Having a weird crash. I believe it is due to a expression pedal. I’m attaching the crash log and details. Let me know if more info is needed.
Crash does not always happen, about a 50/50 when using the expression pedal(just moving it at all causes crash).
Plugin: Polychrome Graphene
Expression pedal: Nektar. Plugged into a M-Vave 4 button midi controller. Plugged in via USB, not using BT connection.
Midi is directly mapped in the plugin. Not through any widgets. And no widgets monitoring the pedal or buttons. I have the plugin pedal and the on/off toggle switch mapped to the expression pedal through it’s built in midi mapping.
I’ve had this pedal for several years without issues, and appears to work without issue in other plugins. Occurs in the plugin Graphene only while in Gig performer. Does not happen while using the standalone version of Graphene. I’ve not been able to get this crash to happen in other plugins.
Hoping someone will review the crash log, and maybe something in it points to the issue with the plugin, or perhaps there’s some unknown issue elsewhere. Drivers, faulty device? Any advice on the cause and possible solutions would be welcome.
That could be part of the problem. Not every plugin responds well to direct MIDI connections.
Instead, map the pedal to the host automation parameter via widget.
Thanks for the suggestion. Is this a prefered method to use in GP? I tend to only directly map midi in plugins for preset selection and expression pedal. Everything else I do map through a widget. Just felt unnecessary to make extra widgets for preset “next”/ “previous” and the expression pedal.
But I will give it a shot and see if it goes away.
Yes, there’s a big emphasis on using host automation via widgets vs. direct MIDI connections. It’s a more stable and reliable way to control the parameters of your plugins with external controllers.
Thanks for that. I discovered a bit more while mapping with a widget. It seems that having the expression pedal mapped to the on/off of the pedal is what’s crashing it. If I unmap that no crash. If it’s mapped, it crashes.
The only thing I’m not sure how to do, is something the plugin has built in, it allows you to add a delayed off for the pedal switch, so when you are moving the expression pedal 0-100% back to 0% it doesn’t turn off for a set amount of time. I’ve not seen anything in GP that would do this. Would you know if there’s a way to implement a timed delay on a widget?
Yeah, sadly (or very usefully, depending on one’s perspective) Gig Performer is a bit of a “canary” when it comes to discovering plugin issues as it tends to stress the VST APIs more than typical DAWs . The crash is happening inside Graphene as indicated by the crashreport in this line of crashrpt.xml
Not only “preferred” but actually strongly encourage as the “correct” approach to the GP paradigm and for many reasons. For example, imagine you’ve got 100 plugins in your system and you have programmed them to respond to explicit CC messages coming from your MIDI controller. Now, you arrive at a show for sound check, your controller fails and you’re given another controller that sends different messages. You have three minutes to reconfigure every single plugin to respond to completely different incoming MIDI messages or you have to go find a manual to figure out how to completely reprogram the controller (good luck with that).
If you have used widgets and the rig manager, you can simply relearn the associated MIDI messages (takes 5 seconds per knob/slider on your controller) and you’re done.
Many other benefits — suppose you have a plugin with two different parameters that you want to control at different times, one is a filter cutoff and the other is LFO speed (say) and you want to control one or the other from your expression pedal at different times and at other times you want to use separate sliders or knobs to control them. Your expression pedal and your sliders and knobs all send different MIDI messages…
Or perhaps you want certain parameters of your plugins to change automatically as you switch from one variation to another so no MIDI messages are being sent at all from your controller…
