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[SOLVED] Major freezing/hanging issues with an interesting cause and no obvious solution. Any ideas?


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Meldaproduction plug-ins also have a way to change how their GUI's interact with the video driver, but theirs is accessible via a GUI in any Meldaproductions plug-in's Settings. You don't have to manually edit a configuration file as you seem to need to do with the Cakewalk LP's.

Just open the GUI on MAutoPitch and click on Settings. Over on the left, under GUI and Style, you'll see a control for GPU Acceleration. The choices are "Enabled," "Disabled," and "Compatibility Mode." Try "Disabled" and see if anything changes.

I don't see where anyone has mentioned it in this thread, but using the 64-bit Double Precision Engine has stifled at least one plug-in of mine, so if you haven't tried turning that off, give it a shot.

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5 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Meldaproduction plug-ins also have a way to change how their GUI's interact with the video driver, but theirs is accessible via a GUI in any Meldaproductions plug-in's Settings. You don't have to manually edit a configuration file as you seem to need to do with the Cakewalk LP's.

Just open the GUI on MAutoPitch and click on Settings. Over on the left, under GUI and Style, you'll see a control for GPU Acceleration. The choices are "Enabled," "Disabled," and "Compatibility Mode." Try "Disabled" and see if anything changes.

I don't see where anyone has mentioned it in this thread, but using the 64-bit Double Precision Engine has stifled at least one plug-in of mine, so if you haven't tried turning that off, give it a shot.

Unfortunately, the plugin won't even fully load the GUI, and freezes (and hangs CbB) before I can do anything.

Also, the 64-bit double precision engine is turned off.

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10 minutes ago, AxlBrutality said:

Unfortunately, the plugin won't even fully load the GUI, and freezes (and hangs CbB) before I can do anything.

Do you have another VST3 host you can load it into just for the purpose of adjusting the setting? Cantabile or a REAPER or Mixcraft trial? Tracktion? Sound Forge? Also, he just dropped v14, so who knows, give that a shot, too.

I don't remember what nVidia card you have, but is swapping a newer AMD/ATi into your system a possibility? My ATi 5770, which works a treat in my Dell with both CbB and Mixcraft, turned Mixcraft 7 64-bit into a crashy slug when I had it installed in my Gateway Core 2 Quad system. I swapped my cards around and back and forth and now the 5770 is in the Dell and my nVidia is in the Gateway and there is peace in the valley. But sometimes the combination of adapter and BIOS and motherboard and who knows what else just conspire to mess things up.

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The 64bit DPE setting is unlikely the issue with VST3 MAutoPitch. The plug-in loads and works OK for me regardless of the 64bit DPE setting.

I don't bother installing Melda VST2 plug-ins any more, all the VST3s I have tried from them work OK. While I have the MTotalFXBundle, there are quite a few I have not tested.

As described by the OP, the problem seems like a system related graphics issue. I am not the one to ask about hardware/driver problems. The solution I provided WRT the L-Phase plug-ins came from Cakewalk support posts on the old forum.

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7 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Do you have another VST3 host you can load it into just for the purpose of adjusting the setting? Cantabile or a REAPER or Mixcraft trial? Tracktion? Sound Forge? Also, he just dropped v14, so who knows, give that a shot, too.

I don't remember what nVidia card you have, but is swapping a newer AMD/ATi into your system a possibility? My ATi 5770, which works a treat in my Dell with both CbB and Mixcraft, turned Mixcraft 7 64-bit into a crashy slug when I had it installed in my Gateway Core 2 Quad system. I swapped my cards around and back and forth and now the 5770 is in the Dell and my nVidia is in the Gateway and there is peace in the valley. But sometimes the combination of adapter and BIOS and motherboard and who knows what else just conspire to mess things up.

All three plugins with this issue (Slate VTM, Eiosis DeEsser (distributed by Slate), and MeldaProductions MAutoPitch) test fine in Reaper.  That was actually the first thing Slate asked me to do when I contacted them almost a year ago.  (Unfortunately, after reporting that, I never heard back from them.)

I have yet to update the Melda plugin; will do that at some point.

