Some Vst plugins say" Cannot find any instruments"

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I'm getting a bunch of Vst plugins that are saying, when loaded in VeSTige, that they can't find any instruments. They do continue to load, and act as if they loaded correctly (i.e., VeSTige loads them and creates an entry in the song editor, and you can even add a pattern to them in the piano roll. But they do exactly nothing.

I tried this with DSK Saxaphones (https://vst4free.com/plugin/2160/) and the same plugin from another source (just to be sure it wasn't a bad copy). No change. It just says it can't find any instruments. I've gotten this several times, and it's getting very annoying, to say the least. (I did find out that Vst plugins MUST be in "Program Files" to work in MS Windows 10 (WHY?). So they're all back in that directory after LMMS totally failed to see them in c:/jim/lmms/Vstplugins.

I also tried extracting the zip inside of the Vstplugins directory in program files, and just to do that, I had to move the DLL file into the main Vstplugins directory (out of the DSK Saxaphones directory). No change...no instruments found.

While searching for an answer online, I did see where the other one (L something) that everyone seems to compare LMMS to, and they apparently have the same issue. Is there something I'm missing here about specific VST plugins that can't be used by anyone?.

Suggestions? Anyone know what's going on? Are these all just bad plugins?

Thanks
Jinx wrote:
Sat Nov 21, 2020 9:17 pm
I'm getting a bunch of Vst plugins that are saying, when loaded in VeSTige, that they can't find any instruments.
First try the methods shown here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V60j4ZXiyZ8
If that fails
Get:
MDA-Piano http://mda.smartelectronix.com/synths.htm
And retry
If that fails
Repost :p
Btw i see that the fix of your username is successful, so i wont PM you about it 😎
First, thanks for taking care of my username for me. :-)

Second, the installation method shown in that tutorial (which I'd already watched along with two others saying the same thing, basically, without adding effects...was happy to learn that yesterday!), and that's how I've been adding VST instruments.

Finally, as for mda-piano, VeSTige wasn't loading it at all until I set the permissions to 755 (rwxr xr x). Most are either packed with those permissions, or M$ forces them (they think even text files are executable) when they're unzipped. But every now and then, one isn't, and you have to manually do a chmod 755 foo.dll (that's a Zsh in Cygwin ... no idea what the equivalent is for M$ anything).

But that's not the same as what I'm seeing on other stuff (like DSK Saxaphones mentioned above). For those, it looks like it's loading properly, except of course for the "Cannot find any instruments" bit. The instrument *appears* to have loaded, but it makes no sound from its keyboard on VeSTige or from the song editor. Add all the notes you want using the piano roll, but nothing plays from the ones getting that specific error.

So, just to confuse things even more, the very same DSK Saxaphones dll that failed yesterday with "Cannot find any instruments" loaded just fine today. Must be some quantum mechanics thing, maybe a specific electron was in the wrong places at the time. Who knows..... :-)

So unless someone has any (non-quantum mechanics related) explanations for that last bit, I think it's just a mystery with no solution to it. Oddly enough, in the forum post I mentioned above about the commercial "competition", they didn't seem to ever find an answer, either, unless it was in other posts that my search for that exact error didn't find. Strange......

Thanks.
Jinx wrote:
Sun Nov 22, 2020 4:59 pm
mda-piano, VeSTige wasn't loading it at all until I set the permissions to 755 (rwxr xr x).
I think all your odd issues will go away if you right-click lmms-shortcut and choose run as administrator, provided you have those rights, of cause
Your account rights are ...weird
What do you mean by "[my] account rights are ...weir"? M$ Windows has always made everything executable. I have never figured out WHY, but it does. You don't need execute permission to open, say, a text file in a text editor (mine being vim/gvim). You do need execute permission to run a shell script as ./foo.sh (but not /bin/sh foo.sh). But then, anyone looking for anything from M$ to make sense (at the system level, specifically) is on a snipe hunt. Either way, it's all working properly now, so I'm sticking with the strange quantum mechanis-based theory. :-) Some electron somewhere in the universe was in a certain wrong set of positions (but then, once observed by lmms .....no, don't go there, that part of quantum theory gives me a massive headache). :-)

Thanks. Now moving on to some game-specific VSTs (game music and audio SFX). Let the fun begin! :-)

PS: Just FWIW, right now, I'm learning the things I KNOW I will need, so that when I really get started, I won't have to keep going between working on the game and going back to tutorials for stuff I could/shound have already learned). I chose this after learning that even announcing a game from (September, I think) to December is a death sentence for the game. So I have some extra time to do this and get started. Close to starting, and starting off strong, now.
Jinx wrote:
Tue Nov 24, 2020 12:49 am
..
Did it work after you chose "Run as administrator"?
I never use root (or in the case of M$, administrator privs unless there is an absolute requirement to do so. So I need to know exactly what that requirement is before I even think about running LMMS as administratorl.
Jinx wrote:
Tue Nov 24, 2020 4:56 pm
I never use root (or in the case of M$, administrator privs unless there is an absolute requirement to do so. So I need to know exactly what that requirement is before I even think about running LMMS as administratorl.
You cant compare root and Administrator.
Just run it!
I does absolutely everything as Administrator! I dont even have a different account!
Right-click Run as administrator, that is what you should do!
In M$, Administrator is the same as root in UNIX(TM) and Unix. Both have supreme power over the system and that includes the power to destroy the system.

Doesn't matter. I found the REAL problem, something I hadn't considered. I only added the DLL files to the Vstplugins directory, which many (same ones that weren't working, btw) had .instruments directories, too. I used Zsh's power, combined with cpio and find, to copy all of the instruments directories (that didn't already exist) to the Vstplugins directory. I did a quick test, and plugins that were not working work fine now. This doesn't exactly match some of the earlier oddities, but I think that's something I just fixed without realizing it.

Point is, it works fine now, so if I need to mark this thread closed, please let me know how I do that. If an admin does that, please do so.

Thanks.
Jinx wrote:
Thu Nov 26, 2020 12:21 am
In M$, Administrator is the same as root in UNIX(TM) and Unix. Both have supreme power over the system and that includes the power to destroy the system.

Doesn't matter. I found the REAL problem, something I hadn't considered. I only added the DLL files to the Vstplugins directory, which many (same ones that weren't working, btw) had .instruments directories, too. I used Zsh's power, combined with cpio and find, to copy all of the instruments directories (that didn't already exist) to the Vstplugins directory. I did a quick test, and plugins that were not working work fine now. This doesn't exactly match some of the earlier oddities, but I think that's something I just fixed without realizing it.

Point is, it works fine now, so if I need to mark this thread closed, please let me know how I do that. If an admin does that, please do so.

Thanks.
Great!
No we do not 'closes' topics they just seep slowly down :)