Free DLYM (modulation fx) from Imaginando

[biscuitdough]

When wanting to install it it asks me to to add an entry to environment path, never saw this with a plugin before, anyone know what's up with this ?

DLYM.jpg

I have a habit of unpacking installers to see what they will do before actually running them. I was surprised to see it was doing this.

The plugin is dynamically linking to the OpenGL ES library. Basically, what this means is the plugin needs to load the library at runtime and to be able to do this it has to be able to find the path to the OpenGL ES DLLs. The way windows searches for DLLs is actually rather non-trivial.

One of the ways to make sure your DLL is always found is to stick the path in your systems PATH environment variable. This is basically a list of paths the system knows to search in. It's the reason you can just type "notepad" in a terminal without knowing the full path to notepad.exe.

However, polluting your system PATH with DLLs is extremely bad practice, as it can lead to a fun little thing called DLL Hell. This is bad.

If you really don't care you can just install it and it will likely be OK. If you don't want to take chances you can unpack the installer and drop the OpenGL ES libraries into the same folder as the plugin DLL.

I just installed and tried DLYM out before reading this. Does the uninstaller correct the path or am I going to need to manually fix this? I'm an IT admin for work (like probably 40% of people here) so I'm sure I can handle it but I'd certainly prefer it to clean up after itself.

[Obsolete462444]

Looks like a fun plugin, but the installer is indeed a PITA. It doesn't allow to point to the correct VST directory (Windows) and installs AAX by default, which I don't want or need. I find it astounding that a company that develops sophisticated audio DSP code is unable to create a proper installer, which is orders of magnitude simpler than coding audio algorithms.