melda issues with cubendo:solved; cubendo x86 sucks

[yesandknow]

first and foremost - congrats on an awesome bundle of plugins!

(also proud they're coming from the czech republic.)

i'd just like to chime in and see if i could get any suggestions re: a common issue that happens with certain plugins when used in cubendo.

(i'm currently using cubase 6 0 4, although this issue pertains all the way back to nuendo 3 as far as i can remember.)

what i'm talking about is the infamous 'no gui' bug -- this happens with certain plugins only (native intruments being especially prone to this behaviour, also soundtoys and quite a few more). in layman's terms, this usually happens with plugins that are a bit more 'complex' and take a little longer to load. unfortunately for me, melda plugins are among those as well.

when taking up the issue w/ steinberg (many people have inquired, it's not a problem only i'm having), it's the usual passing of the hot potato, eg 'it's not me, it's the vst plugin developer!'; or alternatively 'it's not me, it's teh windows!'. what's pitiful is that other hosts seem to often handle those same troublesome plugins seamlessly, while the inventor of the vst standard cannot seem to cope with them.

anyway, below are three types of faulty behaviour that i've found:

-- 1/ the plugin loads into the insert slot, but no GUI is displayed, just an empty frame; when switching to text mode ('switch to generic editor' in c6; ctrl+alt+shift+edit button in previous versions), the plugin controls are present and the plugin processes audio.
-- 2/ the plugin loads into the insert slot, but no GUI is displayed; when switching to text mode, there is nothing and the plugin doesn't process any audio. when unloading the plugin from the slot, versions of C5 and earlier would often crash the whole DAW. C6 seems more stable, and usually just unloads the faulty instance.
-- 3/ the CPU seems to be loading the plugin, but nothing appears in the insert slot at all; as if the user hadn't done anything.
-- 4/ an attempt to load the plugin into the insert slot just crashes the DAW at once.

#4 has never happened to me w/ melda luckily; 1, 2 & 3 all have happened to me.

solutions?
-----------

--as i've investigated into the issue, it seems this could be memory / gfx memory related. it usually only happens on larger projects (usually when cubase takes up around 800MB+ of RAM as reported by the task manager).

--i've tried both changing the size of the pagefile as well as disabling it altogether, and disabling the physical memory extension (to use more than 3GB of RAM within a 32-bit windows system) -- to no luck.

--another possible culprit that came up during my search was a certain registry setting that windows uses to calculate how much memory to allocate for displaying windows. it seems there's only a certain amount of memory preallocated to display windows, and when too many are displayed, it can run out of memory, hence produce GUI errors. (more on this here for example: http://blogcastrepository.com/blogs/mat ... /2013.aspx )

--again, changing these registry settings hasn't helped (btw. this issue only seems to relate to XP and prior systems; win7 should run smooth, and i have tested C6 on both XPpro and win7 and the same thing seems to happen on both systems).

--it appears once a projects starts to have issues with loading those troublesome plugins, it's somehow cursed for eternity; eg, loading any of the plugins that are susceptible to the 'no gui' issue will indeed produce an empty frame with no gui, or crash the host, or the plugin will not load -- and restarting the host won't help...

i'm pretty much running out of ideas now.

since taking this up with the big companies, esp. with someone as rude as steinberg, is quite pointless, i was hoping i may get some more insight on here!

cheers for any help, and keep up the awesome work!

-lukas / prague

[MeldaProduction]

Hi Lukas,

first of all, thank you! .

Now what you are talking about is "out of memory" indeed. There is a pretty simple way to simulate this actually , on 32-bit Windows - take all plugins, and put them into the project, one by one. At one moment there is no memory anymore and plugins first stop showing GUI and then they stop loading at all, since even the executable doesn't fit there.

This can hardly be fixed as the plugins just need that memory, they cannot work without it. Lots of it is probably related to graphics, which proofs your theory about "only more complicated plugins do that".

But there is quite a simple solution - just get 64-bit OS and potentially upgrade graphics card. There was one case, where enabling sonogram caused problems with audio processing and we found that it was because of the internal onboard graphics card. Personally I use Win7 64 with "just" 4GB memory and some passive graphics and it works without the problem at all. But when I use 32-bit Cubase, the problem occurs again.

[yesandknow]

hey

cheers for the reply!

i forgot to mention i did try switching my graphic card; the ATI chips _supposedly_ work better with cubendo, so i got a cheap ATI (switching from an nVIDIA chip) -- again, this didn't change anything (it was argued the less memory the GFX card has, the better, as it shadows its memory in physical RAM, therefore reducing the RAM available for other processes). (though i'm still a little perplexed as to why a different host would accomodate those same plugins w/o running out of RAM... is the cubase core that much RAM-hungry?)

anyhow, cheers for the suggestion to go 64-bit. what i'm indeed concerned about is running 32bit plugins seamlessly within a 64bit DAW. are the currently available bridges 100% (ok, at least 80%) reliable?

also, i've read on various forums that the 64bit version of cubase turned out less stable and people ended up squeezing less juice out of their CPUs inside a 64bit cubase, as opposed to running a 32bit cubase on a 64bit win7.

i know this hardly relates to melda and is definitely more a steiny [vs audio interface] issue, but since we already have a discussion going, and more productive one compared to the feedback you receive from steinberg... i wanted to ask anyway.

edit: just an idea related to possibly boosting the available RAM for plugins -- win7 enables using flash disk memory as additional RAM; do you reckon this could help inside a 32bit OS when physical address extension is already engaged?

thanks!

[MeldaProduction]

Ok, so with 64-bits - I personally use Cubase 6 64 with no problems. In fact it is the first Cubase version, which seems stable .

Of course with 32-bit plugins you are in trouble. In my opinion bridges are not reliable at all. It's like some extreme temporary solution, but there are problems with GUI, CPU usage, latency... The best idea is to stick with 64bit plugins only.

With the flash drive - I don't think so. It's a pretty smart move, which however ended up with no significant gain in speed afaik. It basically means that Windows can store executables on flash drives for quicker system startup and they can use it for swapping as well. But it doesn't solve your problem with memory. When the address space is full, then it's just full and you can't do anything about it. Swapping doesn't help here, because the apps/plugins just cannot get an address to the additional memory. It's like trying to buy a land on Mars, but Mars has already been sold .

[yesandknow]

thanks for the replies.

alas the dreaded move to 64bit seems inevitable...

[MeldaProduction]

thanks for the replies.

alas the dreaded move to 64bit seems inevitable...

Yeah, but don't, it's pretty fine on Windows... less so on Mac...