I wondered if anyone has used any of the Waves instruments (e.g Electric Grand80, Electric88, Electric 200 etc). I got these a couple of years ago during one of the Waves deals and have just got around to trying them. When I tried to add any of them to a new rackspace - GP went away and thought about as normal; the window with the instrument displayed opened briefly [sometimes it doesn’t display the graphic at all] and then the whole of GP crashes in a big heap back to Windows with no error message or anything. I’m using Windows 10 - but I wondered if anyone with either platform had noticed any issues. I’ve tried re-installing GP.
Given previous problems I have had with the terrible Waves installation methods - I am more than happy to believe its something to do with Waves. So before I go ahead and delete every single Waves plugin I own - and then re-install them (as currently my blood pressure is reasonably well controlled and I’ve got a couple of weeks to spare to put right the Waves problems their rubbish instalation will cause!) - I thought it would be wise to check whether others have had any issues first.
What version of Gig Performer are you using and what version of the Waves plugins are you using? Some time ago, we did some enhancements to better support validation of shell plugins without compromising regular validation. Also, it’s highly recommended to use the very latest updates of Waves stuff
I’m using the latest version of GP (2.6.2) and version 9 of the waves plugins - I don’t have an upgrade deal with waves - but no Waves plugins are more than 2 years old - so should work. There are no problems with normal waves effects plugins - not that I use that many - its just with the instruments. The one difference between effects and instrument plugins I would assume is that the latter has some form of sample library. This is the reason I wondered whether there was some issue with my Waves directory structure and that perhaps the plugin could not find its samples correctly.
However, just for information and no other - I actually have noticed a few non-waves related crashes of GP since I installed 2.6.2. I haven’t mentioned it before because its not that many and cannot see any pattern. However, I had no such crashes with 2.6. I tried to downgrade back to 2.6 to check it out - but obviously GP won’t let me do this.
Actually you can - just uninstall GP 2.6.2 and reinstall 2.6 using the link below. If you are able to demonstrate/reproduce any crashes in 2.6.2, particularly something that worked fine in 2.6, please open a support ticket so we can look into it.
Thanks David - I’ll try that. The problem is that apart from the Waves instrument problem - I have probably had about half a dozen random crashes that are not at all reproducible (i.e. I do exactly the same thing again and it works fine). I would certainly have raised them formally if I could reproduce them.
You should probably still tell us what you did — although to be fair (to us), if the issue is plugin-related, there’s nothing we can do about it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell on Windows because you’re just informed that “the application Gig Performer crashed”
OK - I reinstalled GP 2.6 and tried again. I have had no crashes using it as normal (which proves nothing as I might have to use it for longer) although its still does not function correctly with Waves instruments.
So Waves pianos such as Electric Grand80, Electric88, Electric 20 all crash GP as before:- a window opens where the instrument graphic would be; it thinks about it for a few seconds and then crashes GP with no error message at all (not even a Windows one). The only Waves instrument that does load is the synth called Codex. That loads correctly and seems to be OK - but I cannot get any sound out of it (by that I mean there is no sound, but also the codex graphic does seem to show any activity/indication that it is seeing any midi at all - and I have checked that midi is actually entering).
For info: as It may not mean anything - but I notice that in the GP plugin list - all the Waves instruments are categorized as ‘Effects’.
Possible useful info: When I was looking around for an alternative host to Forte (like many others) and before I discovered GP - I bought a copy of the AKAI VIP host as they were selling it for a ridiculously cheap price and it looked to be an option. I found it to be problematic and its not remotely in the same league as GP (although being able to audition preset patches in instruments which are extracted and categorized automatically, is very nice). Anyway, as it is still on my computer - I just tried loading the Waves instruments as above - and they all worked perfectly. This, therefore, suggest that its not a Waves directory structure problem on my computer - but is something more fundamental to GP.
PS And if you load the AKAI VIP host into GP (as it can cleverly be used as a VST too) - then you can load the Waves PIanos (but I tried only one) inside it and that piano too now works in GP.
I’m using all three pianos with GP. I also had some similar issues with V9 and those three pianos. Once I upgraded to V10 with Waves all my problems went away and they work perfectly on my MAC with the latest version of GP. I’ve used them in many performances.
Also, be aware that if you install Waves V10 plugins and related support, you will need to manually remove the old V9 bundles. Otherwise, every time you fire-up Logic X it will rescan ALL of your plugins over and over and over again. In theory they are supposed to coexist, but on macs they don’t play well together.
Generally, when a plugin is developed, it’s tested against some known DAWs and if it works fine, the development is deemed done. However, plugins often don’t implement the entire VST spec and they may be making (invalid) assumptions for how they are invoked. Sending MIDI data to a plugin from a track in a DAW is far less intensive a process than MIDI data arriving from arbitrary devices (say) along with being rapidly bypassed/unbypassed for example. You might be surprised by some of the horrific things we’ve seen going on in some plugins.
David:
Its a bit hard to justify the above statement. I am well away that VSTs are of variable quality - but if the Waves instruments did not work in some other hosts, but worked in others then that argument may hold up.
But I’ve done some tests and the pianos seem to work as follows:- standalone=OK; in Forte[HOST not DAW]=OK; in AKAI VIP 3.1 [HOST not DAW]=OK; in GP when VIP 3.1 is run as a VST and the pianos added into that=OK; in Cubase 9.5=OK. In GP they crash!
Mleeds above says that he too had similar problems with the instruments in Waves V9 versions in GP - V10 seems to work.
Please don’t misunderstand me - I am in no way complaining about this or even raising a support call.
GP is one of the best pieces of software I have ever purchased and the support is brilliant. Also I clearly have no urgency to use these Waves pianos as they have been sitting around unused for some time (I got them cheap). I just got round to trying them out and I found they didn’t work. So I only raised it on the forum in the first place to indicate I was having a problem and had anyone else had a similar problem. Clearly nobody is particularly bothered judging by the lack of response.
I think just to ignore it and I will update to Waves V10 one day - and hopefully that will fix it.
Uh yeah - precisely —for V10 they addressed the issues in the plugins that were causing crashes with V9 when used in GP. We have had some interactions with Waves around this stuff so we have more info on this particular situation.
I get it. Let me suggest an analogy, albeit hypothetical. Suppose you’re a tire manufacture. You develop a new tire and you test it on a hundred automobiles in the consumer market and it works fine when those cars accelerate. You’re good to go. Then somebody comes along with a Tesla that can accelerate significatly faster than all those consumer car and consequently stresses the tires way more than other cars so they blow more often. That does not mean that the problem is the Tesla!
More importantly, if a plugin vendor has not actually tested their plugin with Gig Performer, they’re not in a position to claim that any crashes are not due to their plugin. As Gig Performer becomes more widely known, more and more plugin developers will test with GP.
Now I don’t mean to claim that crashes are never due to Gig Performer. And it’s certainly the case that in our earlier incarnations, we certainly had our own problems with some plugins that were due to our not implementing functionality that a plugin expected to be there. But as GP has matured, crashes in plugins that are due to bugs in Gig Performer have pretty much disappeared. In fact, we have some examples of plugins that work fine in Gig Performer but crash in other hosts (it’s not appropriate to mention names).
Totally understood and appreciated. The only reason I’m responding is because it really is important to understand that just because a plugin works in another host (or even a dozen other hosts), that does not mean that the problem must be due to Gig Performer. We always want to be informed of such crashes and we communicate with the plugin developer in question to resolve the problem. We can determine quite easily whether a crash is due to us or the plugin (and the plugin developer can tell as well).