Plugins not listed

[rorywalsh]

DISCLAIMER: I’m not reporting a problem with Ardour. Rather I’m seeking help to diagnose an issue loading plugins in Ardour…

I’ve developed a plugin framework based around Csound, that has worked, problem free, with Ardour for as long as I can recall. However, users are now telling me the latest plugins are exhibiting problems. So after some experiments it seems that if I place say 5 different plugins (built with JUCE) in my VST dir, Ardour only lists one. Even stranger, if I add a plugin on a track, save the session, close Ardour, remove that plugin from the VST dir and reopen Ardour, it will put another one of the plugins in its place, although the plugin window still gives the name of the first plugin. It’s as if Ardour thinks the plugin .so’s are all identical?

The plugins binaries are very similar, but they are not the same. Any ideas on what might be going on here? Or how I might go about debugging this? I can try building Ardour myself here in order to step through the debugger, but I’m hoping that won’t be necessary.

[x42 (Robin Gareus)]

(built with JUCE)

Most common case here is that the is dynamically linked and also uses plugin uses gtk3 (that conflicts with Ardour’s use of gtk2).

Can you check if ldd /path/to/your/plugin.so lsts libgtk-3 and libwebkit2gtk etc? If so, try recompiling the plugin with <JUCEOPTIONS JUCE_WEB_BROWSER="0" />.

In Ardour check Menu > Window > Log and in Preferences > Plugins > VST clear cache, and re-scan.

It will put another one of the plugins in its place

Could it be that the VST ID is not unique?

Or how I might go about debugging this?

With a debug build of Ardour (e.g. nightly.ardour.org – demo is fine). Start Ardour6 -D Pluginmanager that adds debug-trace messages. You can also try with a self-build as long as it’s not optimized.

You can also try a manual scan (adjust paths as needed):

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/Ardour-6.0.pre0.3022/lib/ \
  /opt/Ardour-6.0.pre0.3022/lib/ardour-vst-scanner -f ~/.vst/YourVST.so

That’ll cache information about the VST in ~/.cache/ardour6/vst/ and/or add the plugin to the blacklist ~/.cache/ardour6/vst64_blacklist.txt

[rorywalsh]

Most common case here is that the is dynamically linked and also uses plugin uses gtk3 (that conflicts with Ardour’s use of gtk2).

Can you check if ldd /path/to/your/plugin.so lsts libgtk-3 and libwebkit2gtk etc? If so, try recompiling the plugin with <JUCEOPTIONS JUCE_WEB_BROWSER="0" /> .

No conflicts as far as I can tell. I disabled the web browser option quite some time back as it was causing an issue.

Could it be that the VST ID is not unique?

I don’t think so. In fact, the only difference between the binaries should be the plugin id. But this is a good place to start looking.

Thanks for the information on how to start debugging this. I’ve more than enough to get me going now

[rorywalsh]

Thanks @x42. Looks like I had accidentally messed up the writing of the plugin ID to the plugin binaries. It’s all working fine now again