VST Plugins not working

[Brian Johnston]

They used to work... I presume there's one button I have to click or something simple. I have FX clicked on (so they are active), and each VST is 'on.' I'm getting nothing, including the Delay and other effects that come with Cakewalk. Other than that, I can record, etc.

[Lord Tim]

Are your FX bypassed? I'm not sure what you mean by "FX clicked on" exactly.

But check to see if the FX light up on the Mix Module is lit, if it is, deselect it.  It's a little bit confusing - if it's lit up it means "FX are bypassed", not "FX are on" like it suggests it would be. There's a few custom themes that make it a bit more intuitive as to what that button does.

[Max Arwood]

Mute lit up = on 

Solo lit up = on

PDC lit up = on

FX lit up = off - WHY???

It is confusing to new users. I could easily get used to them all meaning the same lit up is = on

Make them all the same.

[Lord Tim]

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of this stuff had a fresh look once Sonar is released, honestly. There's been some great alterations done in some custom themes that I'm sure the Bakers have noticed.

[57Gregy]

10 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

Mute lit up = on 

Solo lit up = on

PDC lit up = on

FX lit up = off - WHY???

It is confusing to new users. I could easily get used to them all meaning the same lit up is = on

Make them all the same.

Because it's the FX bypass, not the enable FX, I would guess.

[Max Arwood]

Spock said with a stern face - That’s not logical!

[Lord Tim]

A few of those buttons are problematic in that way. Take the PDC one for example. When it's off, CbB is doing automatic plugin delay compensation as you'd expect it would do, but when it's lit it means Bypass PDC, similar to how Bypass FX works.

You wouldn't want this stuff always lit and be distracting up on the Control Bar unless it was important to do so, so you can understand why the state appears off. But at the same time, these work in the opposite way to what Mr Spock would consider logical for sure.  Even just having a line through this stuff so if you click on the PDC or FX button that has a Strikethrough line on it would suggest that "ahh, if I click this it means I'm cancelling this stuff out" and it makes a lot more sense. Those custom themes I mentioned do something like this.

I do understand why this was done like it was, to keep consistency with a poor decision made wayyyy back in the day, but going forward it'd be nice to see this made less ambigious.

[Max Arwood]

Yes, and you don't have to make them so bright. A different color would work as well. If you had a DAW that supported vectors, you could make a nice 3d button that would look like it was pressed down or up ??? lol

[Lord Tim]

Pfft, there's no chance the Bakers are working on anything like a vector driven UI, keep dreaming... ? *cough*

[sjoens]

Why be confused when 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, & 10 state buttons used on same GUI?!  

There's bound to be: 
1. Mismarked buttons
 (labels don't convey what button actually does)
2. Broken button states
 (5 state button but only 2 states work, or work backwards)
3. Awkward knob action
 ("hot" areas too small to work efficiently)
4. Inconsistent behavior
 (similar knobs & buttons on same view behave differently for no reason)
5. Mislit buttons
 (on when should be off, never go on or off at all, etc.)
6. Visual misalignment
 (knobs & buttons 1 or 2 pixels off from being visually centered with adjacent or similar items)
7. ???

Would be nice to fix them all, but there's so many like this it would be a full-time job to fix.
Nothing against vector based GUIs, but graphics are easier to repaint & create 3D appearance and "fix" (compensate for) some of the awkwardness.  But we'll find out soon... or later.

Edited September 4, 2023 by sjoens

[Lord Tim]

Bitmap graphics are problematic in general in different resolutions. I think we'd all prefer a nice crisp UI at 720 and also 6K rather than some blurry or blocky mess, or something that just won't shrink anymore and starts cutting off parts of the application once it runs out of space. You can do an awful lot with vectors, including some pretty cool 3D looking work, so let's see how it all comes together.

The biggest issue I think, as I mentioned earlier, was keeping things consistent with earlier versions. Even when we switched over to Skylight from the old 8.x interface, there was a big attempt to keep consistency with the buttons and iconography so that people don't immediately freak out. Then as things evolved over the years into what we now have as CbB, it improved but you could really tell the legacy was there so as to not annoy the userbase, even if the reasoning behind having such an element was originally made in 2001 and design language or UX expectations have really moved on.

Sonar and Next have a great opportunity to update the design language to bring it into 2023 onwards. Next can be entirely its own thing, but they still need to be a little careful regarding what to do with Sonar - it's essentially going to be CbB at first so it stays familiar, but its now that it's a great time to have a look at things like those weird button states or how controls scale, etc. and go "it's time to finally fix this"

[Starship Krupa]

BTW, for the aforementioned themes that "fix" the button states, see me sig. All of my Mix Modules have buttons that are "lit" when the feature is "on," and for the "off" states, there is a slash. Actually, as a joke and nod to a local Bay Area band, my FX bypass button has "NO FX" in red when FX are bypassed.

Also, my Simple Instrument tracks show the icon that has both MIDI and Synth together, because that's what Simple Instrument tracks are. The Synth icon is used for Synth tracks, and the MIDI icon is used for MIDI tracks. For the life of me I don't understand why it's the other way around in the standard themes.

[sjoens]

On 9/2/2023 at 10:56 PM, Lord Tim said:

You can do an awful lot with vectors, including some pretty cool 3D looking work, so let's see how it all comes together.

Hopefully.  My attempts at editing SVGs revealed not all are created equal.  I tried using 2 different editors but the results were incompatible with a particular GUI.  The resulting files were also quite a bit larger in MBs.  Whereas a PNG is a PNG is a PNG no matter the tool used to make it.

[sjoens]

After re-reading ↓ this ↓, there may not be any files to play with.

 Could be simply adjusting color, brightness, hue, transparency & etc. of internally coded elements.  Similar to X1-X3.