The last I heard on this bug, it was determined to be a plugin issue and Audio Damage was fixing it. Here's the conclusion, as far as I know, from a KVR thread on the topic (warning: KVR thread): Here's the last we heard from Audio Damage at the Reaper forum:
Thanks for the reply, schwa. I wrote to Audio Damage on June 7 to report that the newest upgrade to Discord was crashing Reaper in the usual way. Chris Randall responded: "It has been determined by people smarter than I that this is most assuredly a Reaper bug. (There's actually a lengthy discourse on the subject on the VSTGUI mailing list.)" I replied that I would take it up with y'all. So I guess the ball keeps being thrown from one court to another, I have no idea what's going on, but I'm not giving up.
Geez, I hope this is something that can get resolved. I'm pretty interested in discord 3 (when it comes out in x64) and RR (if/when it's x64) and since reaper is my main squeeze it's a pita to buy them....then have to return them if they don't work.
Wow, this thing is endless and frustrating! We did communicate directly with Audio Damage in December and the last we heard from them, they had identified a problem with how their plugins unload shared libraries. I'll email Audio Damage again and ask them for whatever new information they have, then report back here.
It seems odd that only the pay-to-use plug-ins have this bug, which prevents me from testing. At any rate, here's a potential hack-of-a-fix, I'd be surprised if it didn't help. This DLL, if you drop it into your 32-bit REAPER Plugins/ directory (the same place as reaper_video.dll, etc), and restart REAPER, should fix. The source code is here: I compiled it using VC6 and 'cl /MD /O1 /LD reaper_audiodamagefix.cpp /link /opt:nowin98' I await your feedback! Note: if it does fix, you might ask, "why not just include this code in REAPER"? The answer, of course, is that it's otherwise pointless and generally bad form. We don't use GDI+ for a reason.
I dropped the .dll into the folder and I just tested every Audio Damage plugin I own in Reaper- they work perfectly! I'm astounded. What a great day :) I'll change the title of this thread to reflect the news. Thank you so much, Justin, I can't tell you.
Just a bit more technical context. This is not a question of "Reaper choosing not to support GDI+". If a plugin wants to use GDI+, it can do so in the normal way. Plenty of plugins do use GDI+ properly. The bug here is that these particular problem plugins apparently use GDI+ but don't unload it properly. The audiodamagefix.dll that Justin supplied does nothing but load GDI+ and never unload it. Justin's dll essentially introduces a new (generally benign) bug that cancels out the plugin's bug. Which is why Justin wrote that the fix is "otherwise pointless and generally bad form." I know that for most people this whole business probably just sounds like tiresome blame-passing, which is a bummer.