u-he Plugins Still Stealing Focus in Bitwig v5 on Windows 10

[PieBerger]

Hello!

I finally got around to installing and using Bitwig 5 on the Win10 PC in my studio, but unfortunately it seems that u-he plugin windows are still stealing focus i.e. click on the UI and hitting space on the QWERTY keyboard to start playback no-longer works. This behaviour was present in v4 too, but on MacOS it's no longer an issue.

Are you guys aware of this behaviour, if so, can you offer any advice for a fix? It is a major workflow killer, so much so that I can't really program patches on my PC anymore. I can happily work on my MacBook, but longterm I would like to be able to use my u-he plugins efficiently, without wanting to punch my screen  especially Hive, which is I use for 95% of my sound design.

I will report the behaviour to Bitwig support too, so that they are aware and can hopefully offer offer a solution or a timeline for a fix etc.

Thanks!

[tasmaniandevil]

I just tried it with Bitwig 5.0.4 on macOS, on Linux and on Windows 10.
And there is no general problem, the space key still works to start/stop playback in Bitwig, even while the plugin interface is in focus.

[PieBerger]

I just tried it with Bitwig 5.0.4 on macOS, on Linux and on Windows 10.
And there is no general problem, the space key still works to start/stop playback in Bitwig, even while the plugin interface is in focus.

Thanks for getting back to me Tas. How many screens are you using, just the one or multiple? I'm having this issue on my Windows PC with a two screen setup, however, a couple of friends who use BWS5 on Windows, but with a single monitor only, both reported the same as you, that plugin windows do not steal focus.

Naturally, the next step for me would be to test again with dual monitors and then again with one of them disconnected to see if that changes the behaviour. I will do this tonight after work and report back

[tasmaniandevil]

That's an interesting detail.
On Mac I could test this with two displays, and it works fine, doesn't matter if the plugin is placed on one or the other display.
On Windows and Linux I could only test it on single display setups.
Might be something to report to Bitwig.

[PieBerger]

That's an interesting detail.
On Mac I could test this with two displays, and it works fine, doesn't matter if the plugin is placed on one or the other display.
On Windows and Linux I could only test it on single display setups.
Might be something to report to Bitwig.

The plot thickens. One of my aforementioned friends was kind enough to repeat the test but with multiple displays and they got the same result as a single display i.e. plugins did not steal focus. We can therefore confidently rule out it being a general problem with multi-display setups and consider it an issue with my specific setup. We have an assortment of displays kicking around at the office, so I can borrow a couple to check if the problem can be pinned down to my existing displays specifically. In any case, I'll be able to return to yourselves and Bitwig support with a decent amount of data for you to scratch your heads over.

[tasmaniandevil]

Thrilling developments, very curious case. Keep us posted on the progress.

[OdoSendaidokai]

Testing one Screen Setup on Linux (Kubuntu 22.04) it doesn't work. But it neither works for eg. SurgeXT. BTW that never worked here and reported that to Bitwig long time ago. But they said they couldn't recreate it.

[PieBerger]

Thrilling developments, very curious case. Keep us posted on the progress.

I spent some time yesterday afternoon on this and the problem appears to have, rather annoyingly, fixed itself. Obviously I'm happy it has gone away but I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to determine exactly why it presented itself in the first place nor understand what I did differently to change the behaviour...

One curious thing I did note is that on one occasion I was able to "break it" and revert back to focus stealing behaviour after switching to Triple Display mode (I only have two displays) and Tablet mode. Switching back to any of the Single or Dual display modes fixed it again and unfortunately (for troubleshooting purpose anyway) I was unable to repeat the behaviour by switching back and forth between these two views and the others.

I'll continue to keep an eye on it and if it does pop up again, at the very least, I can try switching the views to see if that forces the program to behave itself!

[anoise]

I can confirm focus stealing is happening here too, in Bitwig 5 and Diva, VST3/Win 11, single PC monitor.

[D-Fusion]

I can confirm focus stealing is happening here too, in Bitwig 5 and Diva, VST3/Win 11, single PC monitor.

