DX8a anyone?

[Bob Cain]

Does CEP work for anyone under DX8a? Under DX8 it lost its mind if you refreshed plugins. They all disappeared. Forever. Is that still true with DX8a?

My love affair with CEP is almost over, much as I cherish it, without being able to use the new tools out now that require DX8a. It has become a survival issue if you are a professional. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/frown.gif

Bob

[bcwdwks]

Just the other day I read, on this forum, that Dx8.1 is out. That may solve your problems. Do a search.

Good luck http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif
BC

[Bob Cain]

**** . Based on a response from Synt in another forum I decided to give 8.0a a try. Same ol, same ol. If I refresh DirectX plugins in CEP it crashes and all plugins are gone on restart. Any subsequent attemps to refresh crash also. What a f***ing pain in the a**.

Bob

[DS_Sultan]

Bob, why not give DX 8.1 a try. It has been working on my system for some time now without a hitch. Although I have to say I am not having any DX issues to begin with. But before you divorce Synt give it a go.

You can get it on my site in my File Chamber (http://dssultan.artistcollaboration.com) along with some other stuff. This site will be growing as I find usefull things to post.

[Bob Cain]

Originally posted by DS_Sultan:
You can get it on my site in my File Chamber (http://dssultan.artistcollaboration.com) along with some other stuff. This site will be growing as I find usefull things to post.

Thanks. I tried your link to DX8.1 and it seems to be broken.


Bob

[DS_Sultan]

If your using Netscape, right click on the link and click Save As. It does work.

[Buckwheat]

Bob,
I have been using DX 8.0a for months now on a few PCs with CEP and it is solid. I have lots of different plug ins and see no problems at all. For me the 8.0a is the most solid version yet. 8.0 did have some problems. In my experience DX can be messed up by some plug ins, games or other multimedia program installs or uninstalls. But usually if you just install DX 8a again and maybe run a registry cleaner utility to remove illegal references left over, then it is fine.

[Bob Cain]

Originally posted by Buckwheat:

But usually if you just install DX 8a again and maybe run a registry cleaner utility to remove illegal references left over, then it is fine.

Thanks, Buckwheat. Experimentation with other software has led me to the conclusion that the problem is a rogue plugin which brings down applications that scan for their presence (except for Sound Forge for some reason). I have been trying to find a utility that will allow me to disable/enable plugins so that I can do a binary search to find the culprit. Unfortunately no such utility seems to exist. There are utilities that will remove them but reinstallation is required to get them back. If worse comes to worst I'll have to go that route. I'm in process of verifying that I still have or can obtain the installation packages for all my plugins. That's a worthwhile exercise in its own right I suppose.

Can you point me towards a good registry cleaner?


Bob

[DS_Sultan]

Well Bob, DXMAN will let you un-reg and re-reg a plug in with no trouble. So you could conceivably find your culprit very easily.

As for the reg cleaner, there are so many out there. I use a little program from Microsoft (free by the way) that will clean the registry and make backups of what it finds and removes. It's called REGCLEAN. See if you don't already have it on your system. If not, let me know. It may not have the power of say a reg cleaner from McAfee or Symantec, but it does a good job.

[Bob Cain]

Thanks for the reply, DS.

Originally posted by DS_Sultan:
Well Bob, DXMAN will let you un-reg and re-reg a plug in with no trouble. So you could conceivably find your culprit very easily.

http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gifIn theory, except it is one of the many progams that now crash when scanning for plugins. Is this what they call a "gotcha"?

As for the reg cleaner, there are so many out there. I use a little program from Microsoft (free by the way) that will clean the registry and make backups of what it finds and removes. It's called REGCLEAN. See if you don't already have it on your system. If not, let me know. It may not have the power of say a reg cleaner from McAfee or Symantec, but it does a good job.

I have Clean Sweep but it always crashed trying to analyze the registry. I just purchased the upgrade and, lo, the registry sweep function is gone! Is this what they call a "gotcha"?

regclean is on my system but it didn't fix anything. Heavy sigh.


Bob

[Buckwheat]

Hi Bob,
I have not tried the Regclean, but I the Norton Win Doctor (part of Norton utilities) has solved DX issues for me in the past. I used to have a MacAfee utility that did too, but I can't remember which one it was now, anyway I like the Norton stuff better. Just be sure to set the Norton programs to not run in the background all the time.
Have you narrowed the culprit down to a few plug ins ? Maybe if you list the ones you have we can see if any of us have the same. I would like to be sure and avoid the problem!

[Bob Cain]

Originally posted by Buckwheat:
Hi Bob,
I have not tried the Regclean, but the Norton Win Doctor (part of Norton utilities) has solved DX issues for me in the past.

Can you brief me on what it can do with DX plugins? After just paying another $35 to Synantec for an upgrade that did less than the original I am now a bit shy of spending more with them.

Maybe if you list the ones you have we can see if any of us have the same. I would like to be sure and avoid the problem!

I have a plethora of plugins which is why this is a bitch. I'm in process of locating the installation packages for them all so that I can do a mass removal with Vincent Burel's DX Uninstaller and selective reinstall until I find the culprit. I will report back if and when I find it.

Bob

[trock]

It would be a LOT easier and faster to de-install and re-install them using DrDX. That's exactly what it was developed for.

[Buckwheat]

Bob,
I do not know Windows programming enough to tell you what the Win Doctor actually did, but in my case I found that it corrected the annoying problems such as when many DX plug ins leave references to them in host audio software, and in a few cases where even after I uninstalled the plug ins, I had problems with the host software. So I can only assume that the Win doctor is cleaning out the leftover reference to these plug ins. So I found Win Doctor a useful tool (and Speed Disk and Disc Doctor are useful too). Maybe someone here more well versed in the code behind Win Doctor could elaborate more.

Trock - what is DrDX? I have never heard of that - got a link to it?

[Bob Cain]

Originally posted by trock:
It would be a LOT easier and faster to de-install and re-install them using DrDX. That's exactly what it was developed for.

Thanks, Trock. I haven't heard of that one but it sounds like it could be a life saver. Got a link to it?

Bob

[trock]

KPreston - a contributor to the plug-ins forum - created it. If you do a search under KPreston and then go to his profile, you can e-mail him and ask him for a copy. He's a great guy and he created it when I had a similar problem.

[Bob Cain]

Originally posted by trock:
KPreston - a contributor to the plug-ins forum - created it. If you do a search under KPreston and then go to his profile, you can e-mail him and ask him for a copy. He's a great guy and he created it when I had a similar problem.

Thanks, man. I wrote him and I have all my fingers crossed.

Bob

[Bob Cain]

Postscript. The problem after removing DX8a was that devenum.dll was still left behind from DX8a and is the component that interferes with plugins and which OS reinstallation won't replace. I deleted that, re-installed Win98SE to get back to DX6 and all is well. It took two weeks and inspiration from God and Keith Welchel to find this. No vendor could or would offer a suggestion beyond re-intallation of their application. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/mad.gif

Bob