Plugin window title bar disappears in Cubase 8 32bit

Audio Plugins
1

Hi all,

we have a problem with our plugins that we can reproduce with an empty JUCE project configured to build a “Hello World” audio plugin.

JUCE Version: 3.2

Binary Type: VST 2

OS: Mac OSX (tested on Yosemite & El Capitan)

Host: Cubase 8, 32bit

We could not reproduce it in 64bit Cubase, on Windows or different hosts.

 

 

How to reproduce:

1) Launch Cubase 8 32bit

2) Instantiate plugin so that the window is visible

3) Click somewhere ouiside the DAW, e.g. on Desktop => plugin window is hidden behind DAW

4) Click somewhere into the DAW (not the plugin window show/hide button)

 

Result: Plugin window misses the (OS style) title bar. If you now click on the plugin window show/hide button twice, the window will be properly drawn again.

 

As I said, we could reproduce this with a plain Hello World project.

Is this a known issue? Can someone probably provide guidance on working around this?

2

If you can confirm that it's still a problem with the latest JUCE v4 codebase, then we'll take a look, but things may have changed since 3.2..

3

As we're currently release qualifying the plugin it is obviously not an option to upgrade JUCE.

Is there any way you can think of to force a redraw of the parent window title bar?

 

4

No, the parent window belongs to the host, the plugin can't (and shouldn't) do anything to it. Anyway, the title bar may not even exist, depending on the type of host.

But what exactly what you mean by "disappears"?

5

I have created a video to illustrate the behaviour:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ste1psags4ypnxt/Cubase32bit_bug_720p.mov?dl=0

 

 

6

It's not disappeared, it's just behind the main window.

In old Carbon-based hosts, the juce plugin is a floating window which follows around its parent window, but is set to always-on-top so that it doesn't get lost. It looks like when the app gets focus, it doesn't bring the plugin windows forward, but the juce one happens to come to the front because it's always-on-top. Can't remember whether we did anything to fix this recently, but actually not sure what we could do about it.

It's a legacy problem anyway - 64-bit plugins will work fine, because they can embed a Cocoa NSView instead of the old floating window trick.