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Cabbage plugin does not load in REAPER - solved

This problem wasted a whole weekend for me. In case someone else experiences the same I post the solution here.

Symptoms: Cabbage plugins are found when scanning but when trying to include them on a track the FX window shows this error:

When a project using cabbage plugins is loaded the error looks like this:

Reaper_plugin_error

Failed Attempts: The usual hint, delete plugin cache and rescan, does not help. Re-installing REAPER does not help. Re-compiling the plugins does not help.

Solution: In C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\REAPER.ini correct the line lastcwd=C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\Cabbage to the directory where the Cabbage plugins are actually located and delete the line vstpath64=C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3.

Thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of any such issues. I’ll take a look during the week and try a solution whereby users don’t have to edit any .ini files :+1:

I don’t think this is an issue of Cabbage. After all I am not sure how this problem started in the beginning. The last thing I did was creating a new plugin. Admittedly, I did a typo in the file name when exporting it from Cabbage. I corrected this by manually renaming the vst3 file not by exporting again. Maybe that confused REAPER. The strange thing was that from that moment on not only the new plugin did not work anymore but all Cabbage plugins.

What seems to happen is that REAPER gets into a state where it looks into the wrong directory for the Cabbage plugins. One can delete C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\reaper-vstplugins64.ini and rescan all directories. This finds the Cabbage plugins as they are listed in the newly created reaper-vstplugins64.ini. But later on REAPER still searches in the wrong directory, namely one of those given in the lines of the main ini file C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\REAPER.ini.

Of course, this is speculative because REAPER does not write a log file with the reason why a plugin could not be loaded.

I fear that although I waited for a week before posting it, my ‘solution’ was premature. Last weekend I noticed that the SINE player (https://www.orchestraltools.com/store/get-sine) was missing from my plugin list in REAPER. I found that the procedure I mentioned above had the side-effect of REAPER not scanning the directory where the SINE Player.dll is located. As soon as I re-included the directory in the list to be scanned by REAPER and had REAPER do a re-scan, all Cabbage plugins failed again. So there seems to be a conflict between the two plugins.

I could confirm that this is the reason by renaming SINE Player.dll to SINE Player.dll.deactivated. After re-scanning (or just restarting REAPER) the Cabbage plugins work again. But of course all projects using the SINE player fail.

I am not enough expert in DLLs to understand how such a conflict can arise. I can just say that it does not depend on whether the Cabbage plugin is saved as VST/dll or VST3. In both cases the Cabbage plugin is blocked by the SINE player plugin. I also tried to re-install the SINE player plugin on a different directory with no avail.

Did anyone experience this kind of incompatibility of plugins before?

Last not least, the versions:

Cabbage: 2.5.28
Csound: 6.15
REAPER: 6.28
SINE Player: 1.0.5.589

I’ve never seen this happen before. From time to time you might see issues with older versions of Csound installed which might cause conflicts, but I’ve never seen it with a 3rd party DLL. I’m just downloading Sine now…

I did a lot of tests today and I think I can specify the problem a bit more: It only happens if REAPER loads the SINE plugin before the Cabbage one(s). So if the first project tab (from the left in the GUI, specified by projecttab1=... in the ini file) loads a Cabbage plugin it works and following projects with SINE plugins work too. The other way around, the error comes as soon as the first project using a Cabbage plugin is loaded and only the SINE plugins work. So my workaround is now: When that error happens I close all project tabs and re-open them in the sequence with Cabbage-using projects first. (After already having posted one wrong solution I am a bit careful, but it seems to work.)

Thanks for reporting back. Just so we are clear, this only happens with Sine? I wonder if Sine is changing the working directory or something like that, hence causing Cabbage problems in finding the relevant .csd file :thinking:

Sine is changing the working directory

That could well be. SINE is (like Spitfire Labs) a ‘player’ plugin which lets you chose the actual instrument within the plugin. So it could be that it sets the directory to the one where the instrument code or samples is/are located. That would explain the order dependence. On the other hand I suppose that in the moment when the Cabbage VST3 plugin is loaded its directory is known and 'cd’ed to. Unfortunately, REAPER does not provide an error log. So it is unclear if it fails already when loading the .vst3 file or later when loading the .csd file.

Thanks for keeping us in the loop at any rate. I did download Sine, but I have yet to test it myself. I will try to get around to it at some point soon.