Some recent VST3 plugins break Renoise's GUI & cause a hard crash

Help, Support & Bugs
1

Since a few weeks ago, I’ve run into several recent plugins that heavily break Renoise’s GUI, essentially making the application unusable, and often also hard crash the entire host. The simplest way to trigger this, which works consistently pretty much every time is:

  1. Open the plugin editor window.
  2. Click on any of Renoise’s dropdown menus on the menu bar.

Instead of the obvious expected result, Renoise’s GUI just “dims” out, as if to indicate it being out of focus or presence of some modal dialog. The GUI becomes uninteractable via mouse, and generally inoperable. Keyboard shortcuts still work, but even trying to open a new project will just hang Renoise indefinitely.

Video example of this behavior: https://i.imgur.com/EKilyb8.mp4

I’ve so far found three vendors with whose plugins this bug occurs:

  1. Sub Ninja by The Him DSP (demo, or available for free)
  2. NA 501 Chorus Echo by Nembrini Audio (demo version)
  3. Codec by Lese (free, happens also with the Sweep plugin, which is also free)

All of these plugins are only available as VST3, not VST2.

In addition to the GUI just “bugging out”, Renoise also becomes completely unstable, and often crashes almost immediately afterwards, or within a handful of seconds. Here’s another example of triggering the bug with the Codec plugin, and then clicking back on the plugin GUI, causing Renoise to hard crash immediately: https://i.imgur.com/Ci6h9on.mp4

I’m not seeing any obvious connection between these plugins, especially considering that they’re from different vendors. I do kind of suspect that they might be using JUCE, which perhaps introduced some sort of incompatibility in a recent update. Other than that I don’t have any good guesses what might be the culprit behind all three (or four) of these. Just overall the fact that this happens with several completely unrelated plugins makes me thing that the issue here might be with Renoise this time around, or that it’s at least worth taking a look at.

The logs don’t really contain anything too helpful, but here’s a relevant bit pertaining to the second crash anyway:

Vst3Plugs: Instantiating: C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\Lese\codec.vst3\Contents\x86_64-win\codec.vst3…
Vst3Plugs: Failed to apply initial component state to controller (not critical)

Error Message: Ouch. The VST3 plugin ‘Lese: Codec’ crashed in its editor window.
Error Message: IMPORTANT: This is a fatal error. Please save the current document under a !new! name to prevent losing important data.
Error Message: It’s most likely that this is a bug in the VST plugin, so please report this problem to the authors of this plugin in order to get the problem fixed!

I’m using Renosie 3.4.3 and an up to date Windows 10 installation, with up to date NVIDIA drivers.

3

I’ve got the same setup as you (Win10 and Renoise 3.4.3), but I cannot confirm the error.
I checked Sub Ninja by The Him DSP and it behaves as expected, have a look:
SNR

1 Like
4

Same here, no problems using sub ninja.

Does it matter if you alternate between different audio drivers, asio, directsound, wasabi etc and try to replicate? Do you run the vst’s in sandbox yes/no?

5

No, I don’t run VSTs in sandboxes. But I checked what happens if, and there’s no difference. Sub Ninja still works fine. And I don’t have any of the drivers that you’ve named. I’ve got the drivers for my “Soundblaster Z” sound card, my “Scarlett Solo” audio interface and the “Realtek High Definition Audio” driver, that’s it. No problems at all.

Edit:
Not sure if you were talking about the device type:
RDT
No matter what I choose (DirectSound, WASAPI, ASIO), the result remains the same. Sub Ninja is working.

6

Sorry for being unclear, those questions were directed at Noby as he’s experiencing the buggy behavior and we don’t :slight_smile: . But good one on A/B’ing the sandboxing question as this can exclude it being an issue probably.

7

No, I/O device or driver doesn’t make a difference. Forgot about the plugin sandboxing, but it also doesn’t help. With sandboxing enabled though I get slightly different behavior, with the plugin(s) crashing immediately if I interact with the GUI in any way:
image

Sandboxing turned on Renoise also doesn’t hard crash, instead just producing the above dialog. This hardly helps at all though in practice since the GUIs still aren’t usable (and the sandboxing option isn’t feasible for me to use in normal operation in the first place due to latency and performance reasons).

I also tried replicating this on my laptop, but was unable to. Aside from the hardware differences, the software side and config I have there should be more or less exactly the same. No issues though, all of the aforementioned plugins work just fine. It’s just on my main desktop PC that these issues occur on.