B4II with the new GP4

Just FYI
I had happily kept running my old 32bit B4II with JBridge wrapper (B4II is a discontinued Native Instruments Hammond VST). Since I ungraded to GP4, there have been two times that a Rackspace has gone completely silent, right after a “pop” noise, and the Rackspace will not make sound again until I delete and re-insert one of the the B4II in that particular Rackspace. (Interesting that only one of two instances of B4II becomes the culprit needing to be replaced)
I hate to give up the B4II, but I will have to give it now. And, hey, I might as well get my money’s worth out of all the other Hammond VST’s I own. (For many songs, I like the B4II better than all the others, but, of course, safe to assume that the nuances I like better it is not something that the general listeners will ever notice).
OH WELL, THAT’S IT FOR THE B4II - GOODBYE OLD FRIEND! :wink:

Hmmm, while we certainly don’t officially support jbridge or anything else to access 32-bit plugins, I’m not aware of any change in GP4 that would stop it from working if it was working with GP3.

I use several bridged plugins, all work fine in GP4 as in GP3.

Now I remember more.
After it happened, (again, I heard a small pop noise, then no sound from one particular Rackspace containing two instances of B4II), I noticed:
1] I could play other Rackspaces normally but going back to the problem Rackspace would give me the same small pop noise and no sound. It is a pop noise I think is associated with the sound engine stopping or starting.
2] When I deleted the output “virtual patch cables” on one particular instance of the two B4II existing in the Rackspace, the Rackspace started producing sounds normally again.
3] The “bad” B4II instance allowed me to save the Preset. Then I deleted and replaced that offending instance of B4II. Then I loaded the saved preset. Then everything was fine again.

THEN THE NEXT DAY, ANOTHER DIFFERENT RACKSPACE CONTAINING B4II had the Pop noise and went silent. It was during rehearsal and have not gone back to fix that one yet.

This reminds me of a thread from a few weeks ago: Rackspaces go dead randomly.

Also a Native Instruments thing, although that was using Komplete Kontrol. In his case I believe going into the wiring view and simply deleting and re-connecting any of the blue audio wiring connections restored his sound.

Why would use 2 instances of B4II in the same rackspace? Do you have more than 2 keyboards? As far as I remember you can have the same instance play a patch on the top keyboard that is different from the bottom keyboard. Maybe I’m mistaken.

I have a powerful 8-core server that I run GP4 on and I have B4II – although it’s sounds are really outdated compared to cheap organ alternatives out there today. VB3, Blue – to name a couple.

I can try to test with 2 instances in the same rackspace and report back if I have the same issue.

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@mikelupo
Notes:
1] On some songs I have two keyboard players with separate monitor routing/mix.
2] I have a pcAudioLabs i7 laptop with 64gb RAM
3] I own most all the Hammond VSTi’s and, just personal taste, I still just like how the B4II sounds, and how it works. (I owned a real C3 for many years so I guess I do have some experience with the real thing :wink: )
4] Thank you for trying a test. :grinning: For me, so far the problem seemed to happen unpredictably, so, so far, I am not aware of any specific steps to recreate the problem.

ok thanks for the clarification. But again, – even if you have 2 keyboard players, do you need more than 2 organ patches? so Keyboardist A plays on a channel which is routed to the B4II vst top keyboard, and Keyboardist B plays on a different channel that’s routed to the bottom keyboard of the B4II vst. That could all use the same B4II vst.

ok I tried B4II on GP4. It worked for a few notes and then the plugin crashed – but not GP. I remember this problem happening on GP2 as well though. The plugin goes blank (VST shows an empty white square) and no sound. Deleting the plugin and re-adding it doesn’t solve it either.

As others have mentioned, – other JBridge’d plugins work fine. I have EG70 From Guido S. – the plugin is ancient and 32 bit. Works fine with GP and has never crashed. So I thing you have to chalk this one up to an old outdated plugin.

@mikelupo
I think I recall the “goes white and stops” issue from long ago and I solved that by changing a JBridge checkbox setting (but I would not remember which checkbox setting).
Above and beyond that, at this point I have decided I should just spend my time tweaking my newer Hammonds to get the sound I want, rather than spend trying to keep B4II on life support.
Thank you for testing it out and reporting your findings!

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