It’s very frustrating that every time you start Cubase it HAS to read EVERY plug-in before it starts. This is very time wasting if you have a lot of free plug-ins (or paid ones for that matter).
Sonor will start up (after the initial scan) within seconds because it doesn’t (as far as I can tell) have to read the VST folder EVERY time. It would be great to have (at least) a way to disable the scan so you can start up more quickly instead of the 2-4 mins it takes with a lot of VSTs. I never add new stuff to my DAW and waiting for Cubase (after a crash or restarting) is such a hassle. I have to sit for 2.5 mins wating for it to scan plugins. Nothing’s changed Cubase… help me out here.
Would it not be so much more sensible if Cubase only scanned VSTs as and when they are required?
Often when doodling about waiting for the Muse to smile upon me (an infrequent event), I have no use for any VSTs at all, preferring to use a piano patch from an external synth with C5 recording in the background.
I think there must be something wrong if it scans all plugins every time you open up the application.
My installations of Cubase (5.52) only scans for new plugins whenever I’ve installed new ones or moved a DLL. So starting up Cubase is actually pretty fast.
Only new plug-ins are scanned each time. It only goes through a FULL scan if you update Cubase to a new version or when the time changes to / from daylight savings (at least in the USA).
Although I have not personally experienced in Cubase, I did help a friend who was having a similar issue in Ableton Live and Pro Tools on Windows 7. Launching those apps would ALWAYS result in a full plug-in scan. It turned out that an incompatible plug-in (in this particular case it was MOTU Ethno v1) causing the app to not create a cache or database of the currently installed plug-ins. Removing Ethno allowed the plug-ins database to be created properly in both apps. He also said that everything continued to work fine after upgrading to Ethno 2.
Try just pulling all of your third-party plug-ins and see if you still have the same problem with just the Cubase plug-ins. This will require 2 launches of Cubase. If Cubase is still doing a full re-scan of just its own plug-ins, then something really bizarre is happening because it shouldn’t be doing that every launch.
I know that a fresh install will boot much more quickly than when I have all off the plug-ins installed ( I have 50-60 freeware plugs) so maybe it is one particular plug-in. I’ll try moving some folders out and see what happens.
Something is going on with your plugins then. I have about the same amount of plugins. Freeware, paid for, VSTi’s, both 32 bit (JBridged) and 64 bit, and mine can do a full scan in about 20 seconds.
I’ve requested this before - still get’s my vote. As well as faster start-up on projects, it would mean that you don’t need to close an open project to see newly installed VSTs - you could just hit the ‘Rescan’ button…
Same applies to hardware. The number of times I’ve opened a project then realised the keyboard controller wasn’t on!
There are a lot of reasons why it works the way it does. Plus, it already only scans when there is a change. But, ask yourself, do you want the system to have issues starting because of a wonky plug, or do you want the system to have issues while you’re working on a project and you try to load a wonky plug? I know which one I prefer.
I think you should at least have the option to scan or not scan. Why is it that Sonor takes 5 seconds to boot when Cubase takes a minute or more? It’s always the VST 2x Plug-In Manager that hangs forever…
*Edit
I think it might be the Waves plugins… The version 7 update says it addresses this. Unfortunately no support for 64 bit yet…
