Track Goes Dead (no sound) when effects are added to it.

Like the title says.

In one of my Scaler3 tracks, should I add an effect plugin to one of the 3 effect slots inside the mixer tab, the sound from that spefic track just goes completely dead providing no more sound.

It only seems to start providing sound again should I remove the effect plugin from the slot.

Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong here?

Hey @Soundboy and welcome to the forum. we have had a few reports of this but cannot reproduce it in anyway. Could you please list your specs and open a clean session (no template) of your DAW and load a new instance of Scaler 3 and try from there? Basically we would like exact steps to follow to try and recreate what you are experiencing here. Thanks.

Sure. There are no specific steps neccassary on my end. It just simply happens every and any time I add an effect to one of the mixer slots. So basically from the start of a new session:

1 add “Scaler 3”,
2 add chord/s to scalers mix track,
3 go to arrange view and view the mixer,
4 add an effect to one of the slots,
5 the track you added it to now produces no sound.

My specs are as follows:
DAW: Ableton Live: 12.1.10
OS: Windows 11
RAM: 96
Nvme: Samsung 990 Pro with 558 GB free
CPU: i9-12900K

Here’s hoping this info can help in some way.

Hi, thanks for the report here. We have been able to reproduce this bug in some circumstances. In our experience it is affecting the VST3 Scaler 3 plugin on Mac and Windows running in Ableton Live, as well as Studio One on PC, with some VST3 effect plugins, as well as Scaler 3 standalone on PC.

We have not been able to reproduce this in Ableton Live when using the AU or VST2 Scaler 3 plugin on Mac, or the VST2 plugin on Windows, or the VST3 plugin in other hosts e.g. Reaper. So for the moment we would suggest using AU or VST2 in favour of the VST3 plugin in Ableton Live. Or if using the VST3 Scaler 3 plugin, this issue does not seem to occur when hosing AU or VST2 audio effect plugins.

It also doesn’t seem to be an issue with all VST3 plugins. For example Native Instruments’ Bite and Raum do stop audio on that track, but NI’s Guitar Rig Pro 6 will not. There is similar inconsistency between various Arturia plugins.

Could you please let us know which specific effect plugins you are adding to Scaler 3 to cause this? And also the plugin type, but it seems safe to assume it is only VST3 effect plugins.

So a safe route at this point seems to be avoiding VST3 in Ableton Live, and avoiding VST3 audio effect plugins in Scaler 3 standalone on PC, however we will of course try to have this resolved as quickly as possible.

I only really use VST3 plugins so I suppose that would explain why it seems as though almost every plugin I throw into the mixer causes this to happen.

If only there was a way to route the audio to different outer channels instead, then we could add the effects there instead and not limit ourselves to just 3.

Anyhow, I have a large collection of effects plugins so I won’t go through them all, but here’s a few popular ones that seem to create this error:

AOM - Invisible Limiter, AudioDamage - EOS2 Reverb, Dada Life - Sausage Fattener, Eventide - Blackhole, Kazrog - Kclip3, Lunacy Audio - Beam, Polyverse - Wider, Wavesfactory - Spectre, Soundtoys - Decapitator, Valhalla - Vintage Verb, Kilohearts - Faturator, Xfer - OTT.

I suppose for the time being, I may download the AU version of Scaler and hope that this resolves most of the problem.

This problem is not limited to Ableton Live, I experience the same problem in Studio One. It does seem to be plugin specific as some work fine while others mute the audio