. I haven't yet figured out exactly what the problem is. I'll report back if I found out more. It's pretty problematic though, as I can't easily use VSTis in my songs if there's a such a big risk of losing my presets.

I have had also this problem with supermassive.

[Joachip]

Yes, I just noticed!
Maybe this is another Juce related problem? Then again, I don't recall any of my own Juce based plugins failing this way.

I tried logging using Process Monitor while the preset bug happened, but it generated 800000 events, and the few things that I was able to find, that looked suspicious, did not reveal anything.

[nathansnider]

When running Juce plugins like Valhalla SuperMassive or Rhizomatic Plasmonic...

Aside from the GUI stuff, did you have to do anything special to get Plasmonic to work? I've been trying the demo, and Plasmonic won't show up in the Buzz machine list even after a full rescan. It works fine in Bitwig and as a standalone program, but Buzz doesn't like it for some reason. When I try to see if I can load it manually, PVST only lets me browse for .dlls and preset files, not .vst3s.

[Joachip]

I did have trouble with that, and I forgot to write down what I did. Doh!!

But maybe all that was missing was to add "C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3" to the VST directories list in the "Global 2" tab of pvst?

PS: The Pianoteq plugin also has trouble with the drop-downs when in bridged mode.

[nathansnider]

Well I updated PVST to b35 and Plasmonic started working , but then I exited Buzz and when I tried to start it again later, it crashed on load . After removing PVST and PVSTi dlls from the gear directory, Buzz started up fine (but of course without any VSTs), so I reverted PVST to b31 (the last backup I had on hand), and everything, including Plasmonic, worked again? Anyway, whatever the bug is, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the 64-bit bridging problem. Thanks for the hints, though!

[River Cricket]

I'm also chasing a different problem with (at least) Rhizomatic Plasmonic and DiscoDSP Corona and even the SuperMassive effect where these plugins sometimes do not recall their settings correctly when loading a bmx file with more than one instance of the same VST. I haven't yet figured out exactly what the problem is. I'll report back if I found out more. It's pretty problematic though, as I can't easily use VSTs in my songs if there's a such a big risk of losing my presets.

I've had this with Valhalla suite stuff and with Serum, which is a non-JUCE VST. So it's not JUCE-related, as far as I can tell, but it is plugin-specific - I think. I've never had the issue with Brainworx stuff, for instance, and to the best of my recollection it's never happened with Surge.

My "solution" is to just save new .BMX files all the time, so when the problem manifests I usually have an older save file that i can harvest settings from. Of course, with all those extra copies, disk space can be the downside here - one long project I had where I was using a fair amount of EasyRec/AudioBlock bouncedowns ended up taking about 40GB of space after all was said and done.

Sometimes I'll also save presets within the machine, though this gets ugly and cluttered quite quickly when saving a bunch of presets that I have no intention of ever using outside of a specific project.

[polac]

I'm also chasing a different problem with (at least) Rhizomatic Plasmonic and DiscoDSP Corona and even the SuperMassive effect where these plugins sometimes do not recall their settings correctly when loading a bmx file with more than one instance of the same VST. I haven't yet figured out exactly what the problem is. I'll report back if I found out more. It's pretty problematic though, as I can't easily use VSTs in my songs if there's a such a big risk of losing my presets.

Sounds odd, especially that it's random. Perhaps it helps to disable "load/save in gui thread".

I've had this with Valhalla suite stuff and with Serum, which is a non-JUCE VST. So it's not JUCE-related, as far as I can tell, but it is plugin-specific - I think. I've never had the issue with Brainworx stuff, for instance, and to the best of my recollection it's never happened with Surge.

I cannot reproduce it with Serum here, songs are loading fine, but i'm doing not much songs lately. I have also some Valhalla stuff installed here to test.

[polac]

Also are there problems with vst2 or vst3 plugins? Only test vst2 here.

[polac]

But maybe all that was missing was to add "C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3" to the VST directories list in the "Global 2" tab of pvst?

No you don't have to add your vst3 folder in Global2, that has no consequences. The vst3s are still and only scanned in "C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3".