Moduleinfotool.exe LoadLibrary: access denied

Developer VST 3 SDK
1

I’m trying to use the new moduleinfotool that came with 3.7.5 but unfortunately, it seems to be having issues loading the plugin to parse it. The LoadLibraryW call fails with an Access Denied error, I checked the code and the path to my vst seems fine. The permission on the file seems a bit odd but I changed to the windows equivalent of a 777 without any luck.
Am I missing something, does the tool need to be signed somehow? (I’m on Windows 11 using VS2022).
I realize that most hosts aren’t yet supporting this new json format, but I figured I might as well start using it.

Thanks,

Matt

2

the access denied error might be a red herring, after commenting out the moduleinfotool call, I noticed that the validator is also failing, but with a different error: failed: The specified module could not be found. I’ll dig more later to see if something my missing in my test plugin so it wouldn’t be valid. I kind of wish the validator was providing more useful information.

3

I took a look at the compiled dll using dumpbin /exports

File Type: DLL

  Section contains the following exports for yourplugin.vst3

    00000000 characteristics
    FFFFFFFF time date stamp
        0.00 version
           1 ordinal base
           3 number of functions
           3 number of names

    ordinal hint RVA      name

          1    0 002D863C ExitDll = @ILT+79415(ExitDll)
          2    1 002C67CA GetPluginFactory = @ILT+6085(GetPluginFactory)
          3    2 002DAAF4 InitDll = @ILT+88815(InitDll)

  Summary

        1000 .00cfg
       67000 .data
        6000 .idata
       89000 .pdata
      1D2000 .rdata
       17000 .reloc
        1000 .rsrc
      5D6000 .text
      2C4000 .textbss
        1000 .tls

Compared to noteexprenssionsynth.vst3

 Section contains the following exports for noteexpressionsynth.vst3

    00000000 characteristics
    FFFFFFFF time date stamp
        0.00 version
           1 ordinal base
           3 number of functions
           3 number of names

    ordinal hint RVA      name

          1    0 002F746F ExitDll = @ILT+83050(ExitDll)
          2    1 002E48E7 GetPluginFactory = @ILT+6370(GetPluginFactory)
          3    2 002F9ADF InitDll = @ILT+92890(InitDll)

  Summary

        1000 .00cfg
       6B000 .data
        6000 .idata
       8E000 .pdata
      1E4000 .rdata
       18000 .reloc
        1000 .rsrc
      614000 .text
      2E2000 .textbss
        1000 .tls

Is there a way to know what’s wrong/failing in this case?

4

Well… turns out the issue was that my project was failing to link zlib which was the root cause of all my issues…

If anyone encounters a similar issue, the problem I run into was that I was linking against zlib on mac and coming to windows, I didn’t realize that the linkage will fail at runtime and not give me any feedback. I thought I was doing something wrong in my SDK implementation but it was good old Windows letting me know that I had a dependency that wasn’t available (I had to guess which one).