Fixing start-up crashes in standalone mode

There have been various discussions here in the past concerning crashes of various NI products. I have had issues with this in the past with the components of Komplete 4 which were fixed by resetting my sound drivers in Cubase 4. The issues came up again just recently after installing my Komplete 5 upgrade, but this time resetting the sound drivers in Cubase 4 did not fix startup crashes with various components, e.g. Massive, in standalone mode.

I ran regedit to take a look at my registry keys for products that did start up fine in standalone mode versus products that crashed on startup in standalone mode. I found that in the case of the applications that were crashing, the string value "AB AudioDevice" was either missing or set incorrectly. The keys to look at are under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Native Instruments -> appname

where appname = the name of the application, e.g. Absynth 4, B4II, etc. For each application, there should be a string value called "AB AudioDevice" and it should be set to a valid audio device driver installed on your computer. For example, in my case I am using a Novation Xstation with the Novation USB ASIO Driver, so the string value in my case should be set to "Novation USB ASIO Driver". If the string value is missing, then you can add it in regedit using Edit->New->String Value from the drop-down menus. Make sure to name the new string value "AB AudioDevice". After you add the value, or if the value already exists and is incorrect, you can change the value by right-clicking it and choosing "Modify" and then typing the correct text string (in my case 'Novation USB ASIO Driver') into the Value Data text field and then clicking "OK".

This process was sufficient in my case to get the components to launch in standalone mode. This is not necessarily the final step to getting the components to sound correctly through your audio interface, and I would very strongly suggest that you turn down any audio monitoring devices attached to your interface before launching any of the components. In my case, several of the applications generated some very annoying static until I disabled and re-enabled the audio drivers from within the applications' audio preferences dialog.

I would like to suggest to Native Instruments that they change their applications' start-up code to trap errors of this kind and not crash the application.

If this post belongs in a different forum, then will the moderators kindly move it? I think the information might be helpful to others having difficulties with standalone mode.

 

Thank you.

I have had great experiences with NI programs 'til now, so I was disappointed when-- after installing MASSIVE-- it always crashed on startup. No blue-screen, but the program would start, hang, and then the computer would reboot. This also happens with my free Plexi-Combo download (that came with Essentials) and all of the demos from the NI site that I've tried. No problems with any other NI programs I have-- Absynth 4, Battery 3, Dynamo, Reaktor 3, Kontakt 1, FM7, Pro-53, or Kore Player.

I googled everywhere, but found little help for stand-alone crashes-- but I found your post here and followed the directions (though I'm aprehensive about doodling with the registry)-- and MASSIVE now works beautifully. LOVE it so far.

All of the NI demos I have downloaded had the same problem, so I'll try the same with those.

Thank you. You have saved so much grief.

Best,

Joe