Sounds / VST handling a real mess in synfire

Hi Henrik,

I'm sorry to hear about your frustration. Arrangements are saved and re-opened successfully all the time. It's a core function everything else depends on. Everyone uses it on a daily basis. Therefore I suspect something else went wrong with your setup.

It's difficult to tell without having a look, so if you can send me a screenshot of that arrangement's rack, your global rack, and the error message, we can fix it. Please contact me directly at support at cognitone com. You can send me your rack and arrangement (make a copy and delete all figures, if you are concerned about privacy).

As said, I am confident there's a quick fix once we know what's wrong.

A list of the available plugins , then drag one onto a track, the preset blob gets saved and done.  No additional meta /definition layers.

This works for a DAW, because it doesn't care what notes to play. It merely needs a connection and the rest is up to you. Unfortuntely, in order to render relative figures and harmony to MIDI, Synfire needs more information ...

Looking forward to your mail.

I should say that I have had unlimited problems with drones and loading vst or au plugins. In fact, so far I don't have a clue of how to solve it after many hours of working unsuccessfully on it, sometimes it loads with the list of all of my plugins and imidiately afterwards it stops working, some other times my list is incomplete or non existant, some other times I can see the plugins in the engine 32 list and some other times I dont, I spend hours restarting DAW and Synfire with OSX (10.12.5). What I noticed is that when everything was working I dindt have the audio engine working but now I cant make it work with or without it. Im runing 1.8 but I went back and forth to 1.7.18.

The only progress that I managed to reach is that I see the full list in the engine 32 but not with DAW1 or inside Live like it used to be. I´ve tried also vst and au drones but no luck. BTW the tricky thing is that I see effects but no instruments in DAW1 or Live´s drones. (Live is working good with his own vst, au or native plugins)

The sadest part is that I´ve posted before and nobody replied. Please help.

G

Thanks for posting the screenshots.

A licensing issue with one or more Waves plugins seems to cause problems. You should first try and solve that issue. Cognitone can't do anything about it.

On your screenshots, one menu is populated with VSTs, while the AudioUnits menu shows only one manufacturer. You might need to re-scan all plugins: Audio >> Scan Installed Plugins.

Some AudioUnits also no longer support 32 bit. If you run the 32 bit engine, only 32 bit plugins will show up in the menus.

There's a known issue with Soundcase blocking Ableton Live (VST version only), which is being worked on.

As far as I know, all your emails have been replied to. Please let us know if we missed one.

Thanks for answering me

The problem is the same. As you can see I followed all of your recommendations:

1.- I made a folder with VST plugins only for Synfire with only a few plugins and mostly instruments, no effects.

2.- I changed the name of AU folder in order not to be recognizable by Synfire and not having any trouble with Waves and Synfire

3.- I deleted Souncase.vst in order not to mess with Live

4.- I selected "preferred 64-bit Engine" not to load 32bit plugins and I'm only running Engine2/x64.

No luck. No progress. I have only one Audio Unit but it's weird because my AU folder is disabled for Synfire. No VST although I made this folder only for Synfire and no other one is selected so it can not interfere with Synfire.

G

The purpose of plugins is to be shared among all audio apps on your Mac. So renaming folders under /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins is not recommended. Mac OS will not recognize any AudioUnits that are not in the original Components folder. It may be more flexible with VST, but just to be sure, you should stick with the VST and VST3 subfolder names. 

If you want to disable individual plugins, create a Disabled folder and move them there.

With build #4 the issues with Soundcase and the Drones have been resolved. Give it a try.

If you follow these guidelines, a re-scan with Audio >> Scan Installed Plugins should fix it. Don't forget to set your VST path to the original folder before you start the scan.

Thanks again. 

I should say that I love Synfire Pro but there is still a long way to walk through.

After a long process of trial and error, I discovered that you the plugin scan refreshing system is pretty messy. It is not saying accurately after a "scan and reset" or "scan" or "update" what the active plugins actually are. This is very annoying and time-consuming.

What I notice is that if you turn off the engine and turn it on again it gives you sometimes, not always the plugins that are actually active.

I removed every plugin from VST and Components folders and I started to add plugins by brand one by one until I don't have that label saying "Synfire failed to load the following plugins", so as I said before after hours of moving files, scanning, updating and turning off and on engine while rebooting mac os x, Synfire and Live. I finally managed to have an accurate list of plugins in both Live and Synfire Pro.

This process should be definitely easier so I really beg you to improve this part.

I never managed to run all plugins that I have (It takes a lot of time to try them all with this long test process) so I just sent the ones that I don't use to a Disable folder and that's it, but as you said I started removing Waves plugins from both VST and Components folder. Afterward, I noticed that Soundtoys always boot with problems, also Native Instruments is failing while loading and specially Sineves plugins.

All the best.

G
 

The procedure you describe is not necessary.

Don't get confused by the message "Synfire failed to load the following plugins". This will also show up for 32 bit VSTs during a 64 bit scan, and vice versa. It does not mean the plugin is not usable.

There is no need to move your plugins in and out of folders. Just stick with the default folders (on a Mac) and let the scan run from start to finish without interfering. It takes care of itself. If a plugin is not usable, it will hang for 30 seconds or so and then continue with the next plugin.

Some plugins might pop up a message that you will need to confirm or click away. Beyond that, no interaction is required.

We've never seen any Native Instruments plugin that would not work with Synfire. If you encounter this, there might be other issues involved.

I see that while scanning it goes to 32 and 64 but even AU sometimes are failing to load. Actually I wasnt paying a lot of attention to this but I noticed that when it stoped giving pop ups with failures I started to see my complete list of plugins.

Maybe because I have so many different plugins I'm an isolated case and with my feedback trouble I'm trying to make it easier for the DAW and Synfire to read or recognize plugins.

Anyway as I said NI plugins are only listed in that failure pop up but when they manage to appear on the list they work very good. The problem is the refreshing system that is not accurate and it tends to not show ANY plugin if something fails.

I think I'm having this problem as well. Synfire Express worked 100% but since upgrading to Pro, the 64bit seems to not load anything. The 32bit is loading basic VST/ect, but yeah. I started my entire computer scratch recently and all my other programs are working fine.

I'm hoping to have this fixed, I enjoy Synfire and don't want to have to start begging for a Pro refund and go back to Express.

No worries. Since Express worked fine, Pro will also work, because all installation, setup and audio engine code is identical. Thanks for opening a support case. We'll find out what went wrong on your Mac after the upgrade.

Since 1.8.0 the 64 bit engine became the default engine. If that possibly caused an unwanted side effect on your installation, it will be an easy fix.

In some cases it might help to reset all remainders of any previously failed scans by deleting these files in /Users/<yourname>/Library/Application Support/Cognitone: