@Matt Stegner Where do we go from here?

@Matt Stegner I am in communication with one of the developers of a VST3 effect that isn't working. He said, "From my (limited) understanding of what other developers have discussed online, the issue is that Premiere/Audition deallocates memory for the audio/DSP part of the plugin before the GUI part, leaving the GUI to access something that doesn't exist. From one of the crash logs from Limiter no6, the "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" would seem to match up with this."

He also explained that Steinberg is not issuing VST2 agreements to new developers.

@Matt Stegner
Premiere does crash if I export directly from Premiere. Although, it will encode the video before it crashes sometimes.

@David Bode
Thanks for the follow up.
Does Premiere crash if you export directly from Premiere, and not through AME?
Can you post a picture of your Audio Plugins Manager dialog so I can eliminate some variables?

@Matt Stegner
I did as you requested. I was able to get it to crash simply by applying one VST3 audio effect to the Mix Track, Ctrl M, Send to AME. This was triggered with Toneboosters, Klanghelm, JonVProd, Tokyo Dawn Labs, and Wavesfactory. I couldn't get it to crash this time with Audio Damage Inc or Native Instruments VST3 effects.

I am working on a new video course for Envato's YouTube showing how to mix audio in Premiere. It is frustrating that I cannot show some effects that are only VST3 because they don't work. I have tried using some VST3 effects on 3 different workstations. Same results.

Link to my last course 3 months ago:https://youtu.be/FMTlJ4GLvsU

@David Bode
The first thing you need to try is to rescan your effects to rebuild the internal list. Do the below actions:
1. In Premiere, open "Preferences>Audio>Audio Plug-in Manager...
2. In the dialog that opens, under the "VST Plug-in Folders" section, press the Default button. Please use the default for now as this section only applies to older VST's and not VST3.
3. Check on "Rescan existing plugins" box. This will rescan all the available system effects.
4. Then press the "Scan for Plug-ins" button to scan the system for effects.
5. When done press the OK button to accept the new list

This will remove all effects and completely build the internal list of effects, and is the first step to determining what the issues are and helping get a fix.

Please respond back after you have done this and testing if the effects are still causing a crash.

I have been on with Adobe support for 2 hours trying to work around this. I have tested Premiere Pro with 2021 (v15.4.1), 2022 (v22.0 and 22.3), and the current beta (v22.5). VST3 will trigger a crash on export. I tried effects from Toneboosters, JonVProd, Klanghelm, Audio Damage, Tokyo Dawn Labs, and others.

I provided support with logs from windows and Adobe's crash logs. You can see from my nfo logs that Premiere has been crashing from VST3 effects for over a year.

Support's answer was to stop using VST3 effects in Premiere and they will file a report.

Maybe it might help someone... on Mac in PP check your Prefs-->Audio-->AudioPlug-inManager --> VST folders.

In my case after an iZotope (VST3 only) update my involved PP-projects crashed on startup. Despite all my VST3 plug-ins showed up in the audio plug-in manager marked as "working" when opening an empty project, I had only the path for VST - /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST (VST Plug-In Folder:). As soon as I added the correct path for VST3 - /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 - my with VST3 plug-ins involved PP-project would not crash anymore on startup.

I also guess that the "reset plug-in caches" on startup by holding SHIFT+appstart only involves video and not audio plugins, the reason why I try to handle audio-plug-in related PP Problems by hand. ... well a lot of guess-work with PP-problems. cheers

Hi there.
We’re you able to find a solution to this issue?

I am now facing the same issue. Every time I check my crash logs, it shows my vst3 plugin as the issue.

I’ve followed the same steps Matt suggested and still facing the same issues.

Matt, here's a recording of the issue. I did a full rescan as you asked.
https://www.loom.com/share/0d4b866937fe41b2a0fef0c07ae1f317

Hi Earth,
I'm not sure what might be your issue. Like I said, we test extensively with 3rd party effects and haven't run into any issue like this.
Can you verify that you did a full rescan of your effects that I detailed below? "so the list was fresh" doesn't mean something hasn't changed since then.

When you rescan, can you also press the default button to reset your VST2.4 scanning locations. This is to eliminate variables that might be causing issue, not cause I want you to use Volder VST 2.4 effects.

Sure, no problem. There were no references to vst3 in my plugin paths and i also removed vst2 and disabled all plugins, except a single random one to test with... Pr still crashes on Export or Render when the vst3 is used on a clip or the track mixer.

"I wonder if Pr is scanning the default (C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3) location in Win10?"
Yes, it does. VST3 works differently than the older original VST (what we call internally VST2.4 for the last SDK). That is why I said to remove any VST3 paths from the VST2.4 scanning area as it can cause problems.

Can you send a picture of your Audio Plug-in Manager window to audbugs@adobe.com (Attention Matt) so I can look at it?

and in testing again, now simply dragging a vst3 onto a clip from the Effects Panel is causing an app crash. Understand that i use my audio apps (Ableton, Bitwig) every single day with these same vst3 and i don't have any issues at all.

I'm also noticing that Pr is prompting me to sometimes authorize plugins which have long ago been authorized. Perhaps that's what's causing the crash? Even though the plugins are working fine within the app, upon Export i get the authorization warning about 5-10% of the time and then Pr crashes again.

Thanks Matt. A few weeks ago was the first time i had opened Pr on this system and scanned my plugins, so the list was fresh. The odd thing I'm noticing is that i have no vst3 path in my plugin locations, but all my vst3 are in the list. I wonder if Pr is scanning the default (C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3) location in Win10?

We test extensively with 3rd party effects. So it makes me think there is something else going on.
Can you try this:
1. Open "Premiere Preferences>Audio>Audio Plug-in Manager..."
2. In the VST Plug-in Folder section, remove any folder paths that have the word "VST3" in them.
3. Once any VST3 folders are removed from the VST2.4 scanning list, put a check next to "Rescan Existing Plug-ins"
4. Press the "Scan for Plug-ins" button.
5. Once the scan completes, close the dialog, try exporting with effects again.

You might have a stale list of effects scanned into the Premiere plugin list. If that doesn't help we can trouble shoot further.

Hi Matt, all vst3 effects would result in an app crash when Exporting from Pr. If i sent the export to the queue, then Pr would crash in the background while ME was running. Eventually, ME locks up too and won't render the video.

What effects were causing the issue?
Were you exporting directly from Premiere or from AME?