Stereo Tool

I've tried this BETA1011-013 version because I've been having a lot of difficulties with both 9.92 and 10.10 on a new Mac Studio-based setup (the "ultra" version, running Mac OS 13.6), using the Stereo Tool VST2 plugin in Ableton Live 11.3.12.

The new beta did fix the "seriously over-zoomed Stereo Tool GUI" issues I found in 10.10. But the overall GUI is *S L O W*, drawing what looks like about one frame every 2-3 seconds.

9.92 is causing quite a lot of Ableton Live crashing, which from reading the release notes seems to be a known issue.

Anything else I should be trying?

Did the previous 10.10 at least perform smoothly when it was zoomed? There's a bug in the VSTs that they can't reproduce that affects the skins and the performance of the GUI that I'm getting in Windows. I don't know if your performance issue is related. My solution was to load a skin-only preset (I linked one earlier in this thread viewtopic.php?f=14&t=33668&start=50) which stops the Titlebar skin value from counting up and smooths out the performance.

In the Windows VSTs there's a way to set the CPU cores to ANY which helped the skin/performance issue before I found the skin-loading solution. This may help your performance issue even if it's not caused by the skin.

I did some more tests, and the BETA1011-013 version is playing nicely in *newly-created* Ableton Live sessions. Where things are going really sour are existing sessions that were created on my previous (Intel-based) iMac. 9.92 just plain crashes trying to load one of those sessions on my new Mac Studio, and the beta (and the 10.10 release) both exhibit slow/weird GUI behavior.

I also can't seem to find the "extreme tweaker" setting in the new versions, did that get deprecated or moved somewhere obscure?

Thanks for the "skin fixing" link, I'll see if that changes any of the issues I'm seeing.

All Extreme Tweaker settings have been folded into the single operating mode. Virtually everything is there if you dig hard enough. It may not work on the VST in all hosts, but one can do CTRL SHIFT + to expand all cells for an easier time getting an overview of things.

We still need to add something that adds a delay to the normal (VST) signal path, in order to be able to output the microphone audio faster. Currently we do indeed introduce some delay on the microphone audio instead, depending on what the host does. But if you're streaming in RB, that shouldn't really matter anyway - or are you using the low latency output for monitoring?

Can you check the following? This might help in the (rather unlikely) case that Ableton does the same thing that Audition 1.5 does.

What I think is happening (only read this if you're interested, not relevant for the solution)
What Audition 1.5 does: It appears that Audition has a fixed size for the storage of parameters. If a plugin exceeds that number, the remaining parameters will get random values that seem to come from uninitialized memory. They are usually - but not always - 0. The maximum number of parameters appears to be around 8000. Audacity has had a similar problem in the past, with the maximum number being 4096 - we ran into that multiple years ago when we exceeded 4096 parameters and they fixed that. Audition 1.5 is very old so that can't be fixed anymore. It's also possible that programs just set all new parameters to 0.

So if we have a slider that has a range, like from 0.0001 to 0.50, it will likely be set to 0. As you may know, you can set most sliders outside of their official range and for 99% of sliders that's perfectly file - the range might be weird from an audio perspective but the software will do what you asked for without any issues. But there are some sliders where setting them to 0 causes issues. We have in recent versions added protections against invalid values if they would cause crashes, which is likely why 9.92 crashed and 10.11 does not.

Possible solution
There is a new parameter that controls the screen update speed. Its range is 0.5 - 60 times per second. You can find this setting in multiple places, among others: Application settings -> Resources -> Graphical User Interface. Open the detailed settings and the "Framerate" slider appears. Please check what it's set to and report back here. If this is indeed the issue, I'll change the behavior such that when it's set to 0, we'll use 60 instead of 0.5. 0.5 would mean 1 image per 2 seconds, so that matches your description.

Warning: If this helps, please be aware that this probably means that ALL new settings that were added are set to invalid values.


Edit: I did that anyway. This is clearly something that can go wrong.

BETA 10.11-014 (release candidate, new compressor is removed again!) is posted. I will now start the release build; if we get no serious bug reports (that were not in 10.10) we will release on Sunday or Monday.

Just did a quick check with the beta 14 version and an Ableton Live session that was created on the Intel iMac with Stereo Tool 9.92.

The framerate slider was indeed set to zero, and after setting that to 60, things behaved normally.

I have a few other questions, but since it appears you're preparing to release very soon, wanted to give this report ASAP.

BETA015 is posted; there were some more bugs reported (a linker error for the x64 non-GUI Linux build libStereoTool, and when the preset filter was set to only show built-in presets, importing failed).

DJMark: Thanks!