Hello,

As anyone else had trouble with Plogue Bidule, the latest version from Sister Site, and VST3s suddenly ceasing to work and/or not work to begin with?

It's strange because it has nothing to do with cracked/etc . . . and sometimes, like with Ring of Saturn, they work at first, then stop (Blue Cat's have done this, too).

It definitely seems to be more of the case with plugins that use a JUCE Gui. If there' s a VST2 version, it always works just fine. The Plugins are still in the list, but when I go to actually load them, the next submenu just refuses to appear.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has figured out how to fix this and/or if the newest version has fixed the problem.

It's one of those things where, as of writing, I'm definitely going to buy Bidule since it's the best of all these modular hosts I've tried (unless, possibly, the newest version of New Sonic Arts Freestyle pops up and turns out to be better).

Thanks.

 

My guess is that a relatively small company as Plogue doesn't have the resources for extensive testing when it comes to stability. Notice they haven't even made yet v1.0.0.

It's a shame because it's an amazing product as you said. I used it for quite a while. But I've switched to DDMF Metaplugin or the free Kushview Element for the same problems than you have.

 

All around, Bidule is better than either of those, but they do have certain features that are better. Bidule handles incoming MIDI better and loads more plugins than DDMF, but it lacks certain other features. It seems like it's a VST3 thing, like VST3 was implemented, and people are only sort of figuring out certain things, it's like how some older Synthmaker or Synthedit modules behave strangely, but it seems to be worse with JUCE because it automates so much just to look nice.

Synthedit looks the most "low tech", but functions the best, Synthmaker looks good, but tends to be CPU intensive, and JUCE looks the best, but tends to have the most errors . . .

It's just how programing languages work, lower end languages, like Synthedit, automate less, but work better (the modules are all C++ native), but JUCE is buggier, even though it automates more, but it's sluggish and error prone.

 

i've never used it personally, but I have actually only heard good things about the programmer's work on that product. It also does not look very graphics heavy; more like old Reaktor. Someone mentioned this app being "in perpetual beta stage, and that it is coded with expiration dates". I don't know about all that, but I wouldn't have so quickly jumped away from the problem being caused by any free/beta version you have been trying to use. You've got some correlation vs causation at work, and it could be something simple like bad release, expired beta, or any number of things. I think I might even appreciate getting a blank gui on expired demo, more than it making random noises at me.

 

The version I'm using is from Sister Site, I think it's just something about the VST3 that the programmer has realized by now, i.e. the newest version PROBABLY fixes it, but there might be a workaround. It almost seems like something goes wrong with the database that tracks them/etc . . . But, if I just deleted that completely, it might rescan them correctly and fix the problem.

In general, I think it's just that VST3 is new and stuff like JUCE implements brings in unknowns that people are still realizing, like any programming language, basically.

I'd just be interested to know if other people had the problem and found a fix for it. It may also just be that I have a lot of plugins, since I like layering them in unusual fashions, i.e. some older plugins that sound "bad" actually sound quite good if you use them in layers since they're very light on CPU by modern day standards, you can stack, delay, etc . . . them in all manner of ways other than what was intended.