[solved] Virus Control disappearing in Ableton Live 7
 

I am running Virus Control for my Snow TI in Ableton 7. All is fine until I save the project and reopen it. The 4 midi channels sending info to each part, as well as the Virus Control channel (I'm using it in a similar manner to the Snow Ableton Tutorial) are still there. However, the actual Virus Control plugin window does not appear. Deselecting and reselecting "view plugins" does not cause it to reappear. Similarly, minimising and restoring the Ableton Live window doesn't reveal it tucked around the back of the window or anything like that.

Ableton settings are default, except for the "display all plugins regardless of which channel is enabled" one (I forget the exact name, but that's what it does). I have tried turning this off and selecting the snow channel (which would normally make it reappear), but again, this makes no difference.

The workaround I've discovered is to drop the virus control back onto the virus channel, and a new instance of VC appears, claiming there is no Snow available (presumably because the original, missing one is locking it), but after a couple of seconds, this disappears and it syncs up as if it were a new instance. The snow then works, however, the midi channels become de-linked from the snow and need to be re-routed to point to it and the appropriate channel. This is a bit of a faff as I tend to jump between several projects during the course of a session (so have to perform the workaround several times of an evening) and it also prevents me from making a blank "template" Ableton project for use with all new projects using the Snow.

Anyone else encountered this/got any ideas how to get round it?

This may be really stupid of me, but isn't there a little button in the title bar of the Live plugin that opens up the VC window? When Live opens a project, it never reopens the windows for my external plugins such a VC or the UAD tools.

Do you mean in the bottom-right hand corner of the screen? I've tried that, but it just brings up the tab with the Kaoss Pad-like x-y controller tied to the Snow, not VC itself.

By Kaoss Pad-like x-y controller, I think that you mean the Live plug-in. That is the guy that you want. In its title bar at the top of it, there should be several little round "buttons" that do things such as disable the plugin. I think that there should be one on the right end that brings up the VC window. I don't have Live here, so I am trying to recall all of this from my poor memory.

Thanks very much; that solves the problem, it's the little spanner icon on there that does it. I must confess, I now realise that despite having used Live a fair bit in the past, that was with earlier versions that dealt with samples rather than external plugins and I am new to version 7. I had never really delved into that any deeper than assigning two parameters to the x-y controller part.

Cheers for your help GrooveNinja, much appreciated.

That's the one. I find that VC works really well in Live, and I use it for most of my sounds. One of these days, I am going to try to figure out how to use the Virus as a controller for Live, too. That sounds like it could be really cool!

Yes, touch wood, VC has been really stable and easy to use in Live so far. No latency problems or lengthy configuration needed, it really was "plug and play". Even managed to get it slaved to my ESX-1's midi clock signals so that Ableton and the Snow plays in time to that. I'm still learning it, but it's all spectacularly well designed so far.