Help! Audacity Keeps Crashing as Soon as I Start Playing Any File With VST or VST3

[Butters]

Help!

TIA for your help!

I have had a few crashes here and there in the past, I think mostly to user error while I was learning the hot keys and building muscle memory but today after updating to 3.6 I have had 14 crashes.

I have trimmed the audio, normalized it via effects, applied the real time compressor, the VST3 Izotope DeReverb, VST REQ equalizer, Audacity Realtime Limiter and Muze de-esser. While adjusting the de-esser audacity crashed and gave an error message. I clicked to submit but it said it could not send the crash report.

I looked online and did the delete of the 3 files (audacity.cfg, pluginregistry.cfg, and pluginsettings.cfg) via user/username/appdata/roaming/audacity.

I also attempted to deleted the cache via user/username/appdata/local/audacity/session data but my folder was empty.

I uninstalled, deleted all temp files I could from the %temp% folder, restarted PC, verified there were no window updates, restarted, checked GPU driver, restarted, re-installed audacity, started the project over from scratch, applied the real time compressor and the vst3 izotope de-reverb, clicked the timeline to skip ahead in the project, and it crashed. Reloaded with the “recover last project”, pressed play and instantly crashed.

I Opened the recently saved project and pressed play. Instantly crashed.

Opened the recovered project, turned off real time effects, pressed play, no issues. Skipped around, no issues. Turn the real time effects on, instant crash.

Crash report exception code 0xc0000005

The crash report window says:

Operating system: Windows NT
10.0.22631 3880
CPU: amd64
family 25 model 97 stepping 2
32 CPUs

GPU: UNKNOWN

Crash reason: EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION_READ
Crash address: 0x1ad5048f000
Process uptime: 17 seconds

Thread 6 (crashed)
0 VCRUNTIME140.dll + 0x11526
rax = 0x000001ad50153020 rdx = 0x000001ad5048ef64
rcx = 0x000001ad5048cc40 rbx = 0xffffffffffffff50
rsi = 0x0000000000000000 rdi = 0x000001ad50153020
rbp = 0x000000ab8f0ff7a0 rsp = 0x000000ab8f0ff708
r8 = 0xffffffffffcc6330 r9 = 0xffffffffffffffe0
r10 = 0x00007ffacd400000 r11 = 0x0000000000000002
r12 = 0x000001ad57a55930 r13 = 0x00000000000008c9
r14 = 0x0000000000000000 r15 = 0x000000000000089d
rip = 0x00007ffacd411526
Found by: given as instruction pointer in context

and it goes on. I wont post it all.

Not sure if it matters, but I am running windows 11 (upgraded from 10) and the GPU is a MSI 4090.

Not sure what to do next

[DVDdoug]

Compatibility is up to the VST, not the host. I know Izotope doesn’t officially support Audacity so it may not work.

[Butters]

Thanks.

It dawned on me since I have been using it for a while and not had issues that maybe… it was the new audacity real time effects and conflicts of the 2 at the same time.

I disabled just the Izotope, and left just the Audacity compressor and it was fine, so then I thought I would try disabling the Audacity and run the Izotope and it also is fine…

So for whatever reason, running both at the same time, causes crashes. I don’t know if a crash report would indicate so but that is what I am finding out.

In the realm of things, is it that big of a deal to not use a real time compressor and go back to the effects? no. I can run a real time compressor and tune it to my liking and then plug those settings into the effect compressors. Bing bang boom. back to normal

[ericjones]

Your experience is different from mine as I don’t use Izotop but my 3.6.0 and 3.6.1 kept crashing when i selected anything. Went back to 3.5.1
And things are fine. I tried hunting for the dot cfg files but never found them on my Mac. So I’m waiting for 3.6.2. At least I wasn’t in the middle of a project.
ej

[Butters]

Frustrating. I know I could have rolled back and things worked as they had been but since I found it was an issue with using both Audacity real time compressor AND any VST(3)'s it just made sense to go back to compressing the way I had been and avoid the issue.

I will however, use the real time compressor to see where compression will work the most to real time here and make adjustments so the overall track sounds fine.

My process is it trim, reduce sound of ground noise with the “reduce noise” effect or use iZotope de-noise effect (which is impressively good with its adaptive mode), then I will normalize the volume for the whole track. I’ll then apply compression (in 5.6 I would use the "make up gain to 0) and then use the “clip fix” effect over specific clipping spots.

If it were a paid gig I was doing it for, I would probably spend more time fine combing the file, but it’s not, so what I do is good though I probably should spend more time on the EQ but the recorded source isn’t great so there is only so much I can do.

Anyway, hope things get better with the updates for you