How to build for distribution (debugging load fails)?

Windows
#1

Hello everyone!

BACKGROUND:
I am a VST noob, did some rudiments with the Steinberg SDKs a few years back and now I’ve made a convolver for reverbs and most recently a visualizer for an “Ego Riser” I’m making for my band.

PROBLEM:
The trouble is, I cannot figure out how to package it so I can share it successfully. Of course it is the same old story of “works on my computer”.
Is there a dependency on say a redistributable or something else? Seems consistent that it starts working after JUCE is installed on the host…?

I also struggle a bit to find a good way to debug this. The plugin simply won’t show up in end user Reaper (I have tried all the Reaper workarounds for this issue - it does not fix it).

So I guess this is question part two: how do you debug issues like this? Especially since I am unable to reproduce myself.

I built a Release, x64 and genereally followed Package your app or plugin for distribution.

For context:

image
image802×658 78 KB

It is a visualizer so that the other band members can contribute to the design of the lights.
It has a vertical jet smoke machine (with leds) and four Par Cans that can be controlled through a custom MIDI map (the others won’t bother to learn any DMX software so I just make a MIDI->DMX dongle).

Thanks for any and all answers!

#2

Probably missing the Microsoft C++ runtime on the end user’s machine. The easiest fix is to change your project to statically link to that instead of using the dynamic runtime DLL.

staticruntime
staticruntime974×704 76.3 KB

After changing that, you of course have to re-export the project from Projucer and rebuild it in Visual Studio.

#3

Thanks! I’ll try this. I seem to remember reading this will imply a limit on total # of VST for the client? Cannot seem to find a reference to it now though, but something along the lines of 64 VSTs IIRC?

#4

Yes, linking the runtime statically can have issues like that. (Not with latest Windows 10 builds, though, they substantially increased the limits.)

The alternative is to figure out which dynamic runtime to install on the user’s machine. IIRC, also the dynamic runtime does have limits in the number of different plugins runnable at the same time, though, if not using the latest Windows 10.

1 Like
#5

Allright. I will keep it in mind.

Thanks Xenakios :smiley:

EDIT: It worked! Thanks again!