AAS "version 3" products unusable; AAS support unresponsive???

[ChristopherM]

I have always liked AAS products (going right back to Tassman that was included with some earlier version of Sonar many years ago).  At the end of November 2020, I upgraded to the new generation Chromaphone 3, Virtual Analog VA-3 and String Studio VS-3. They work fine as stand-alones -  and they sound superb - but they are disastrous in CbB.

Typically, when I attempt to load any of them, Cakewalk becomes unresponsive and hogs more-and-more memory, until Windows gets into trouble and starts glitching on graphics and eventually the screen blanks. Even when the screen blanks, I can see that there is constant disk activity (presumably Windows furiously writing to Virtual Memory). I then have to restart the PC. Hoping that the new release of CbB might have altered this behaviour, I just tried again - attempting to load String Studio VS-3 caused Cakewalk's memory usage to climb steadily to over 32GB Commit in Windows Resource Monitor before the screen blanked and I had to reboot.

I posted about this phenomenon at the time in the CbB Feedback thread (but that version is history now, so a new thread seemed necessary). Noel was kind enough to look at a memory dump and said he thought it was an AAS issue. I had already attempted to get AAS's Tech Support to take an interest, but I have had no meaningful response in 2 months - makes me wonder whether they are in some kind of difficulty.

So 2 questions: Is anybody else successfully using any of these version 3 AAS products with CbB? Does anybody have any clue what is going on and whether therefore this is a configuration problem in CbB or Windows 10?

I am using the most recent Windows 10, CbB and AAS versions.  

[paulo]

55 minutes ago, ChristopherM said:

So 2 questions: Is anybody else successfully using any of these version 3 AAS products with CbB? Does anybody have any clue what is going on and whether therefore this is a configuration problem in CbB or Windows 10?

1. Yes been using them all since respective releases with no issues. (win 7 though)

2. No idea whatsoever.

However, I can tell you that AAS support is usually first rate, so I would try again in case you've slipped through a crack somewhere. I had an email from Marc within about an hour last week (Sunday no less) with an answer to an enquiry I made.

Also, AAS issued updates for v.3 products in the last few days, so if you don't have them yet, might be worth a try.

[Starship Krupa]

I'm a user of the Session versions and Swatches/Player with about 20 sound packs. No trouble here, except that they're a touch more resource-hungry, which I help by restricting the number of voices to 4.

A|A|S have an enthusiastic following here on the forum, so it would surprise me if the issues you are seeing are common.

I mentioned resources, is your system powerful enough? 8 Gigs of RAM minimum? Quad core of some kind?

[ChristopherM]

Thanks - I'm pleased they are working for you, but that thickens the plot, of course. I also have previously had good experience with AAS support, but this time Eric keeps telling me he's sorry and that he'll get on to it, but then somehow doesn't.  They're a small organisation, I know, but 2 months is a long time to wait. I got notifications about updates, but not to these products - I'll have another look, so thanks for the heads-up.

[ChristopherM]

4 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

is your system powerful enough? 8 Gigs of RAM minimum? Quad core of some kind?

16GB of RAM and Quad core cpu. Standalone, Chromaphone 3 uses less than a GB of RAM. In CbB (for me anyway) it filled up all RAM and then created a 32GB swap file before crashing. So I don't think its resources as such. I have wondered whether it's because I use the CPU graphics rather than a separates graphics card, but that has not been an issue with anything else.

 

[marcL]

19 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

No trouble here, except that they're a touch more resource-hungry, which I help by restricting the number of voices to 4.

I noticed this also, but only with the newest versions! It takes much longer until they are loaded, very annoying! This is why I wait updating Strum GS-2.

[Starship Krupa]

Wow, those are some nasty symptoms. Now that I think of it, I wonder if this is the cause of an odd issue I've run into a couple of times. If it happens again, I'll make a note of whether the project was using A|A|S Player.

(The specs of my main DAW are in my sig, but I also sometimes copy projects to my aging laptop for mixing. It's maxed out to 8 Gig RAM and "hot-rodded" when I swapped a quad core i7 in place of its original dual core i5 and swapped the spinny drive for a 250G SSD. After 3 years of BandLab ownership, Cakewalk has gotten so stable that I have had projects open, forgotten about them, had my computer go into full sleep, wake it back up and Cakewalk is still open and runs happily. I don't know about anyone else, but for me, this is a HUGE improvement over the last version of SONAR.)

A couple of times now I've had a project open on the notebook, gone away and left it, come back and had a pop-up from Cakewalk saying that it can't write to the disk. Checking the disk, it's been at zero free space, when usually it's about 50G free. Exiting Cakewalk and then checking, the disk was back to its usual free space. This is a classic symptom of a memory leak; the program uses more and more memory, the system increases the size of the swap file to accommodate it until there's just no more room. Either that or it had to create a hibernation file that was enormous, or both. Given your issue, it could be the same thing but with a slower onset, maybe because on my system, the transport wasn't running.

