Hi all,
I’ve been asking for this for years, a way to protect de DAW from plugin crashes The new Bitwing DAW will do it:
It’s a great idea, well implemented.
Best,
Thanks for the link. I mentioned this many years ago as well. Bitwig have done a great job of implementing it. Mind you it’s much easier to do this as you’re building a new engine than modifying an existing one that was never designed to do this.
But it would be reassuring to know that your project won’t fall apart because of a rogue plugin. Maybe it’s time to redesign the engine. Again.
Odd coincidence: my N5-64 started crashing on startup very likely because of a plugin.
Wish I knew which one…
Why not make a bootable snapshot disk before you install the suspect plug-ins? There are plenty of incremental backup utilities around.
Oh yeah… Please…
+1
If you watch the video carefully, you can discover that every plugin has its own thread in the OS and it can be 32 o 64 bits. That’s a very intelligent way to do it. Steinberg did something similar with PPC plugs on a intel machine, but it did not work well.
Considering the number of piugins some of us like to experiment with, this wouldn’t be a very efficient methodology. And certainly not as quick as the host telling you a plugin crashed, identifying the plugin in the process and making it possible to continue working without other consequence.
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This!
Holy thread necro batman! 
So the reason why they probably don’t do it is latency and high workloads. To isolate plugins you don’t run them in a separate thread, that won’t do it, you run them in a separate process. That works and isolates stuff well, your browser does that (and is part of the reason modern browsers gobble memory) but it has a cost: Every time you switch back and forth from the plugin to the host, you have a context switch and that costs performance. It takes time for the CPU to switch contexts as it has to (oversimplifying a bit here) save the state of the application and restore it.
That is fine if you are doing something with a few plugins/tracks, but if you get the big honkin’ projects that Nuendo is designed for, you’ll bleed performance and have issues. So not something you’d probably want as an always on feature.
If you wanted to do isolation like that probably the best way is a tool like Jbridge or Vienna Ensemble Pro that runs the plugins in a separate process.