Digital Performer crashing after installing Pulsar Massive?? Here's the solution.

[James Steele]

So today I jumped on a deal over at Best Service. They had the Massive + Mu bundle on sale for $99 but $70 if you use “EGGY20” at checkout. I posted the info in the Plugin Deals thread here for those of you who might want to jump on it.

Anyway... after installing the bundle, DP started crashing any time I attempted to load a project. Very weird behavior. First thing to check when that happens is if you changed anything recently... like... oh... installing new plug-ins!. So on a hunch I opened DP, went into the Audio Plugins prefs and disabled Pulsar Massive, let MAS relaunch. After that, all my projects opened with no problems.

I decided to investigate further, and checked my components folder. The file name for Pulsar’s “Massive” plug-in is “Pulsar Massive.component.” It presents as just “Massive” in DP. Then I scrolled up and noticed Native Instruments’ “Massive” VI plugin was gone. Weird. Used Time Machine to check previous state of Components folder and sure enough NI Massive WAS THERE… “Massive.component.”

I restored it from Time Machine. Then checked DP’s Audio Plugin setting and there they are… two plugins called Massive. One is Pulsar, the other Native Instruments, and they seem to coexist just fine now. No more crashing projects:

MassiveAUs.jpg (39.69 KiB) Viewed 693 times

So anyway… seems crazy that the Pulsar Audio Massive installer would delete Native Instruments’ Massive AU, especially when the filenames are different, right? But it does. And after I ran the installer, that’s when DP became a crashfest on project load. I don’t understand why that would be, but it is.

Here’s the smoking gun video of the Pulsar Audio Massive installer deleting Native Instruments’ Massive VI component:




I’ll report this to Pulsar Audio. I haven’t yet checked if running this installer without restoring NI Massive makes other AU hosts like Logic Audio unstable… and I guess I’m just not that curious. It all seems to be working right after restoring Native Instruments Massive.

[corbo-billy]

Many thanks; reinstall Massive from Native Instruments with Native Access because I don't use Time Machine .
This situation is still surprising !

[James Steele]

I wasn’t sure if I was overreacting sharing it here… thought perhaps I was the only one. But now that I hear someone else experienced this issue and it helped them, I’m glad I did.

I did report this issue to Pulsar Audio support and sent them a link to the YouTube video of their installer deleting NI Massive. It’s baffling why it would do that.

[James Steele]

Just received a response from Pulsar Audio regarding my report of the issue to them. Leaving out the name or the rep for privacy.

Hi James,

Thanks for reaching out !

We have included in our installers various operations aiming at optimizing the functioning of our plugins, by deleting some temporary, useless or obsolete files.
Some of these operations, in the Massive installer, actually affect the functioning of the Native Instrument Massive, or even delete it, if it is present on your system.
This is of course completely unintentional, and we're sorry about it. Of course, this will be fixed as soon as possible in the new installer.

In any case, in the meantime, just re-install NI Massive and it will work again, as before.

Sorry about the inconvenience..

Best Regards,