Hi All, I have just fitted a new motherboard/chip & ram to my windows pc (win10 64bit),
windows launched perfectly and the my RME soundcard was also recognised. When i try to launch Cubase 14 it hangs when checking vst plugins. I have gone through as many plugins that I could find (3rd party) and reinstalled & activated them to no avail. I tried launching cubase in safe mode and deleting preferences etc but it still hangs at the same point. Any ideas how to get around this please? It works fine if i disable all 3rd party plugins but it does not say why it is hanging nor what plugin is causing the issue. thanks in advance.
Have a look at
C:\Users\Name\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg and search for “VSTScannermaster”. Open the file with a simple text editor and you’ll see how long it takes to scan each individual plugin during launch. You can do this “live” while you launch Cubase, this should give you an idea.
Another strategy: Disable 50% of your VSTs and see if Cubase is still hanging. No: Take 50% of the other half. Repeat until you’ve cornered the culprit by excluding 50% every time.
Maybe it’s more than just one plugin. In this case you’d have to start again.
Do you still use VST2 plugins as well?
What sort of 3rd party plugins do you use? Waves, UAD, Softube, etc - have you checked the forum if other users encountered problems as well with these plugins?
Killing the vstscanner proces - NOT the vstscannermaster proces - allows the scanning to proceed with the offending plugin blacklisted. You may have to repeat the proces for every offending plugin.
FWIW, I’ve never killed the VST scanner process. For my case, simply trying to start Cubase a second time after killing Cubase has worked all except one of the times this has occurred on my system (I think a total of 5 times in the month and a little I’ve had my new system (and never on the older system). The advantage is that there is no blacklisting of plugins, even temporary, needed. That said, though, if the OP has this problem persisting on every Cubase start, it is either a different problem from what I was seeing (i.e. in the post linked above) or there is some other variable on the OP’s system.
I mentioned this solution because Cubase normally never hangs on my system. Yesterday, however, it hung every single time I tried to start it, unless I either started without third party plugins or killed the vstscanner process. I can live with Synchron Stage Reverb being temporarily blacklisted, but running Cubase without third party plugins altogether is useless.
It might be caused by one plugin trying to connect with its mothership, failing for some reason and thus blocking Cubase from starting.
Reco suggested to find out which plugin causes this situation. Then you probably have to take of its licensing.
I’m curious on this. Did you have that plugin on your system prior to “yesterday” (guessing the day before yesterday by now), or was it new or updated “yesterday”? Also, in either case, if you start Cubase now without it on the blacklist, do you still get the hangs?
I’d certainly agree that, if there is one specific plugin that is consistently preventing Cubase from starting up, it needs to be eliminated, one way or the other (i.e. blacklisting, uninstalling, or using some other method to prevent it from being scanned – e.g. moving it out of the VST3 directory or changing its extension from .vst3 to something like .tmp). But, if that only happened on one day, even if multiple times, it would seem like there was something “weird” about that one day (e.g. authorization server issues). That may indeed be a good reason for the temporary blacklisting.
In my own case, I’ve had only 5 of these hangs total. The first three were in the first week or two of my using Cubase 14 on my new system, and just restarting Cubase once I’d determined it was hung and killed via Task Manager was sufficient to let Cubase start without a hang. In the other two cases, on the same day a few weeks later, Cubase hung when I tried to start it a second time, and there was also a scenario, which I now know relates to my MOTU 828x drivers, that made Windows 11 crash and restart. Once it was restarted, though, Cubase started regularly again. (I suspect that on that specific case of killing Cubase, I may have either not let Cubase stay hung long enough before kiling it – i.e. since I now recognized the problem from the past times – or tried starting it too quickly afterward (though I hadn’t waited very long in the earlier cases, either). Thus, in my cases, the killing VST scanner, checking the scan log, then dealing with the blacklist/unblacklist stuff would have taken decidedly more time than just killing Cubase and restarting it.
I have had the plugin since it came out and it has worked flawlessly up until now. But I did update it a couple of days ago, so I guess I’ll have to reach out to VSL about this.