That "disappearing" plugin thing; still in C9?

I’m referring to the issue here:

In short, there’s a bug whereby after a certain number of plugins are loaded, new ones can’t be added. What’s worse, some plugins can actually become unloaded in the saved project; vanished without a trace, which of course SERIOUSLY affects mix recall. Some people reported that using jBridge fixes it in C8-8.5, but now there are some issues with jBridge in C9 apparently…?

Can anyone who’s familiar with this confirm that it’s still an issue in C9? I know that Steinberg probably didn’t actively implement a fix, but since there’s clearly been some changes in the way VST plugins are handled, I’m holding out hope that it got fixed “accidentally”.

To reiterate the point I made in the Cubase 8 forum…I’m amazed that this issue still exists. It’s cost me tens of hours.

Until the issue has been completely resolved there’s no way that I’m going to update to Cubase 9.

Hello,

this is not fixed on our side yet, although a good share of work has been done already. To sum it up, this is due to a limitation of dll slots in Microsoft’s Runtime library (when the library is loaded statically rather than dynamically). It cannot be fixed ‘by accident’ I’m afraid - and Steinberg can only partially fix this on its side.

Current status:
– Lower the amount of slots occupied by Cubase itself
– Identifying 3rd-party vendors that occupy more slots per instance
– Contact 3rd-party vendors to dynamically link to the C Runtime library, rather than statically
– Get rid of an issue affecting devs who are still on Win7 (I have no further tech details on this)
– Discuss with Yamaha for changes on their side (to further reduce the amount of loaded dlls)

Thanks for the reply Fabio. Appreciate any and all communication on this issue because it has been very debilitating for me on several projects…

Is there any approximation as to when a fix will be rolled out? I understand that not everything is up to Steinberg, but even a partial fix would be welcome at this point (allowing more plugins to be loaded by reducing the amount of dll’s used).

Hello,

I know the course of action will be finalised in January and I hope it can make it to the following build.

For the time being, those who have the problem can lower the amount of loaded dlls by moving some of the components out of the folder C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 9\Components. Of course, this applies only to the dlls which are not needed during use (eucon if you don’t use such controllers, video files if you don’t need video support, hubservice, etc - make sure to not remove any core component like Baios, the exception dumper, mediaservice, SamplerTack, stepdesigner and the VST files). This will allow for more plug-ins… not much more, but could help some of you.

The ultimate solution would be unique processes per VST, wouldn’t it?

The solutions are mainly two: either MS removes the slot limitation (or increases the amount of usable slots) or all developers could switch to dynamically loaded libraries. I’m unaware of the reasons for this limitation and our developers wanted to get in contact with MS as well, but as the second would cover the majority of use cases, it’s the way to go for now.

DAWs start a new thread per channel, I don’t think it’s possible to spread the processing of VSTs on the same channel on more processing threads, but a dev would say better.

Thanks for the insight. It’s true that a processing chain has to happen sequentially and can’t happen in multiple threads at the same time. I was thinking of the DAWs that “sandbox” plugins but I don’t know the details on this either.

I’ve never encountered this. What sort of number of different plugins in a project might cause a problem?

It’s highly dependent on how the libraries are loaded by the plug-in. Plug-ins loading libraries dynamically do not cause problems, those loading statically do. But it is very difficult to state a number, as some plug-ins may occupy more than one ‘slot’.

There’s some good info on this issue in Google and the finger can really be pointed squarely at Microsoft.

What I think is interesting is that I’ve never heard anyone mention this in relation to FL Studio.

Maybe FL isn’t compiled with VC 2015, they might still be using 2012.

-E

That would solve it?

No, there’s no silver bullet at all.

Fabio, today I updated to 9.0.10 I worked on final mix and I opened my project again with missing plug ins. I assume that there is no changes on this build yet?
Please, say only to know what we have. It’s extremly time consuming issue, even insert freezing didn’t help. Only exporting track with inserts helped. Good to have selected tracks import to reopen some…
But sometimes is difficult to know whch plugs are missing at all.
Please say that it will solved soon, I have big problems.

Thank you!

I’ll also poke on a Status Update for this. I’m still on Cubase 8 and won’t upgrade until I know the issue is resolved. The issue has cost me (without exaggeration) upwards of 15-20 hours of work.

Poking again. Still no status update? This issue was first reported on the Forums over a year ago.

Hello,

work on our side is in progress, but let me clarify again that this cannot be solved by Steinberg alone.

I understand, but is there no way for this to be prioritized more heavily by both Steinberg and Microsoft? Or perhaps at least a realistic ETA?

It’s been a debilitating issue for over a year now and doesn’t seem to affect other DAWs.