AU Plugin Problems

How to use MultiTrack DAW
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cargomaster
Posts: 9
Joined: December 30th, 9:35 am

AU Plugin Problems

Post by cargomaster »

I picked up a few Tonebooster plugins, the compressor, the eq, the reverb. I’m having problems when I get everything set. I got to listen, and they’re shut off, the reverb most noticeably. So, I drag it to a different slot, and it starts up again. But other tracks, it’s gone away. And every time I fix one, the rest have problems. Is this a TB problem or an MT DAW problem? Any guesses?
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pwnified
Posts: 1565
Joined: August 17th, 9:41 pm

Re: AU Plugin Problems

Post by pwnified »

I'm pretty sure it's a plugin problem. The way it works is CoreAudio is asking the plugin to render in a realtime audio thread, and the exact error retuned is 'kAudioUnitErr_RenderTimeout'. This can happen if the plugin takes too long to process the buffer of audio for a given timeslice. During development, certain plugins would return this error, and others would be just fine. Some plugin developers are better than others at understanding the realtime nature of the audio thread, and not to hold locks, no memory allocations, no logging, no calling obj-c etc, in this thread.

I think a lot of plugin developers don't notice because they develop on new faster devices, so there is a much greater chance their plugin will complete the render within the time allotted and not get killed by coreaudio.

I think the best we can do now is ask plugin developers to be more careful. You could ask them directly and maybe point them to this excellent article by Michael Tyson (of Audiobus)

Four common mistakes in audio development
http://atastypixel.com/blog/four-common ... velopment/
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cargomaster
Posts: 9
Joined: December 30th, 9:35 am

Re: AU Plugin Problems

Post by cargomaster »

Unfortunately, I think a lot of these guys are just taking their desktop plugins, and doing the minimum to get them to work on iOS. It’s quite possible that that was it was written for MacOS breaks any number of smart dev rules on iOS.

Thanks for the response.
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