Unable to load DSK SaxophoneZ VSTi

Nahkranoth · March 26, 2009, 08:23:34

Can you give us the list of those specific vst, just to know what they have in common? Maybe all of them are some kind of specific synthedit-made soundfont players? Not that it can help but just out of curiosity.

AmericanDiamond · March 26, 2009, 23:55:19

Yes, here is the list that I've gotten the "Exception" and "...not a valid VST plugin" messages with:

DSK SaxophoneZ
DSK Synthopia
DSK DrumZ - MachineZ
Kassiopeia! 1.0
Loop Drive 3.3
Vocov 2.13
TAL-Vocoder
oxytocin.05.06.2008
SuperDrumFX

Voyager 1.1***

***Voyager 1.1 worked once (after it hung the first time; worked the second time with the other plugins cleared), but most times it causes OMPT to hang, forcing me to close it from Task Manager. It didn't generate the Exception message.

LPChip · March 27, 2009, 07:04:40

Have you considered reinstalling windows?

It seems like there's something not right on your system that makes your system unstable enough for certain plugins to not run.

EDIT: to test that, you could create a new profile (in windows xp, control panel, users, new user) and login using that profile, then test this again.

Nahkranoth · March 27, 2009, 08:10:43

Everything working fine on my side except Kassiopeia. The problem is that it has some envelope modules that crash on PCs with AMD processors.
Voyager will hang your pc for quite a long time everytime it starts. But it is worth the wait. (It can easily eat you CPU on some patches, after all it is 4osc synth with LOTS of processing).

Have you tried dependency walker to see if the problem is with some missing/malfunctioning dll?

Saga Musix · March 27, 2009, 12:04:59

I would also guess that it does not depend on an "unstable" windows installation or whatver (please explain me with common sense why that would trigger a "not a valid VST plugin" message, as this is checked by loading a specific function of the DLL), but it could have something to do with the processor architecture (64bit vs 32bit, Intel vs AMD), or maybe the plugin DLL is a .net dll and you don't have the .net framework installed.

LPChip · March 27, 2009, 14:08:16

I've experienced this in the past myself. A somewhat broken windows install gave me strange and unexplainable error messages while they shouldn't occur. It was in another software package that uses plugins, somewhat similar to this. I just couldn't load some of the plugins. One of the devs told me that the only thing they could think of was something outside of the scope of the problem that could cause this.

They were kinda blunt and said: we cannot help you. The only thing you can do is reinstall windows, cus it should work. As a last resort, I reinstalled windows, and it worked again.

Sam_Zen · March 27, 2009, 14:55:11

OT - What's about this .net framework ? I suppose it's an M$ thing. What does it do ?
I tried to install a new version of some app. and suddenly I needed .net framework.
I didn't want that.

psishock · March 27, 2009, 19:32:28

it's fine Sam, won't do any "harm", so don't need to afraid from it.
In very short, it can be considered as a "combined programming language", and the runtime files are needed to be installed for the applications that are based on it. The same thing is happening example with directX or video compression codecs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework

Saga Musix · March 27, 2009, 21:57:29

The difference is that it's pretty much bloatware, though. You need to install a dozens of megabytes to run a small application.

Relabsoluness · March 27, 2009, 22:35:39

Quote from: "Jojo"The difference is that it's pretty much bloatware, though. You need to install a dozens of megabytes to run a small application.

So it's more or less like Java?

Saga Musix · March 27, 2009, 23:48:30

Yeah, but even bigger.

psishock · March 28, 2009, 00:17:34

Quote from: "Jojo"You need to install a dozens of megabytes to run a small application

omg... this reminds me of the windows and modplug relations.

anyway, what difference would that extra ~100mb of installed runtimes make? In the end you can run the desired piece of software, and that should only matter.

Sam_Zen · March 28, 2009, 00:21:50

Thanks guys for the useful comments.

Reading the Wiki, I had my conclusion rather quick. A very fuzzy system, with all power and permission at the M$ side. An extended use of still more services, which already is quite a horror, if you check what's started up already.
The amount of services running without being relevant is anyway ridiculous.

I saw 'ActiveX' mentioned in the Wiki, which is microsofts own Java, and even worse than that.
Jojo : - but even bigger..

Well, that does it. My app upgrade was indeed rather small. So no .net framework for me ....
I'll stick with the previous version.
Sorry for the OT intrusion.

uncloned · March 28, 2009, 05:01:04

the one group microsoft is good for is the hardware manufacturers

microsoft insures people will always be looking for upgrades to overcome the demands of their libraries linking to libraries to libraries that they probably have no idea what they really do anymore....

AmericanDiamond · March 30, 2009, 19:08:42

I read somewhere else that it could be that my SSE (Streaming SIMD Extension) is too old, or maybe that my PC is so old that it doesn't even have SSE!

I have an HP Pavilion 6573Z with an Intel Celeron 501 MHz CPU and 192 MB of RAM (128 added). It was designed to run Windows 98SE but my brother installed XP without my permission, so I had no choice in that matter. Plus I kept getting those BSOD every week with 98SE.

XP is a lot more stable on my system though, but I am really hoping that a dated SSE (or lack of SSE) is not what's causing this problem.

Question: If I upgrade my .NET framework completely, would that be sufficient? I don't want to be naive about SSE, but if it's that then I think the days of music production for this PC are reduced severely.