VEP 7 stopped working

[brian brilliant]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I tried to open a session I was working on the last few weeks. It has some 20+ audio tracks, a few aux ins and two instrument tracks with the VEP 7 plugin inserted, routing a Kontakt organ from another Mac. While I was 'about' to finish the mix and the inserts looked quite crowded, the day before, everything was running smothly with an average CPU load in the 40ies with a few spikes in the lower 50ies. So, all in all nothing fancy. As I tried to open it, an error message came up, which stated something like "cannot engange VEP, not enough resources, DAE error -20038", if I recall it right.

In order to reduce the CPU load I firstly bypassed and then even deleted one after the other plugin to see, which one(s) devoured all the resources. Then I tried to reactivate the VEP plugin, however, with no success. I even increased the buffer size to its maximum. As it made me wonder I opened another blank session with only one track. Again no success.

I came to the (wrong?) conclusion that the plugin must have been corrupted and firstly deinstalled it, installed the latest release of VEP 7 and dumped the plugin preferences.

But now it got really strange: If I open now the previously saved session, it sais, that the track cannot be played back since the plugin is "not installed". I repeated the procedure several times, even with an older release of the software, as I thought that the latest version may not be compatible with my version of ProTools. In any case, the plugin IS installed: I can see it in the Avid plugin folder (AAX!) and it even shows up in the startup dialogue briefly, after I dump the preferences. It also works perfectly with Reaper and H AU, which I use for network sessions. So it is not a licence issue (you only need one for the server anyway). Most peculiar: The VEP synchron player and audio input are shown in the plugin menu. Only the instrument plugin is just gone.

I did some googeling and research on the DUC and I hope I did not overlook anything. But I could not find anything related to this.

Did I overlook something or am I just plain stupid? I know I am not the most technology affine person and try to not touch a running system as long as possible. Nevertheless, I got it easily installed the first time and cannot remember to have done something differently now. I am thankful for any advice or link to another thread where this issue might have been discussed before. In the following I noted all information I deem relevant. Please let me know if there is anything missing:

Master:
Mac Mini 2018, i7 3.2 hexacore, 32 GB RAM, 10.14.1
ProTools 2018.12
Orion Studio 2017

Slave:
Mac Mini late 2012, i7 2.3 quadcore, 16 GB RAM, 10.14.2
VEP 7 server

Best regards and thanks in advance

Stefano

[falcowe]

So I have a couple of thoughts. But I want to clarify some things first. The only VEPro plugin missing is the VEPro Plugin correct (i.e. the one you connect to a server instance from)? And the VEPro Audio plugin is working correctly? If so that is indeed odd. And after this whole mess has happened have you tried doing a clean reinstall of VEPro (that is to say uninstalling VEPro with VSL's uninstaller, restarting, re-installing VEPro, trash ProTools Prefs, restarting and seeing if it shows up then). Other than that I really have no idea why the plugin wouldn't show up. That is super weird. Also a small thing but I think it you incorrectly translated from German (which I am assuming is your native language), but you said "While I was 'about' to finish the mix and the inserts looked quite crowded, the ..." what did you mean by crowded? I doubt it's relevant, but I just want to make sure I understood the initial scenario.

But on the original issue. When you got the DAE error did you notice a CPU spike on your DAW system? If not did something hang on the VEPro Slave machine causing the error? But hopefully if you can get VEPro working again the issue won't come back. I certainly am not having any issues running VEPro on two separate computers with ProTools on a different DAW machine, but then I'm nowhere near hitting CPU limits of any of my machines.

One final duc post I found that you should try before doing what I suggested above. https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=372661. It might save you 30 min if you can avoid doing it the long way I suggested.

[brian brilliant]

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, falcowe.

Yes, only the VEPro plugin is missing. The Synchron player and the Audio plugin show in the PT drop-down menue. However, I did not test the latter in practice but I will do so when I am back in the studio tonight.

Yes, I reinstalled VEPro three times using the uninstaller first. I also installed an earlier release of VEPro 7 as I thought that maybe the latest may not be compatible with PT 2018.12 anymore. What I did not yet try is to install VEPro 6 for which I also have a license. But I will also give it a try. And yes, I also trashed the PT preferences so it scanned the plugins when starting it the first time afterwards. Funny enough, for a split of a second it shows as all other plugins in the welcome screen.

As regards my expression about the crowded inserts, I meant that there are a number of plugins on several tracks but the CPU load is still okay, mostly below 50%. I just thought it might be relevant as the initial error message related to not having enough resources. But I do not think it was a resource issue. Also RAM was used less than 30% I believe. – And yes, my mother tongue is German.

No, I did not notice any CPU spike. Also, the slave machine did not do anything, as – to my understanding – it only engages once the instrument tracks are loaded. And since it did not get to this stage, I think it just remained idle. Unfortunately, I cannot recreate the error message as the plugin won't install.

Thanks for redirecting me to that other thread. I deleted the 'installedAAXPlugIns' several times when trashing the preferences but I will now also try to delete this 'HAL' folder later and see what it does.

I will let you know later this evening if I got it back to work and if yes how.

[falcowe]

Hopefully one of the suggestions works and you get VEPro 7 back and working again. Otherwise my final suggestion would be to reinstall ProTools as it seems to be the culprit. But I have doubts whether that will actually do anything. And I realize it would be a pain to do. Also it sounds like you did do the VEPro 7 reinstall correctly so I also doubt doing that again will yield a different result. Still worth a try but I don't have high hopes of it working.

One final idea to try, once uninstalled make sure the VEPro plugin doesn't appear in the Plug-Ins folder of ProTools (/Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins). Maybe for some reason the uninstaller isn't catching the AAX plugin? It's unlikely but worth checking too. Ohh, also while I don't think it will hurt to try, deleting the HAL folder probably won't do anything either, that suggestion was made in regards to your DAE error and not the missing plugin.

Thanks for the clarification on your crowded plugins. You are right it doesn't sound like that is the issue but something could have spiked for whatever reason throwing an error. But it's hard to test, like you said, because you can't get VEPro 7 reinstalled. Have you tried contacting VSL support? If not, you should if this doesn't work, they will do their best to help you out. You could also post on the VSL forums, Paul Kopf and his team are pretty active over there, and VSL's support via email has been great for me in the past. They will do what they can to help you!

Good luck, and hope something works and you VEPro 7 back.

[brian brilliant]

Well that was a tough nut ... reinstalling VEPro and trashing PT preferences once more and restarting in between was not successful. Also, I did not find the "The Avid Core Audio" file in the HAL folder mentioned in the other post. So I was fiddling around and finally found in the preference folder two files named "at.co.vsl.Vienna Ensemble Pro.plist" and "at.co.vsl.viennaensemblepro.plist". Just out of desperateness I deleted them and ... tadaah ... the plugin is back again with no error message. I have no clue what these files were good for since they apparently did not show up anymore after starting PT again. So, exept for the fact that PT is now in factory reset mode and I have to rename all the I/Os again and do some reconfigurations, I am just glad that it works and hopefully I can get my mix done until the weekend.

Thanks again, falcowe. Good to know that there are people out there who care to support each other. Hopefully this solution will help someone else in the future.