Hello,
This is also happening to me, Cubase 14 on Mac M1 MacBook Air, latest versions of everything, plugins included. Hangs about 6~8 minutes on the ‘Scanning VST3 plugins’ phase of the startup. VST2 is disabled.
If I then quit Cubase and load it again it loads very fast. But, if I restart my Mac the same thing happens again - a very slow startup hanging on the VST3 scan phase.
I know this is related to the scanning of one or more plugins. Some months ago, the same discussion was happening in the forums relating to slow startup problems in Dorico in this thread Request for help: investigating slow VST scanning - #82 by mducharme
After some time an update was release for Dorico that seems to solve the startup problems or, at least shows the name of the plugin being scanned during the scanning progress so that we can try to identify the offending plugin(s). @Ulf any plans to bring a similar type of thing to Cubase? Can’t the code for the Dorico plugin scanner be, at least partially, ported to Cubase? Surely it’s not something completely different, correct?
I would also like to leave a suggestion for future versions of the plugin scanner. A report at the end of the process with the scanning time per plugin would be very helpful. At least, list the plugins that take more than a “reasonable” time (1 min?) to scan. This report should be able to be saved to a text file.