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[d_pert]

Hi all (and the powers that be) ,

I've been messing for a few months now with DX and VST plug-ins added to the DSP Studio and feel compelled to report that in general, the handling is poor and not really useable. I’m continually forced back on the net to look for a truly working, solid VST-host/media player app, but of course there isn’t one. I love MC14 for all its other superiorities and wouldn’t really be happy with any other app even if I found one.

Here are some of the plugins I’ve used. All are purchased, latest versions, and work 100% reliably in Steinberg Cubase 5 (arguably the gold standard VST host  as Steinberg created the VST specification), on the same system(s) with absolutely none of the issues listed further below:

Waves 7 C4 Multiband Compressor (VST)
iZotope Ozone 4.03 Mastering Suite (DX and VST)
IK Multimedia  T-RackS 3 (VST)
IK Multimedia ARC System (VST)

Problems I'm encountering (intermittently, some sporadic, some frequent):
-effect of the plugin is not 'heard' (realized) unless I 'frig' with it, like select another item in the DSP studio for display and then return to it
-crashing of DSP Studio when a track change is made with the DSP Studio open and a plugin panel displayed
-different combinations of up to two plugins resulting in little bit of the previous track being heard when a new track is started (approx. 0.5 second snippet heard, seems to happen when at least one plugin in chain is a DX
-display GUI panel not shown completely, or not shown at all, intermittently
-settings inside plugins intermittently retained through MC14 restarts, or even sometimes closing and reopening of MC14
-authorization/licensing of plugins reset or lost, but no always, after MC14 updates, requiring re-authorization of individual plugins
-plugins not activating or displaying correctly unless MC14 is run elevated

I have experienced all of these issues using either Windows Vista 32-bit or Windows 7 64-bit, with either on-board ASUS HD Audio devices, M-Audio sound cards, and pro IEEE interfaces such as Steinberg’s own MR816csx, and a competing Presonus interface.

I use partition imaging to regress my system to clean state(s) after practically any experiment or attempt to use new software and maintain a clean system, always up to date. And again, I have zero issues (have never had any issues) with any of the same plugins, on the same system(s) using Cubase.

As I prepare once again to search the web for another poorly documented DIY solution, what  I’d really love to see is JRiver open the hood on its VST and DX plug-in support and not just be the only media player app that claims to provide the feature, but that has really dug in and sorted out the bugs in it too. Unless I’m completely missing something here, the VST and DX plugin behaviour in MC14 as it stands is not really useable.

Can anybody alse report the same finding?

[Matt]

Are there any use cases that are reliably reproducible that use plugins that we could install here?

A lot of plugins work quite well (all of them we've tested actually).  But the nature of third-party plugins is that they can depend on a special, undocumented call or call ordering of the host.

[d_pert]

Hi Matt,

I'll e-mail you a copy of one of the plugins I listed, with a description of the usual issue.

[Matt]

Thanks.

I should mention that one known issue is that we've encountered plugins that don't properly support UAC.  Cubase may allow Windows redirection to hide UAC problems, but JRiver does not.

In this case, you either need to run Media Center as administrator or get a fixed version of the plugin from the authors.

[Frobozz]

Would installing the VST dll's outside of the "Program Files" folder get around the UAC (User Account Control) problems/conflicts, at least for some cases?

[Matt]

Would installing the VST dll's outside of the "Program Files" folder get around the UAC (User Account Control) problems/conflicts, at least for some cases?

The problem I'm thinking of is a VST plugin that requires HKLM (protected registry area) write access for its licensing to work.

In this case, the registry is the issue so the install location would not matter.