Cakewalk support recently  indicated they had found an issue with a response to a GUI command with VTM, but I haven't heard anything since (that was about a week ago).

I am currently in the process of gathering all my bugs (these and more...I encountered yet another one this morning), recreating all of the dump files, and putting together one massive bug report...which I will post in a separate, condensed, updated thread so as to maybe help others as well.

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The issue has to do with how some specific OpenGL versions interact with the Video driver.  Its not a host problem as such.
Cakewalk itself doesn't use OpenGL but we use normal Windows API's, GDI+ and some Direct 2D to talk to the graphics devices. Nothing special.

The LP plugins are built using JUCE which does use opengl. As far as we know the Melda plugins and other plugins that have the opengl issues are also built using JUCE. The JUCE dev's were notified of this back in 2017 and their response was that it was related to some interaction with the version of opengl higher than 2.1.

Under this scenario the plugins that use OpenGL end up hanging with some video drivers when initializing opengl. IOW The hang itself doesn't originate from the app itself but in response to the plugin initializing opengl. This is what complicates the issue and makes it difficult for us to address at the host level. The fact that it doesn't hang in another app isn't particularly useful other than indicating that problem won't manifest there because of some other dependencies. Our workaround for the LP plugins was to have a setting that skips opengl altogether. This was done back in 2017 and the plugins have not been updated since then.

We'll continue to investigate this to see if there is some workaround that can be handled at the app level.

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34 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

The issue has to do with how some specific OpenGL versions interact with the Video driver.  Its not a host problem as such.
Cakewalk itself doesn't use OpenGL but we use normal Windows API's, GDI+ and some Direct 2D to talk to the graphics devices. Nothing special.

The LP plugins are built using JUCE which does use opengl. As far as we know the Melda plugins and other plugins that have the opengl issues are also built using JUCE.
The JUCE dev's were notified of this and their response was that it was related to some interaction with the version of opengl higher than 2.1.

Under this scenario the plugins that use OpenGL end up hanging with some video drivers when initializing opengl. We'll continue to investigate this to see if there is some workaround that we can do at the app level. But as has been explained numerous times the hang is not coming from the app itself. The fact that it doesn't hang in another app isn't particularly useful other than indicating that problem won't manifest there because of some other dependencies. 

Thank you for the details and explanation of what's going on.  I wasn't really passed any of that info by the official support channel, only that you had recently finally found a possible cause and it could be on the plugin end, but it wasn't confirmed and you were still investigating.

34 minutes ago, Noel Borthwick said:

But as has been explained numerous times the hang is not coming from the app itself.

No offense, and maybe I'm misreading your tone here as a bit condescending, but no one has actually confirmed that until you did, just now. Everything in this thread has been speculation...and as mentioned, I wasn't passed any info from CbB customer support other than y'all might have found a potential cause (this was about two weeks ago) and that it appeared to be on the vendor end, but that y'all were still investigating and trying to contact Slate.  (And that was after a year of me complaining about it and sending in reports, for the record.)  I was given a bunch of language/code to pass along to Slate in case they ever decided to finally get back to me, but I have no idea what I'm looking at there.  I'm not a developer.

Don't get me wrong...I don't care whose "fault" it is, nor do I have any allegiances here.  I just know I can't use several of my favorite plugins, and haven't been able to for a year.  (I also didn't bump this thread, which is months old, btw...although I have made references to this problem in general in newer threads because it is a huge source of frustration).

I'd also like to note that it was Slate and Melda who were vehement that I test it in Reaper or another DAW, and then neither ever got back to me again after I reported that it worked fine there.  I don't know what that's all about, just how it looks.  It's not the first time multiple companies have pointed at Cakewalk and then abandoned me...which is why, as I've mentioned to you recently, I prefer to just come to you now regardless of the program in the hopes that you have a professional repertoire with whatever company we're dealing with.

Again, I do appreciate the work and the communication.  Do you have any idea if JUCE would be working on a fix, and if that would manifest in updates with Slate, Melda, etc. and their plugins?  Or are these all pretty much useless plugins for the foreseeable future, and I need to just abandon them and move on (barring some magic from you guys)?

