JUCE8 Plugins Don't Work Causing Black Screen and Crash

[relaborn]

Thanks for giving yabridge a shot!

• I read through both the troubleshooting and the known issues sections, and my issue wasn't listed there

Problem description

This is not a yabridge issue but I'm documenting it here because people will come here.

Many JUCE8 plugins result in a black screen GUI because they require Direct2d feature level 1.3 and that's not currently available in wine, dxvk or vkd3d.

You will likely see this error in your logs

[Wine STDERR] err: DxgiFactory::CreateSwapChainForComposition: Not implemented

There is a workaround for plugin developers to call previous rendering methods after detecting wine but this requires developers to want to do this and implement it. Apulsoft have done this already and others might be willing if they are hit with a pleasant support request detailing the problem and pointing to the solution.

https://forum.juce.com/t/juce8-direct2d-wine-yabridge/64298/5

This is likely to be a growing problem unless there's an implementation of recent D2D features upstream as developers transition to JUCE8. Personally I back up my prefixes before I attempt an upgrade.

What did you expect to happen?

Working plugin

What actually happened?

Black screen plugin crashes after a while

Operating system

Debian 12.8 Bookworm

How did you install yabridge?

Directly

yabridge version

5.1.1

yabridgectl version

5.1.1

Wine version

wine-9.21.r1.g32abf9fc ( TkG Staging Esync Fsync )

Plugin

Many JUCE8 Plugins

Plugin type

VST3

Plugin architecture

64-bit

Host

Bitwig, Reaper, Mixbus

Desktop environment or WM

Gnome

GPU model

AMD Radeon RX 6600

GPU drivers and kernel

Mesa 22.3.6-1+deb12u1

Debug log

20:03:14 [Lair-9AGIJQgm] [Wine STDERR] 0024:fixme:d2d:d2d_device_create_device_context Options are ignored 0x1.
20:03:14 [Lair-9AGIJQgm] [Wine STDERR] err: DxgiFactory::CreateSwapChainForComposition: Not implemented
20:03:14 [Lair-9AGIJQgm] [Wine STDERR] err: DxgiFactory::CreateSwapChainForComposition: Not implemented
20:03:14 [Lair-9AGIJQgm] [Wine STDERR] 0024:fixme:d2d:d2d_device_create_device_context Options are ignored 0x1.

Anything else?

Plugins I know to be problematic:
Audio Modelling SWAM instruments and Ambiente
Hertz Drums
All Aberrant DSP plugins

All these plugins have older versions based on JUCE7 except Ambiente. If you check for older versions in your download page or contact the developer you should be able to get them.

Developers often have their own altered tree for JUCE, so not all JUCE8 plugins are a problem.

VocAlign6Pro is JUCE8 but exhibits other problems.
Minimal Audio Squash is JUCE8 but works fine.
Apulsoft apUnmask is JUCE8 works fine.

How to find out if your plugin is based on JUCE8

strings PluginName.vst3 | grep 'JUCE v8'

to scan the all your yabridge vst3 plugins, do this
cd ~/.vst3/yabridge && IFS=$(echo -en "\n\b"); for i in $(find . -name *.vst3 -type l); do grep 'JUCE v8' $i; done

[0CCULTIST]

Does the latest version of apShaper work for you? 1.2.4 switched to JUCE 8 and doesn't work for me, but 1.2.3 does.

[relaborn]

Just tried the demo and it doesn't work. It's based on JUCE 8.0.3 and apUnmask (which works) is based on JUCE 8.0.4 so I presume it's just a build from before the issue was fixed.

The dev is really nice. If you drop him a mail explaining the issue, he'll probably do a new build.

[relaborn]

Just an additional symptom and a partial fix.

Sonible prime:vocal is a JUCE 8.0.4 based ARA2 plugin and standalone app. It doesn't work with yabridge 5.1.1 due to the lack of ARA2 support (it doesn't allow plain VST usage).

The standalone app manages to display it's initial screen but only updates for resizing. Same CreateSwapChainForComposition error.

This can be fixed by creating a dxvk.conf file containing this single line

d3d11.maxFeatureLevel = 9_1

then add this to your environment in your preferred way.

DXVK_CONFIG_FILE=/wherever/your/file/is/dxvk.conf

This fixes prime:vocal but just produces a black screen for apShaper 1.2.4. It may or may not work for other JUCE 8 plugins, I guess dependent on whether they've coded a fallback. Potentially, it would be nice to set DXVK_CONFIG_FILE in a yabridge toml file so that it can be enabled per plugin or per prefix.

A fuller fix probably requires vkd3d, which does contain code to cover CreateSwapChainForComposition. I have yet to figure out a way of forcing JUCE 8 to use DirectX12, if that's possible. The version of vkd3d installed by winetricks is vkd3d-proton which works in conjunction with dxvk, using dxvk's DXGI implementation.

[sandycorzeta]

Confirmed this also happen with reFX NEXUS5 vst.
They use JUCE8 also and have it black screen when i use it through yabridge.
Version 4 didn't have this problem.