I know Ross is unlikely to support AudioMulch 1.0 any more (of which I am a registered user of 12 years or so), and I'd happily upgrade to Mulch 2.0, but the demo I tried runs much slower than Mulch 1.0 on my ageing 1 GHz PIII with 256MB RAM. ;) OS is Win XP SP3.
Anyway, I have noticed a lot of newer VST plugins crashing Mulch 1.0. This includes the latest version of Valhalla Shimmer, and the latest free EQ plugin from Voxengo (Marvel GEQ).
I get the "Illegal Floating Point Operation" error and it shuts down.
Any ideas why? Or of there's a fix? Should finally uprgade my PC later this year, which I am hoping will clear things up, but I8d really like to use some of these plugs now.
All the best,
Gregg
There isn't a fix. I'm pretty sure it's a bug in the plugins if you're only seeing it with the plugins.
If I were you I'd report this as a bug to the plugin developers. The fact that their new plugins are breaking and very few if any old plugins break with this issue is perhaps a good indication of a problem in their plugin,
One possible technical answer is as follows you can forward it to the plugin developers:
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AudioMulch 1.0 sometimes unmasks some floating point exceptions including division by zero. If your plugin assumes that these exceptions are masked (especially in GUI code) then your plugin may crash with "Illegal Floating Point Operation" or divzero errors. You need to audit your code for bad practices like this and/or remask floating point exceptions you aren't avoiding before codepaths that may do this.
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They're always welcome to get in touch with me for more info.
The situation arises due to interactions between the development tools I have used and that plug-in developers use. AudioMulch 0.9, 1.0 etc was built with Borland C++ Builder which had different floating point policies than MS Visual Studio (used for AM 2.x and most plugin development). AM 1.0 did a lot to achieve compatibility but ultimately there are still ways plugins can break -- and there are no rules in the VST specification to say how things really should be done.
In the end, plugin developers may choose not to support or test on AM1.0 and you may have no choice but to upgrade.
Ross
Thanks Ross. The latest version of the Voxengo GEQ VST plugin now works, but I still have trouble with Valhalla Shimmer, so I'll forward the details to Sean Costello!