Anyway, since A|A|S seem to be dragging on getting back to you, it could be that in the wake of the v. 3 updates they're busy working on fixing a bug or bugs and Eric just has no news for you. Not all companies are forthcoming enough to say "it's a known issue, our developers are working on it."

To help figure this out there are a couple more things you can try (and so will I).  First, take a look in Resource Monitor and see if you can see specifically what process(es) are eating up your RAM. If you're not familiar, you open Resource Monitor from a link at the bottom of Task Manager's Performance screen. It shows what's using up CPU and RAM in greater detail. I've suspected memory leaks in the past with A|A|S Player, but never pinned it down, because my usual trick of limiting the number of voices seemed to cure it. They love to put loooooooooong release tails on those patches, which causes the player to quickly stack 'em up.

Second, if you have another audio program you can try the plug-ins in, it would be helpful to see whether your A|A|S synths have trouble with them. I think Ableton Live! Lite is still available for free, also Mixcraft and REAPER have free trials. If they choke Ableton, then for sure there's a problem there.

I've posted elsewhere about the (sometimes significant) sonic differences between the earlier sound packs and the ones "remastered" for v. 3. Have you also updated your sound packs along with the synths? Who knows, there could be some issue with using v. 2 sound packs with v. 3 synths.

[ChristopherM]

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

First, take a look in Resource Monitor and see if you can see specifically what process(es) are eating up your RAM.

Second, if you have another audio program you can try the plug-ins in, it would be helpful to see whether your A|A|S synths have trouble with them. I think Ableton Live! Lite is still available for free, also Mixcraft and REAPER have free trials. If they choke Ableton, then for sure there's a problem there.

Have you also updated your sound packs along with the synths? Who knows, there could be some issue with using v. 2 sound packs with v. 3 synths.

Thanks for your observations, Starship.

Resource Monitor shows cakewalk.exe as the process gobbling up memory and it just keeps going until the entire OS malfunctions (something that doesn't seem to happen much in Windows 10).

I have tried these plugs in Cantabile (which does nothing other than handle plugins, of course, so it seemed like a good test bed) and they are slow to load, but not massively, and then they work fine. And the standalones work fine, too. That would seem to implicate CbB, but, as I mentioned, Noel Borthwick seemed certain that the issue was AAS's after he had looked at my memory dump, and I've never known him to be wrong!

And all of this happens long before the instrument is called upon to generate audio, so I don't feel it's the complexity of the sound generator. What I noticed in Cantabile is that the instrument is loaded and capable of sound generation long before its GUI appears, which is what made me wonder about graphics issues.

I used AAS's combined installer, which selects the revised sound packs along with the instrument, so I don't think sound pack incompatibility can be the cause.

It sometimes feels that the technology now gets in the way of creative music making rather than aiding it. 

 

[ChristopherM]

@Starship Krupa - I just read your brilliant piece about the evolution of VST in another thread. Funny and insightful, like all the best satire!

[Canopus]

Just a wild guess: AAS do optionally supply NKI presets and previews for Komplete Kontrol. Is that something you have installed as part of your AAS plug-ins? If so, maybe such additions might add to both load times and memory usage.

FWIW, I’ve also got the latest VST3 versions of these AAS plug-ins installed and have no problems running them in CbB on an eight-year old Core i7-3770 with 32GB of RAM and Windows 10 Pro 2004.

[ChristopherM]

2 minutes ago, Canopus said:

Just a wild guess: AAS do optionally supply NKI presets and previews for Komplete Kontrol. Is that something you have installed as part of your AAS plug-ins? If so, maybe such additions might add to both load times and memory usage.

FWIW, I’ve also got the latest VST3 versions of these AAS plug-ins installed and have no problems running them in CbB on an eight-year old Core i7-3770 with 32GB of RAM and Windows 10 Pro 2004.

Thanks for replying - I'm encouraged that you are running successfully, but I don't select the NKI option from AAS.

[Starship Krupa]

17 minutes ago, ChristopherM said:

Resource Monitor shows cakewalk.exe as the process gobbling up memory and it just keeps going until the entire OS malfunctions (something that doesn't seem to happen much in Windows 10).

Sounds pretty memory-leaky.

