Vst Plugin Crashes In Macaw 3.02 and earlier

In Macaw 3.02, and earlier versions, some Vst plugins WILL crash your instance of Macaw. This is not really the plugins fault, but is more a design flaw inside Macaw to do with how the threads are being locked, which causes deadlock in the way about half of all Vst plugins that you load work.

So about half of the Vst plugins you get will work and some will just cause the program to go into deadlock, or an infinite loop. The problem is caused by Macaw locking the Dsp thread and then the Vst plugin trying to aquire the same lock via an audioEditIdle message while the Vst is executing.

There is no solution to this problem at this time, other than to contact the people who make the plugin and try to get them to not send Idle messages during the Vst process call. Otherwise the plugins will keep crashing.

To fix this problem will require a major change of the program, but that is not going to happen for a while, so until then if your favorite plugin does not work then there is nothing that can be done about it.

New demo song posted

Here is a new demo project for Macaw. Done in the style of the Transformers movie theme. I tried to copy the sound of the repetitive deep bass that was used in the action scenes to create the sense of danger and urgency and also used the same chord pattern for the adventurous mood.

Click here to download the mp3 file(Exported from Macaw using the export audio file feature)

Click here to download the project file that loads in Macaw to see how it was made

Click here for more demo songs...

Macaw now works in Linux on Wine

As of version 3.02, I have configured Macaw to run in Linux via Wine, which is a Linux program that runs Windows programs in Linux, but not always perfectly. It is not perfect and you have to navigate around some sloppy wine menu rendering, but problems that exited before such as missing fonts and problems with trackbars are gone, so now you can run Macaw and it works about 90% as good as it does in Windows, where Macaw is meant to run.

I tested this in Puppy Linux using an older version of Wine and a really bad window manager, so it probably works better now on newer Linux versions with newer Wine versions.