 

 

Edited by AxlBrutality
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I think you are reading too much into my text. I changed the wording to look more neutral if it helps :)
I was trying to explain why issues like this can take time to solve when the problem isn't part of the actual DAW code. If it was we would have fixed it back in 2017 when we had an issue with our own LP plugins wouldn't we? It isn't a question of who's fault it is. Its system interactions between multiple third party components. In all these years we have only had a tiny number of customers who had the issue with the LP plugins and we provided a fix to not use opengl for those who did. Apparently some plugin vendors have done the same and others have not.

When you talk to support at a company, the reps are typically not developers and the best troubleshooting they can do is run "black box" comparisons like testing in other hosts. Until an actual developer looks into the issue in detail there is no way to conclusively find a real solution. However most plugin developers are DSP engineers and opengl problems are likely not an issue that they may have expertise with. Couple it with the fact that many only work on Mac's (JUCE abstracts all the cross platform dependencies away) and its even harder for them to investigate deeply.

>>Do you have any idea if JUCE would be working on a fix.
No but its unlikely from what I've seen. They do not prioritize GUI issues and this is surely at the bottom of the pile since it impacts only a tiny number of users.
@Ben Staton is going to try and look into it some more when he gets some cycles. What makes it harder for us is that we don't have any systems that exhibit this problem. I have NVidia machines and they all run the slate plugins as well as our LP's fine without any tweaks. Given the nature of this issue we can't promise any results but well try.

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@Noel Borthwick  Fair enough, and thanks for all the explanation and clearing the air.  We're good.

That really does suck, though.  I guess I'm off to find comparable (and hopefully not expensive) plugins, and to try to somehow avoid plugins that use OpenGL. 

Honestly, I'm just glad I have some sort of closure after about a year of wondering about/fighting with this.

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1 hour ago, Noel Borthwick said:

It may be cheaper and a lot quicker to just try a new video card. Just buy a current gen card and try it - if it doesnt work you can possibly return it.

Here's the thing....my video cards have been newer cards.  Not brand new, but not exactly old-timers either.

My laptop (the one that's currently my workstation) has both a recent-build NVIDIA GTX 1050ti and an Intel UHD 630, both with updated drivers [I've tried running these plugs on both cards, to no avail).  My wife's desktop (which was formerly my workstation and had the same problems) has a slightly older NVIDIA GTX 1050.  (All of those cards also apparently support up to OpenGL 6 or whatever it is now, which supposedly had cleared out a lot of these problems [from what I've read....but we're starting to get into territory that I don't know much about]).

Also, unfortunately, due to my laptop being a laptop, and my wife's desktop being a small form factor prebuilt gaming rig (with power and physical space limits because MSI prebuilts suck), I have minimal ability to upgrade any of these cards.

It's a possibility, but idk.  Might just be time to go back to ASUS rigs...I never had any issues like this with ASUS motherboards or ASUS-versioned NVIDIA cards.  (Both these computers are MSI rigs.)

I'm not a computer geek though, so again, I only half know what I'm talking about if we go much deeper here.  My computer knowledge is better than some, but nowhere near where it probably should be at this point.  Lol.

Edit:   I've done some deeper digging, and it appears that a few Fabfilter users have experienced these issues for years without a resolution, and Fabfilter also continues to use OpenGL anyway.   All seem to point to OpenGL conflicts with NVIDIA cards specifically, but as you mentioned, it's been a very small subset of people...most people even with NVIDIA cards seem to not have issues.  Strange.

Edited by AxlBrutality
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23 hours ago, Noel Borthwick said:

Our workaround for the LP plugins was to have a setting that skips opengl altogether. This was done back in 2017 and the plugins have not been updated since then.

Ah, now this is a tidbit for those who have been wondering about the LP plug-ins and whether/when BandLab will  make them available. And for that matter, other cool things written with Cakewalk, Inc. code now owned by BL like Rapture. Oh how I'd love to get my hands on the Pro version of that, having managed to wrangle a Home Studio license.

Some of them may be due for a bit of tidying up in the years that have passed since the demise of Cakewalk, Inc. Yes, years, plural. 2017.

