Plugin Alliance Support

[Patience Quiett]

Im not sure whether it's compatibility with OS Ventura or Logic 10.7.5 causing it but the wonderful plugins from Plugin Alliance, which I use on every project, are crashing Logic repeatedly. Poof...and it's gone. I've been mixing a complex track for a couple of days and it's been happening a lot. Has anyone else been experiencing something similar?

I have not done that yet, but it seems any PA plugins that I used over the last few days can cause a crash by adjusting a parameter or even opening the GUI. But it's not always. I was able to finish my mix today that had several PA plugins on. I just had to restart (and save) often.

all my 3rd-party plugins worked in ventura from day1 of the OS betas. so perhaps an issue with plugin alliance? you could also try deleting logics preferences, restarting. or rebuild the audio cache (read up about this first! there are posts on this forum...)

at this point, your best bet is to start with plugin-alliance, and try some of what i suggested. also, hopefully others here will have thoughts, this is a good forum (with lots of smarter people than myself)...

I just heard back from Plugin-Alliance and the answer is "We do not support Ventura yet" . So if you are planning on moving to Ventura, know that it will be a while before their plugins are compatible. It seems like Melodyne may not yet be either as that has been consistently crashing too.

This is a judgement-free zone ?, but the "solution" of course for all these little niggley workflow things is to never upgrade on day one of a new OS release, especially on a machine you require for production, and especially especially if you have no recovery plan to revert if you decide to give it a try.

It seems no matter how many times this message is preached over the years/decades, people seem to not hear it - they don't have backups, can't revert, don't forsee the possibility of problems, and then when something doesn't work they're like "Help, what can I do?"

If you upgrade to a brand a new macOS, it's very possible that things might be fine, but it's also very possible that various issues might happen, of varying severity in varying places, but it's really difficult to predict what those will be.

I *was* thinking that this time, being on a brand new current machine on a current version of the previous OS, that I'm in a good place with my machine to upgrade to Ventura, especially from earlier reports from people saying all their plugins were fine and they weren't encountering significant problems etc - but now we are seeing drips and drabs of various issues being reported - PA plugins crashing, Eventide saying don't upgrade our stuff doesn't work, Valhalla and others having installer issues - most of these things aren't big things, and they will be addressed by developers who wish to continue to sell their plugins in the Mac market, but they will take time to shake out - particularly for notoriously slow-to-update plugin alliances with a large product catalog - and that's exactly why the sensible people wait to see how things shake out, to specifically not be able to put them in a position where some unexpected small issue becomes a production-affecting issue, with no idea of when it might be fixed.

For people that thought it would be fine and upgraded anyway without a fallback strategy, your choices are basically - deal with whatever niggles you are having for as long as necessary for them to be fixed, find alternative workflows in the meantime, or backup your stuff, trash your computer and reinstall Monterey, and all your apps/preferences/data from scratch/backups - which is of course huge pain to do. Their aren't really any other quick fixes to issues you may be experiencing I'm afraid.

And this is why I always backup my full system before updating, and wait and see user reports, specifically around software tools, plugins and utilities I rely on, before making the choice to upgrade, and making sure I can revert, or leave my existing system in place, so I have a fallback that leaves me in full control of my system, at least when an OS upgrade isn't forced upon us, like it can be with new machines.

and updating it with your own personal set of plugins used, with links to compatibility statements and the list that Pro-Tools-Expert puts out for every major upgrade, and to NOT UPGRADE UNTIL ALL THOSE ORANGE BOXES ARE CHECKBOXED WHITE.

that's a great list, but, just pointing out: 'not supported' does not automatically mean 'not working'. as i've mentioned before, all my 3rd-party plugins have worked since ventura beta day 1 (and continue to work); 99% of my sources and effects are, in fact, 3rd party.

personally, i would google, check this forum, and contact the developers. a plugin may work fine, even before it is officially 'supported'. but, to be fair, i get the idea of 'better being safe than sorry'.

But this thread concerns a situation where something is NOT fine, and it needn't be the plugin itself, but some interaction with another installed plugin that isn't working properly and causing stuff to go haywire.

Plugin Alliance are notoriously slow with updates. M1 native support was supposed to be done early this year, and while most of them are done now, we're still waiting for the Lindell plugins native versions...

I do, yes, all my brainworx/PA plugins work fine, but then I'm not on Ventura, as Plugin Alliance have compatibility issues with Ventura. I don't update OS's until I'm happy with the compatibility of my important software...

They have a large plugin catalog, developed by a wide range of different developers that they have to co-ordinate and ask for fixes. And they are historically slow in general at issuing updates and doing bug-fixes - it just doesn't seem that important for them to prioritise. They've been sitting on M1 updates from various developers who delivered them well over a year ago, and they *still* haven't been released.

I've encountered a strange problem I cannot solve without your help.

I'm using a USB stick for my Waves licenses and it's working perefctly fine.

No I wanted to do the same with my plugin-alliance licenses on the same USB stick since they also support this.

But the plugins cannot find the license on this stick when mounted via virtualhere.

When the USB stick is directly connected to a Mac or PC the licenses getting recognized.

To be more precise:

It does not work with macOS 10.13.5.

If tried it now with Windows 10 v1803 and it works.

Michael, can you help?

Both server and clients are on the latest version.

+1 on this: my iLok has been working just fine with VirtualHere up until my recent upgrade to El Capitan.

Now VirtualHere sees the iLok, and even the iLok Manager sees the dongle and licensed on it, but as soon as I try to use any license within my software - it doesn't see/recognize the key.

Same story with my Steinberg eLicenser.

Can anyone confirm this is indeed a "3rd Party USB Host Controller" issue? At least that's something to base further research on...

Yes all was good untul 10.11 when apple completely broke support. As you can find on various postings by searching on this site. From my understanding apple is really more interested in marketing and their software quality has massively deteriated the last few years. Microsoft has been almost the complete opposite

Thank you Michael, I really appreciate you confirming this.

I've already tried to replace the USBEHCI and USBXHCI kexts with the older Yosemite ones, and while they do work in El Capitan, that didn't fix the issue... I wonder which parts of the USB library affect 3rd part host controllers the most.

Thanks Damageplan, that's reassuring.

I've upgraded both the server and the client machine from 10.11 to 10.12.6, and apparently 10.12 doesn't help much...

Just to confirm: is it normal to have the driver in /Library/Extensions instead of /System/Library/Extensions? And to have its permission set to System=RW, Everyone=No access?

I'm on 10.13.6, iLok authorisations are working fine. The USB drive with the authorisation files for Waves and Plugin-Alliance is mounting correctly. The Waves plugins are authorising but the Plugin-Alliance plugs are not.

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