Stereo Tool

Hi guys, hello Hans; Stereo tool always crashes when opening a second instance. It happens in Cubase 5.1.1 and in Ableton 7.01. I get a runtime error message. The operating System is Vista 64 Bit.

Thanks for answering

Wolfgang, I'm posting your email here below so it's logged here (that way I can easily find it back).

Hi Hans, thanks for the quick answer. I'm using Version 4.22. I tried to open two instances in Cubase; it crashed as soon as the second plug-in opened. Then I wanted to make sure that the crash had nothing to with Cubase so I tried to open two Stereo tolls in Ableton and there same thing. No Audio was playing at that time. So exact description of the bug: Open Cubase. Create an audio track. Open stereo tool as an insert effect. Create a second audio track. Open stereo tool as insert effect. Cubase crashes.

Ok, I finally found out what's wrong. All other applications that I've used (Winamp, DSP Stacker, SAM) load multiple instances of the plugin DLL and then instantiate one instance of it.

But, apparently in the VST world, a DLL is loaded only once and multiple instances are created.

Stereo Tool cannot handle this, which leads to strange behavior (I haven't seen any crashes, but if I load 2 Stereo Tool instances, both have a duplicated list of presets). I'll have to search for a solution.

It's even worse than I thought...

I do have a solution for now: Make a copy of the DLL with a different name (eg. vst_stereo_tool_2.dll) and load that instead.

I'll try if I can fix it but I probably won't be able to very quickly (as it seems to be quite a big problem).

Instead of solving it (which seems to take days of work, with a huge risk of introducing new and very hard to find bugs), I have now added a popup message when you load a 2nd copy of Stereo Tool in a VST host, describing this workaround.

This will be in the new version that should be ready in a few days.