Works fine here (Repro and Diva).
I Also use Bitwig 5 on Windows 11 but i use the Vst 2 versions since they are recommended over Vst 3 on Windows.

So maybe it is a Vst 3 Problem or do you use the Sandboxing built in Bitwig?

If i have a option between Vst 2 and Vst 3 i always Choose Vst 2 since i know it works as it should while Some Vst 3 plugins are still a bit Quirky in some vst's and Daws.

[PieBerger]

I can confirm focus stealing is happening here too, in Bitwig 5 and Diva, VST3/Win 11, single PC monitor.

Works fine here (Repro and Diva).
I Also use Bitwig 5 on Windows 11 but i use the Vst 2 versions since they are recommended over Vst 3 on Windows.

So maybe it is a Vst 3 Problem.

If i have a option between Vst 2 and Vst 3 i always Choose Vst 2 since i know it works as it should while Some Vst 3 plugins are still a bit Quirky in some vst's and Daws.

I tried VST2, VST3 and CLAP during yesterday's tests on my Windows PC and they all worked fine, except the one time they didn't when switching to an incompatible view, as detailed above. Once I got it working again, all three formats behaved themselves.

[anoise]

At first there is no stealing. After using the DAW for a while, opening, closing, tweaking different u-he synths, it kicks in. I can't reproduce it, seems it happens randomly.

[PieBerger]

Thrilling developments, very curious case. Keep us posted on the progress.

I've made some progress and I would like you to try something out at your end please A little context first though.

I played around for around 30mins tonight with a simple project, just one channel and a single instance of Diva VST3, nothing else on the channel nor the master and I couldn't reproduce the behaviour. I'm assuming you did something similar at your end, yielding the same result. I swapped out Diva for ZebraHZ and Hive (both VST3), on the same otherwise clean project and similarly could not reproduce the unwanted behaviour. I tried adding a few of my most used plugins, one at a time, into the project, to see if they might be triggers, especially as I've noticed graphical hiccups with some of them previously. This was also a bust.

I then tried opening a much larger project, with multiple instances of ZebraHZ and Hive VST3 and the after opening a random instance of ZebraHZ, the spacebar become unresponsive i.e. I couldn't start/stop the transport. Clicking anywhere on the plugin UI did not bring Bitwig back into focus, nor did clicking on the header of the pop-window. The only way to bring focus and therefore keyboard inputs back into play was by either clicking somewhere in the Bitwig UI e.g. the device panel OR by pressing Alt+Tab and re-selecting the Bitwig window. This is where the test comes in.

On my system I can switch back and forth between focused/not-focused by Alt+Tab selecting the Bitwig window. If I lose focus I can hit Alt+Tab, select the Bitwig window and it comes back immediately. Equally if I am in focus, I can Alt+Tab to (de)select the window and hey presto, I lose focus.

This is a breakthrough because it is indicative of the entire DAW losing focus versus the previously held belief that it was plugin windows stealing focus away from the DAW. It's not a fix, but it's a reproducible behaviour (at my end anyway) and hopefully a good first step towards understanding, what it is about u-he and some other dev's plugins specifically, that causes Windows to toggle focus away from the DAW.

Please kindly recreate the steps/test above i.e. clean Bitwig project>single instance of ZebraHZ, Hive or Diva (or test all three)>Alt+Tab to (de)select Bitwig window>check keyboard inputs e.g. spacebar for transport>Alt+Tab to cycle between states to confirm that unwanted behaviour can be toggled on and off.

Sorry it's a bit of a long one, brevity isn't my strong suit

I don't expect you to be able to come up with a solution straight away, but if you could confirm that you can reproduce the behaviour at your end, according to the same criteria, at least I'll know that I'm not going mad and or that my PC isn't out to get me!

Thanks!

edit: fixed some typos

[tasmaniandevil]

Will try this in a few days.
I had meanwhile experienced the problem one single time over here and already created a ticket in our database to further investigate this.

[PieBerger]

Will try this in a few days.
I had meanwhile experienced the problem one single time over here and already created a ticket in our database to further investigate this.

Thanks! If there is anything you would like me to try out and report back on, just let me know.