20 minutes ago, ChristopherM said:

That would seem to implicate CbB, but, as I mentioned, Noel Borthwick seemed certain that the issue was AAS's after he had looked at my memory dump

As you have read my imaginary history of VST you know that I have some insight into the plug-in/host relationship. People often miss some things when trying to troubleshoot plug-in issues, and I think that it's probably the worst with DAW's and video NLE's. One of the first things we try to do is open a similar program that uses the plug-in, and that is as it should be. Aha, say we if the plug-in works just fine in Ableton Live!, Ableton handles this thing just fine, so it must follow that it's Cakewalk's issue to address.

Not so fast, though, it could be that the plug-in has a bug that Cakewalk exposes, and Live! doesn't. I use Ableton as the example because they work on program stability like it's the cure for world hunger. For as much as it's cited, REAPER seems to handle 3rd party plug-ins pretty well, too, or maybe it's just an inexpensive 2nd DAW to have around. Truth is, the host could be the most VST3 compliant host there is, according to the spec, and the plug-in could also be fully-compliant according to the spec, and they still might not play well together. This is because no spec can cover everything. There are some features that certain hosts don't utilize. Mixcraft, for instance, can't route MIDI data from an effect plug-in. Incoming is fine, its just coming out of an effect plug-in there's no facility for MIDI information.

Now in that case, Mixcraft would work wonderfully hosting a plug-in whose MIDI output has a bug in it.. There are also lots of features that have become de facto standardized because they were left out of VST2 (and often enough VST3). Sidechaining is one big one. VST3 "introduced" sidechaining as part of the spec, but people other than Steinberg had implementing it for a long time before. Same with UI resizing.

SONiVOX instruments have a notorious bug in some hosts where when the host is in loop playback mode, the track will play back just fine, except after the first iteration, every note will be truncated to 1/8. I was using Mixcraft, bought Orchestral Companion Strings and was happy until the next version of Mixcraft exposed the bug. I pleaded with the Mixcraft developers to fix it, but it was the fault of a flaw in SONiVOX and I suspect they forgot about it. 2 Mixcraft releases later, they apparently changed MIDI libraries again and Orchestral Companion Strings started working. I thanked the Mixcraft engineers, who said that they had done nothing to fix the problem. I'm sure it was just updating a library or some switch got flipped in the compiler or whatever. But it wasn't a Mixcraft bug, and changing Mixcraft "fixed" it.

There is plenty code in Cakewalk to contend with non-compliant and just plain buggy plug-ins. Some of it is even front-facing, like the option for sandboxing VST scans. Bad plug-ins are a fact of DAW life.

As far as the spec goes, I've never read any of the VST specs, but I do know that when designing things, software engineers (engineers in general) often don't initially account for things going wrong. There may be nothing in the spec that allows for the host to reclaim memory taken by a plug-in that has exited or crashed, or is simply malfunctioning. The spec probably only allows for conditions where everything is working as expected.

The policy Bandlab has, that the developers of Cakewalk get in touch with their counterparts at the plug-in manufacturer, is a good one. It shows that enough users have complained that it's come to the attention of the devs, and it cuts down finger-pointing. Tech support people like to fix things, but they are also praised for getting tickets closed quickly, so a simple "if it works with Cantibile then it must not be our problem" might be as far as it gets. If Noel gets in touch and says "Chromophone 3 is memory leaking to the point where it's crashing our users' entire systems," that will get more attention.

1 hour ago, ChristopherM said:

It sometimes feels that the technology now gets in the way of creative music making rather than aiding it.

Sometimes it does, and there have been some pretty dope beats that got lost because when I ran over to the computer to enter them into Cakewalk, I wound up drowning in drum map confusion and forgot the drum pattern in my head. Hey. we're always welcome to go back and do it the "old way." I have guitars, a drum kit, a piano. Even a neat recorder app in my mobile phone?.

I view the computer/DAW as an instrument that I have taken up, and a very complex one, and it takes dedication and learning and money to keep at it, just like most other instruments. You're supposed to have a good acoustic piano tuned twice a year. Tuning a piano is beyond my technical skills and paying a good tuner every 6 months would put a big dent in my wallet, so I let it drift. Maybe I'll teach myself how to tune my baby grand someday.

If I had decided at some point that my instrument was the oboe, there would be challenges there, too, like finding a context for playing it (snap, there's another group I hadn't thought of, how badly they've been harmed by the pandemic: symphony orchestras).

[ChristopherM]

8 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

You're supposed to have a good acoustic piano tuned twice a year. Tuning a piano is beyond my technical skills and paying a good tuner every 6 months would put a big dent in my wallet, so I let it drift. Maybe I'll teach myself how to tune my baby grand someday.

AAS at an earlier point did say something along the lines of "You're using Cakewalk? That'll be the problem, then!" for which the author subsequently apologised (sort of) when I asked him for some evidence.

