Plugin Sandboxing - DP needs this

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This forum is for seeking solutions to technical problems involving Digital Performer and/or plug-ins on MacOS, as well as feature requests, criticisms, comparison to other DAWs.
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Michael Canavan
Posts: 3579
Joined: Fri Jul 15, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: seattle

Plugin Sandboxing - DP needs this

Post by Michael Canavan »

I've collected a few DAWs over the last couple years, and there's a new way of hosting VST and AUs that prevents the DAW from crashing. The DAW most famous for it is Bitwig, but Logic, Reaper, Reason, and Traction also do this to some degree, or like Bitwig. This is IMO one of the major hurdles DP has, especially for new users, I would venture to guess it's the main reason that DP doesn't have wide adoption on Windows. I have 400 plugins in my AU and VST folders, and it's almost 100% a plugin any time DP crashes for me.

With Bitwig anyway which I'm the most familiar with, when a plugin would normally crash the DAW for whatever reason, instead it crashes just the plugin, so you get a dialog box saying "plugin x has crashed, do you want to restart it?" This also appears in the plugin GUI.

This I think is the most pressing feature request we as end users can have. I do not think DP is unstable, but it's plugin hosting is not very stable, it's likely nothing on their end, they support AU, VST2 and VST3, on Mac Silicon, and Intel, plus VST2 and 3 on Windows. There is plenty of room for issues, especially since developers concentrate on Cubase as a VST host, Logic for AU, and that's about it.

Ironically enough, Logic introduced plugin sandboxing and it hosed Logics ARA support, so that leads one to conclude that AU issues with sandboxing and ARA in general are why we have ARA only in VST3. The ironic part to that is Bitwig unlike Logic allows for hosting inside the DAW or sandboxed plugins, so it could be a Logic issue and therefore not addressed in AU.
Anyway if you feal like I do about this make your voice heard and request it.
https://motu.com/en-us/suggestions/
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M2 Studio Ultra, RME Babyface FS, Slate Raven Mti2, NI SL88 MKII, Linnstrument, MPC Live II, Launchpad MK3. Hundreds of plug ins.
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