Libraries updated, compatibility with newer releases of Windows and drivers ensured, all that.

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Plug-in compatibility is weird.

SONiVOX are known for tech non-support and sub-zero code, and their Orchestral Companion series have an issue where in some DAW's, when you have the instrument playing back in a looping fashion, after the first iteration of the loop, all notes will sound truncated.

So you'll be mixing a song with a nice legato string or woodwind or brass part, and of course have the project looping, and after it comes back around your string section turns staccato. In some hosts. I went to the "support" forum at SONiVOX and saw that FL Studio users were reporting the same issue, and a couple of other DAW's as well. It was pretty clearly a bug in the Orchestral Companions that was never going to be addressed by SONiVOX.

It worked fine in Mixcraft until one maintenance update. I raised the alarm and entered a bug report. Their devs uncharacteristically pointed the finger, threw up their hands and deferred it, because their libraries were compliant with the VSTi spec and of course every other VSTi on the planet worked correctly. Two maintenance updates later it mysteriously fixed itself when they opened the same section of the code where they had "broken" it earlier.

Which goes to show, a host can be perfectly compliant yet expose a bug in a plug-in that other hosts do not. Were FL Studio and Mixcraft at fault because loop playback of Orchestral Companions "worked just fine in REAPER?" Of course not. I mean, if your instrument doesn't loop correctly in FL Studio, get in the game.

All the DAW devs can do is try to open communications with the plug-in devs, not possible in some cases, like SONiVOX. They can try to "code around it," or in the case of crashiness build in quarantining measures to allow plug-ins to crash without bringing down the host. The problem with the latter is that processing added between plug-in and sound engine inevitably slows things down, which nobody wants. Cakewalk has a form of this where it can scan plug-ins in a "sandbox" to prevent crashing. But only to prevent crashes during scanning.

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18 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Ah, now this is a tidbit for those who have been wondering about the LP plug-ins and whether/when BandLab will  make them available. And for that matter, other cool things written with Cakewalk, Inc. code now owned by BL like Rapture. Oh how I'd love to get my hands on the Pro version of that, having managed to wrangle a Home Studio license.

Some of them may be due for a bit of tidying up in the years that have passed since the demise of Cakewalk, Inc. Yes, years, plural. 2017.

Libraries updated, compatibility with newer releases of Windows and drivers ensured, all that.

Honestly, I'm not sure how worth it it is to most of us or to Bandlab, although it may be appealing to potential new users.  I think a lot of us have since moved on and found other plugins and instruments that are decent to stellar.

The only reason I keep SPLAT/"Legacy" installed is for my XLN license for AD2 (which I could easily just go purchase outright if need be, honestly) and for LP EQ (which is fantastic [though a bit resource heavy], and unfortunately the aforementioned OpenGL issues prevent me from blowing $100-200 on FabFilter...which is also OpenGL driven and has actually had some of the same problems for a small subset of their users).

I do utilize TruePianos and SI Strings once in a while, but that's really only because I'm too cheap to buy something else (and I also am stubborn and don't like to take chances on new things).  Although I think SI strings is included in the Bandlab version anyway?  I can't remember.

Other than that, it wouldn't really break my heart if Bandlab didn't bring any of that stuff back.  I never used about half of it (including things like Rapture), and there are so many other options these days.

Edited by AxlBrutality
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2 minutes ago, scook said:

The license for AD2 bundled with SONAR was the full retail version. It has no dependency on SONAR at all. The same is true for Melodyne Essential.

Oh snap; really?  So, just to clarify...all of the licensing in my XLN account is 100% intact even if I uninstall Legacy?

I literally just  got around to sending an email to XLN support asking about it; I didn't know the forums here would be faster lol.  Thanks!

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Yes.  The bundled AD2 and Melodyne are not tied to the DAW in any way. They are the regular retail products.

TruePianos may run without a valid SONAR installation, CbB may pass its validation. I cannot say for certain having not tested this.

The SI Suite is part of CbB.

 

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  • Jesse Jost changed the title to Major freezing/hanging issues with an interesting cause and no obvious solution. Any ideas? [SOLVED]

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