That should simply work, in max 6.1.10 and 7.3.4 If for whatever reason it does not, loadbanging a message ; dsp start

could maybe work. If it also fails , than something too heavy in main or all patchers is disturbing it.

i will try again later. it might have something to do with the fact that i also set audio prefs right before it. (rate, vectorsize, and overdrive)

I usually set Audio Driver with messages, like sampling rate, overdrive, takeover, vector size etc. All that can be done with messages, and controlled by delayed loadbang. Starting dsp after that has allways worked for me. My only problem ever was that Max sometimes sets Audio Driver to none, if Prefered Audio Device is not present. Not a big deal for using Max to do some work, but can be a problem in case of Standalone. Here one example :

delay will not really work for me. i dont know how long the patch takes to open. then i could as well leave it to the user.

which is normally not a big isssue in max7 if i should be honest; people are used to use the button on the sidebar. but i´d like to have certain patches to start playing audio after they are opened. eventually i need to geet back to the trick which i always recommended for vst: request something from the object in order to find out when the task has finished, then trigger the next step from there.

True, loading plugins sometimes makes more trouble than wanted. Thay can produce artifacts and dropouts when loading, if audio is allready on. But it all depends much on the plugins as well.

Asking a plug if it is a synth or similar, and using the answer to go on with next plug was also my trick - {plug xxx.vst, get -7} .

Last successfully loaded plug woud then start dsp.

By the way all this stuff was so nicelly visible in max 4 vst help file, in Max 7 one has to go to reference to find about this things.

It was easier to get the ideas at that time...

--------- Back to the issue - if delayed dsp start was unsuccessful loading dsp

it will reflect that in adstatus switch. You could try banging dsp start till it spits 1 out ...

i´d need one step before that... need to know when settings are applied to then turn dsp on :)

in my case the driver will remain untouched - but at least the vectorsize will be changed.

worst is that you probably can never be sure if certain method will work on all platforms and with all kind of device drivers.

well, and when something works in root but doesnt in bpatcher, that makes me think it is the usual suspect causing this...

One can't trust 100 % that whatever method will allways work. I prefer to have dsp auto loaded upon start, that works in most cases for standalone, cause it creates own preferences which remain unchanged till one wants to change them. And a good visible button dark for Off, red for On, indicating dsp state. I don't like that ezdac look. If You are a bit away from the screen on stage, You can't really tell if it's on or off. -------- Here is a patch waiting till iovs and sigvs match :