As for piano tuning, ours had reached a remarkably stable point and it just stayed in tune for what seemed like forever. We eventually decided we needed to let a piano tuner loose on it, but it only stayed in tune for a matter of weeks after that. So we found another guy, who came armed with some impressive technology (I can't remember whether it was on a laptop or a tablet, though) which let me decide the amount of stretch that I wanted in the tuning, f'rinstance. He did a great job, which has lasted more than a year so far. He was an excellent player, too, and gave us an impressive recital before he rendered his invoice! And in the UK, he presumably is not prevented from making house calls at the moment (although I personally would probably not invite him in just now).

And I must say that, were I an oboe player, and I got my new instrument out of its case, at which point the it expanded entirely to fill the room. but refused to make even a squeak, I'd be just a tad annoyed.

Edited January 26, 2021 by ChristopherM

[Glenn Stanton]

11 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Sometimes it does, and there have been some pretty dope beats that got lost because when I ran over to the computer to enter them into Cakewalk, I wound up drowning in drum map confusion and forgot the drum pattern in my head. Hey. we're always welcome to go back and do it the "old way." I have guitars, a drum kit, a piano. Even a neat recorder app in my mobile phone?.

it's an opportunity to leverage/increase your beat-box skills into your phone voicemail before ever approaching a computer... ?  who knows? the lo-tech might make it even better as a sample loop ?

[Starship Krupa]

19 hours ago, ChristopherM said:

Resource Monitor shows cakewalk.exe as the process gobbling up memory and it just keeps going until the entire OS malfunctions (something that doesn't seem to happen much in Windows 10).

Confirmed on my system. It's only when I have the transport running, but if I have A|A|S Player on a track, I can watch Cakewalk steadily gobble more memory.

When I change to a different synth, Cakewalk's memory footprint decreases by more than half, and is stable.

I'm interested to know if anything came of @Noel Borthwick's attempt to contact them. I'll try the same thing with Live! and Mixcraft and see what I get.

This is awful, the A|A|S sound packs have the best ambient pads, hands-down, of any instrument in my quiver. I guess I'll have to start freezing until this is sorted.

[ChristopherM]

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Confirmed on my system. It's only when I have the transport running, but if I have A|A|S Player on a track, I can watch Cakewalk steadily gobble more memory.

When I change to a different synth, Cakewalk's memory footprint decreases by more than half, and is stable.

I'm interested to know if anything came of @Noel Borthwick's attempt to contact them. I'll try the same thing with Live! and Mixcraft and see what I get.

This is awful, the A|A|S sound packs have the best ambient pads, hands-down, of any instrument in my quiver. I guess I'll have to start freezing until this is sorted.

Aah! That's interesting. I've finally received a list of diagnostic questions from AAS, so, with your permission, I'll pass your experience to them, too. But the difference is that you are getting beyond the point where my OS gives up and actually having the instruments become usable.

[Starship Krupa]

4 hours ago, ChristopherM said:

the difference is that you are getting beyond the point where my OS gives up and actually having the instruments become usable

I'm psyched that they're following up with you, and of course you may pass along anything that might help. I'm also an experienced software tester and would welcome the opportunity to help out with testing preliminary fixes or whatever.

Be sure to tell them that I'm only using Player.

I haven't tried Mixcraft yet to see if there are also issues there.

[Starship Krupa]

I just tried it in Mixcraft and there's clearly a memory leak. This was using Swatches, VST3, with Multiverse/Minor Atmo Chords, a Chromophone sound.

I made a 2-bar MIDI phrase and set it to loop. Memory usage of the Mixcraft.exe process jumped by about 1K every time the loop went around.

[abacab]

I am running Chromaphone 3 successfully on CbB 2020.11, Windows 10 Pro 2004, 16 GB Ram, i5-9600K.

I have the full collection of sound banks installed for that instrument as well. Using the NKI preview versions, as I occasionally use Komplete Kontrol.

I have no suggestion on how to resolve the issue, but am just adding this info to mention that it does work for me, and so I suspect it's probably not a widespread problem. My normal procedure if I suspect a conflict with a plugin is first to try it with another DAW. There are some free ones you can test with.

And if it was a widespread issue, AAS support would probably be all over it. If it's a "bug", it's most likely what is usually referred to in computer science as a "corner case", which only occurs under specific conditions. And those conditions were probably overlooked during testing.

[abacab]

1 hour ago, Starship Krupa said:

I just tried it in Mixcraft and there's clearly a memory leak. This was using Swatches, VST3, with Multiverse/Minor Atmo Chords, a Chromophone sound.

I made a 2-bar MIDI phrase and set it to loop. Memory usage of the Mixcraft.exe process jumped by about 1K every time the loop went around.

I tried your test with that patch in Chromaphone 3 in CbB, and the memory never changed during the loop.