Erratic behavior

[moon]

Hi All,

Audacity, with the plug-ins installed, works just fine on my simple old '98SE test machine. However, it refuses to function on my DAW (Win2K with lots of other audio apps.) It works fine on its own, but refuses to open if the plug-ins are installed. If I delete the plug-ins folder it functions fine. Has anybody any experience of this behaviour ?

[kozikowski]

Does it do that with Audacity 1.3? 1.2 had shaky support for some plugins and I'm not shocked that they won't work on a machine that already has goodness knows how many audio helper programs running.

Put the folder back empty. Does that work? Put the plugsins back in groups and see which ones fail.

Koz

[steve]

My guess would be the VST enabler. If you can live without VST effects in Audacity it will probably work.

[moon]

I haven't tried 1.3 yet. I'll do that first and then try those other suggestions if necessary. Thanks for the input. Back later.

[moon]

OK, version 1.3 behaved exactly the same. I cut rows of files from the Plug-ins folder and eventually identified file ' vst-bridge.dll' as the culprit. The program opens fine without it.

Any suggestions for a fix ? I don't need vst facilities in Audacity but I'd prefer to have a choice.

There's also another problem. Both versions give me repeat echo on record and playback and I don't have any repeat echo set up on anything that I'm aware of. The only other app. which is open whilst using Audacity is my E-mu Patchmix, my sound-card's mixer. There's no repeat echo set up on that.

[steve]

and eventually identified file ' vst-bridge.dll' as the culprit.

Eventually?
The VST enabler is at present only able to support some VST plugins, and even then, without full graphical support. Ir will, however, attempt to enable all the VST plugins that it can find. Unfortunately, this means that if you stick it into a machine that is loaded with VST plug-ins, the chance of one or more of those plug-ins being incompatible and spoiling the show, is very high.

VST support in Audacity is not complete for two reasons - Steinberg places restrictions on the use of the VST SDK code, and there are a very wide range of plug-ins from many sources, all of which it is impossible to test.

There is a list of plug-ins that are reported to work well with Audacity available here: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... T_Plug-ins (also a short list of ones that are known to not work).

If you want to use ' vst-bridge.dll' with Audacity, you will need to go through all the VST plug-ins that are installed on your computer, and find out which ones are compatible and which ones are not.

Applying "Murphy's Law" will probably find that there are some that work great and are really useful with your other music software that totally screw up Audacity. On the positive side, there are loads of free LADSPA and Nyquist plug-ins that work great with Audacity.

[moon]

If you want to use ' vst-bridge.dll' with Audacity, you will need to go through all the VST plug-ins that are installed on your computer, and find out which ones are compatible and which ones are not.

Thanks, Fiddle, but it's simpler for me to use Audacity on a different machine and transfer files when required. I'm using it as a common denominator with some musical friends scattered around the world.

This problem is far more serious, however. I repeat from my previous post;

There's also another problem. Both versions give me repeat echo on record and playback and I don't have any repeat echo set up on anything that I'm aware of. The only other app. which is open whilst using Audacity is my E-mu Patchmix, my sound-card's mixer. There's no repeat echo set up on that.

I'm not getting this problem when recording or playing back using other sequencers, so I don't think that Patchmix is at fault.

[steve]

Check in "Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O" and make sure that "software playthrough" is not selected.