Issue with Studio Instruments VSTi Plugins in CWbBL

[Christopher Stewart / Poligraf]

hey ! 😊

as i was running out of space on my Windows 10 installation drive, i decided to move some VSTs (about 3.6 Gb) to another drive…

i started by copying everything that was in the C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Vstpluginsfree\ folder to D:\cakewalk\VSTPluginsFree\, and then updated the Cakewalk Plug-in Manager folder list accordingly, and rescanned… there were no apparent issues with those plugins, but the 4 Studio Instruments plugins, which were working just fine before, stopped working : when trying to open projects using them, the Missing Plugins warning window would pop… yet those 4 plugins had not been moved : they were still in the default C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\Vstplugins folder (i.e. not the one i had copied), and moreover, they were still listed in the Manager's Registered plugins panel…

then i tried configuring the Manager folder list to its prior state, but the issue remained…

then i tried copying the 4 plugins to D:\cakewalk\VSTPlugins, reconfigured the Manager again, and rescanned, but that didn't solve the issue…

then i tried reinstalling Studio Instruments altogether through the Product Center, in the default folder, and still that didn't solve anything…


checking out the instrument layout tree in the Manager, i could see the plugins listed, but they were greyed out… nonetheless i could access their properties by right-clicking them, and thus i could see their CLSID, which are :

si-bass : {7A22B903-4856-4556-478E-DF1AE86AC1BD}

si-drums : {E4645766-D414-DBCD-70CA-97B60DF3B81B}

si-ep : {7D6466F5-56D4-96DC-B075-99EA3FFF3FC9}

si-strings : {0D9CD314-8203-ACA3-F1BA-7896F2C3BCD7}

so then i added the 4 plugins listed in the Registered panel to the instrument layout tree, and checked out their CLSID, and got this :

si-bass : {AF26DB3B-FEC7-E526-C7C5-3815B438FD06}

si-drums : {81D81D45-1F37-2F4E-E157-6500190E09D8}

si-ep : {9A2FD0E5-C1C5-2926-3FA0-8B45DBEDA75C}

si-strings : {0D9CD314-8203-ACA3-F1BA-7896F2C3BCD7}

i've tried searching the Windows Registry for the CLSID of si-bass, and the 2nd value (AF26DB...) appears, but not the first (7A22B9…)…

assuming that Cakewalk relies on CLSIDs to match plugins when opening projects, then obviously it cannot locate the appropriate plugins… thus the issue is possibly that there are 2 sets of DLL files, and my projects all refer to the first set, but the files currently registered belong to the second set… yet i've compared the current DLLs with those which were in the folder prior to the reinstallation, and all 4 pairs of files are exact matches (according to Beyond Compare)… so i don't see why the CLSIDs would be different, given that paths and files seem to be the same…

by the way, the 4 plugins currently installed work fine when i add them to a new project, but existing projects that refer to them still can't find them…

is there a way to solve this without having to manually re-add and re-configure all the associated soft synths (in hundreds of projects) ? would editing the CLSID values for the 4 plugins in the registry do the trick, without any undesirable secondary effect ? would this have to be repeated after every rescan ?

and optionally : how could that have happened in the first place ? i have updated to CWbBL version 2024.07 · build 108 on 17.09.2024… but i have used it on several occasions afterwards… it auto-scans the plugins upon starting up, so i don't see why the issue occurred only today…

any help is appreciated  ! thanks ! 🙏