Cubase 12 scans all plugins on startup. Every time. And it takes ages

Cubase
1

Hiya. Running C12 on W10. I’ve had some problems with it crashing on startup, but the latest upgrade seems to have solved that.

BUT

It now runs a complete plugin scan EVERY TIME I start it up. Takes anywhere up to 25 minutes . This feels fairly ridiculous for a professional product. C11 is still rock-solid and starts up fairly immediately.

Anybody have any ideas on what I might be doing wrong?

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2

I think it could be a plugin that is changing something in the VST2 folders on exit.
So Cubase thinks it needs to scan the VST2 folders.
But of course, it’s just an idea.

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3

That would maybe make sense, I think.

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4

Do you use any Waves plugins?

5

I do. Puigtec, Abbey Road Chambers, Vinyl and TG Mastering, Butch Vig and Scheps channel strips and maybe one or two others.

6

You can try temporarily removing the Waveshells. If this solves the issue then use this (make a batch file).

Note this just stops the local server, deletes it and deletes caches. All are recreated next time you start.

taskkill /f /im WavesLocalServer.exe
timeout /t 1 /nobreak
rmdir /s /q "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Waves Audio\Waves Local Server"
rmdir /s /q "%APPDATA%\Waves Audio\Caches"
Pause
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7

Thanks! I’ll give it a go!

8

Don’t forget to remove all Waveshells. From VST3 and VST2 locations. Worth a try and you can always move them back if it makes no difference.

9

Make sure your plugins are up to date, and if you run any kind of system disk cleanup or maintenance tools disable them and try.

Basically anything that could cause a modification in the plugin folders can be a culprit.

10

did you guys solved it yet? I know why its taking forever to startup Vst2 Plugin Manager
Solution- Remove Native Instruments Maschine 2 Plugin also FX Plugin try to start up now

also there abit more delay for the Kontakt 5.6 if you have it on your list

hope it helps

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11

I think Cubase is working normally here, and it still appears to freeze while saying “scanning” - for up to a minute and a half - on every load. Does Cubase not have the feature of other DAWs where you can turn off the scan until you add plugins to your plugin folder and want to use them?

Maybe Steinberg, who invented VSTs, knows there’s something problematic with Studio One and Ableton and FL Studio, which all have this ‘disable’ feature, more or less. Regardless, it’s a royal pain to have to wait so long to open a software package in 2023.

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12

Some VST 2 plugins write to the VST folder, so Cubase thinks there changed something.
It doesn’t scan if nothing changed.

13

That assertion sounds awfully confident. When the issue is it rescans every launch and nothing whatsoever has changed it isn’t a true statement. People come to forums to try to solve things. I’m having similar problems to this with a later numbered version of the application, 13.0.51.

I don’t run any Waves plugins, I have not added to Plugins/VST (not VST3) since the last time I started Cubase and it’s “initializing” VST2 plugins redundant to the last time. It started doing that after installing a trial of Cubase 14. Today after an update of 13 it’s rescanning this folder each launch (some things it never liked that take bizarrely long times to sort). I do have a couple of VST2 things left; Guitar Rig 6, rescanned every launch.

I don’t think it will be logical to blame myself for this. Sure seems like a bug :shrug:

14

Hi and welcome to the forum!
Please try to disable the user preferences. Sometimes they get messed up in between versions.

15

Thanks. I know that well. I did that more than once before I started trying to find out what’s going on. It was my mistake, the Softube stuff is installed inside a subfolder for VST2. It’s still scanning every time. There are annoyances that add up, plugins it takes a long time to ‘initialize’ with the insane instruction to check the plugin while I’m trying to have it scan the plugin.

Something has made it go way wrong the last two days or so. I have reset preferences three times now and the profile from Profile Manager does absolutely nothing. It reverts to its defaults. So I have 71 or 72 differences from the default preferences; re-doing what I want showing in project and in key editor adds up to 33 changes.

Ok, in the meantime, I guess third times a charm (I changed nothing of my modi operandi)? It remembered how I had it set up and didn’t rescan.

16

The best guess I’m able to muster is installing Cubase 14 and setting its preferences (I expected it to look for them from the earlier version or if Nuendo was installed etc but no) made Cubase 13 a bit wonky. Oh well, some mysteries remain. :smiley:

17

We’ve had a lot of users with plugin scanning problems in Dorico and I’ve created an update to the plugin scanner that can be run manually, which may show which plugins are being scanned every time. There is a flag that a plugin can set to say “Always scan me every time”. The reason for this is that some of them do license checks at startup, and there is one dll but many different plugins inside it, and it wants to see which plugins are available (Waveshell is one example of this).

If you download and run the vstscannermaster as described in Ulf’s post then it may show which plugins are causing the problem:

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