Bitwig >3.2.4, JUCE ~5.4.7 plugins and Linux - Anyone experiencing problems?

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Something happened during the course of Bitwig 3 development where a handful of my JUCE based plugins started crashing.
I can go back to previous versions of Bitwig and these same plugins work.

To be specific, when I select one of the plugins in question, the plugin will crash and then allow me to reload it. Upon reloading, the plugin will work, such that it will process audio.
However, once I click to show to the plugin GUI, the crash occurs again.

I've spoken to Harrison Consoles--per their AVA plugins, which are experiencing the problem--and Audio Assault (aIR, plus some others). Both are using JUCE 5.4.7.
From what I gather, the issue is to do with Bitwig, plus recent versions of JUCE and OpenGL. The other constellation is Linux. Although, I can't be sure it's isolated to just Linux.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

abique, kindly, is there any insight you might have?
Thanks.
Last edited by lunardigs on Sun Nov 01, 2020 5:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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I actually found similar behavior using the 3.3 beta and some plugins. Crash when trying to open the GUI. Not happening in 3.2.8. Mac OS Catalina latest.

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lunardigs wrote: Wed Oct 21, 2020 11:46 pm ...
I've spoken to Harrison Consoles--per their AVA plugins, which are experiencing the problem--and Audio Assault (aIR, plus some others). Both are using JUCE 5.4.7.
From what I gather, the issue is to do with Bitwig, plus recent versions of JUCE and OpenGL. The other constellation is Linux. Although, I can't be sure it's isolated to just Linux.

Is anyone else experiencing this?
...
I've seen this in aIR, but only when I try to set Jack below 128 samples for latency. 128+ samples and everything loads great.

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dehuszar wrote: Thu Oct 22, 2020 3:44 am
I've seen this in aIR, but only when I try to set Jack below 128 samples for latency. 128+ samples and everything loads great.
Huh. Interesting ...
I just experimented with this a bit and it doesn't seem to have an effect for me.

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Okay, additional information:
The version of Bitwig where the problems began is 3.2.5. Whatever happened between 3.2.4 and 3.2.5 was enough to cause the breakage.
It could also be that the proprietary nVidia drivers for Linux may be a cause here. Reason being, the same plugins work without crashing on BWS >3.2.4 on my laptop which uses the iGPU and standard Linux display drivers.
Yet, Harrison is not sure about this, nor is Audio Assault. Nonetheless, they've both acknowledged the problem I've described and are continuing to investigate.

Meanwhile, other VST hosts on my desktop do not experience these same crashes as with Bitwig >3.2.4.
To some degree this rules out the combination of OpenGL 3.2, JUCE 5.4.7 and nVidia's driver (455.28 for me) as the strict cause.

Could it be something concerning GPU functionality was changed from BWS 3.2.4 to 3.2.5?

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Another piece: Concerning JUCE, a dev at Harrison told me this:
"... And the addition of the JUCE library further complicates the matter, as they enforce that rendering must happen on a seperate thread than the DSP. Wheras in our XT plugins, we are more at liberty to do both."

If that's so, then I think he's saying the GUI thread is what's crashing inside Bitwig.

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after installing 3.3 b2, i'm suddenly having a lot of plugin crashes and 3.2.8 is behaving badly now too. After launching the app, i get about 2 minutes of decent sound, then suddenly the CPU starts randomly spiking like crazy and produces a ton of glitching. This machine has been running perfectly for two years and suddenly, it's all gone to crap.
edit: nevermind. I tested with Ableton and the same issue is there.

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false alarm with all the dropouts i was experiencing. Turns out that Windows decided to change my power settings to Balanced instead of High Performance.

i still am definitely seeing quite a few plugin crashes when running 3.3 tho...

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3.3 beta 3 no change. Same crashes.

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Further info:
ReAmp Studio by Audio Assault, created with JUCE 5.4.7, demonstrates something.
It's GUI will consistently crash within BWS >3.2.4 when it's graphics is set to "OPENGL". However, it works just fine when set to "NATIVE".

Screenshot_20201101_105921.jpg
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Does they crashes also in other linux daws?

Does your graphic card support the opengl version that ReAmp needs?

In past i had something similar with a old graphic card that didn't had opengl support that a plugin needed. So plugin crashed when opening gui.

If there was no update of the plugins meanwhile then that's not the problem anyway.


I'll give it a try on my linuxbox(also nvidia card) later on day. Don't have the plugin so it will be demo's.

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They do not crash in other Linux DAWs.
My graphics card is an nVidia GTX 1070 (Pascal) and I'm running the official driver, version 455.28 (the latest available to me, AFAIK).

Technically, there should be no problem here. It's a peculiar bug which hasn't quite been identified yet. At least according to the plugin makers in question, and Bitwig support.
I'm told a new nVidia driver is due shortly and to hold tight. I'll report what happens, of course.

Meanwhile, I've contacted Bitwig, prior to opening this thread and they might be looking into it further. I'm not sure. Thus far, they believe it's on the plugin makers to improve their code. Naturally, we're dealing with closed source here, so I'm not sure how that could be assessed from the outside, but that's their assertion. I've also PMed abique and called on him above, but he's not opined on this yet.

Hopefully something turns up here. We'll see.

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Hi,
I've encountered this bug with my own plugin (abNinjam) which does not use JUCE. And indeed crashing started to happen with Bitwig Studio 3.2.5. Later on I've compiled Steinberg Vst SDK example plugins which should be kind of a reference plugins and they crash the same way with Bitwig. I've tried same plugins on REAPER and they work without crashing.

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antanas wrote: Thu Nov 05, 2020 7:43 am Hi,
I've encountered this bug with my own plugin (abNinjam) which does not use JUCE. And indeed crashing started to happen with Bitwig Studio 3.2.5. Later on I've compiled Steinberg Vst SDK example plugins which should be kind of a reference plugins and they crash the same way with Bitwig. I've tried same plugins on REAPER and they work without crashing.
Yeah, I saw abNinjam when I last KVR-searched for Linux plugs. It caught my eye, but I've never used Ninjam before.

So, does abNinjam crash when the GUI is shown? Can you successfully reload the plugin (GUI minimized/un-launched)?

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lunardigs wrote: Fri Nov 06, 2020 10:49 pm So, does abNinjam crash when the GUI is shown? Can you successfully reload the plugin (GUI minimized/un-launched)?
It crashes if computer keyboard key is pressed or GUI is closed. But you can successfully reload the plugin and use it without GUI. Bitwig team are working on fixing this as far as I know. The workaround to stop crashing is changing "Plug-in Hosting Mode" to "Within Bitwig" in Dashboard -> Settings -> Plug-ins. In this case plugins do not crash for me anymore.

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