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

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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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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That would maybe make sense, I think.

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Do you use any Waves plugins?

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

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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Thanks! I’ll give it a go!

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.

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.

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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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.

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