VST3 MIDI Plugins Won't Load in Ableton Live

Audio Plugins
21

Yes, this allows the plugin to instantiate, but Live still stops us from putting a synth after it.

Works in a lot of cases as a workaround, but it isn’t properly supported.

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22

Ableton Live, like most DAWs except for Logic, doesn’t have the concept of an external MIDI VST plugin in the same track as the synth. That concept is only supported with their internal plugins or MAX-made plugins.

Instead, the flow to use an external MIDI plugin is to load it as an extra synth track, then in your “real” (target) synth track choose the track with the MIDIFX as an input and then in the box below, choose the plugin. Then enable input (“IN” button) to get MIDI flowing.

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23

thanks for the explanation! :slight_smile:

24

Any updates on this? I have been attempting to create a midi effect plug in to alter the midi notes of incoming signals to then process to a virtual instrument. Using Ableton and Audio Units. However I can’t seem to get the plug in build to show up whenever I tick “MIDI Effect Plugin.” If I tick either Plugin is synth or don’t tick this. Then even when I alter the midi messages and use a new track and take input from my plugin’s track. I can’t get seem to change the midi signal.

As a side note I used to be able to do this on older versions of Juce. Not sure what changed?

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25

this still didn’t work for me on macOSX, worked on Windows 10

26

What worked for me was just ticking “Plugin MIDI Input” and “Plugin MIDI Output” in the Projucer, but not “MIDI Effect Plugin”

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27

I’m hitting a similar issue to the OP. I first encountered it when testing my own MIDI plugin in Ableton, so I decided to try the MidiLogger example VST3 and get the same error message there too.

I’m running:

  • macOS Monteroy 12.5.1 with an M1 chip,
  • Ableton Live 11
  • Juce 7.03

I’ve tried building the plugin in both Debug / Release configurations as well as tried the trick of removing “MIDI Effect Plugin” from the PIP metadata in MidiLoggerPluginDemo.h. It seems that Audio plugins load & work (tested with the SamplerPlugin example) as expected. As well as the MIDILogger plugin loading in both the AudioPluginHost and Reaper :thinking:

Anyone have any ideas?

28

In case anyone runs into the same issue the solution for me was similar to what @schwrrring & @nicolezim suggested but additionally specifying an Input bus as well:

static BusesProperties getBusesLayout()
{
      return PluginHostType().isAbletonLive() ? BusesProperties().withInput("input", AudioChannelSet::stereo()).withOutput("out", AudioChannelSet::stereo())
                                              : BusesProperties();
}

Setting IS_MIDI_EFFECT seemed to have no effect either way.

The only issue now is that Live seems to interpret the plugin as an audio effect instead (UI shows Audio from / to instead of MIDI from / to) but that can be fixed by setting up routing with other tracks.

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