FIXED: It seems my antivirus program, McAfee Antivirus Plus was to blame. I disabled real-time scanning but not the firewall and Cubase 6.5 started up very quickly. I turned real-time scanning back on and it still started up quickly.
Thanks to those who suggested that as a solution.
After installing the Cubase 6.5 update on February 29, I found it’s very, very, very slow to startup. On about the third time I started it after installation on March 1 it took about 5 minutes before I got to the project setup window. The initial startup with the VST3 and VST 2.x plugin scans also took a long time, but that’s to be expected. I haven’t added any plugins though I did install PreSonus Studio One version 2 64-bit since I last started Cubase 6.5.
It seems to hang on the VST 2.x plugin scan. The startup now is actually much slower than the Cubase 6 startup. Anybody else experiencing this? Could this be a leap year bug?
I’m running Windows Home Premium 64-bit with Cubase 6.5 64-bit only. 8GB of RAM and plenty of drive space with a Roland Quad-Capture USB audio card. All drivers are up to date.
There’s a longer story to all this in this I had to do a reinstall after an initial install failed. I got help from tech support. After getting Cubase 6.0.5 installed and running (it seemed to be fine in terms of startup time) I downloaded and installed Cubase 6.5. Cubase 6.5 rescanned all the plugins the first time it was run and that took a long time.
This morning (Mar 1) when I ran it it seemed to get hung up on the VST 2.x plugin notification during the startup. Nothing was being scanned though.
Just installed it onto another PC (W7 64bit) and the start up hung on VST2 plugins for 15 mins before I did a reboot!
It worked ok the second time but was slow. I’ll try again tomorrow.
People, I had the same problem during first start-up, also during VST 2 scanning. BUT: just before I got a dialog from my virus scanner (F-Secure) that Cubase wanted access to something. Giving the OK didn’t work: I had to disable F-Secure and then startup Cubase intitial run and it started up real fast. Having F-Secure on again didn’t interfere anymore with Cubase startup, but I suspect this may be something to look into: Disable virus scanner during first start-up! Maybe a mod can verify?
I have very slow startup, with a long wait for VST 2 Scanning, just the first time I run Cubase after booting Windows. The subsequent times are much faster, whizzing through VST 2 Scanning with barely a how-d’yer-do, so presumably the info is cached the first time.
I think Waveshell, which I’m running through jBridge for Cubase 64bit, is causing at least some of the hold-up, and sometimes I get an error message saying that it couldn’t be loaded on my first Cubase boot-up.
I believe that fixing slow load-up times is part of the new Waves v9 64bit release due this month!
Also I agree that disabling virus scanning for the VST folders can help!
After installing v 6.5 64 bit update I found that the startup hung initialising Tonic vst and I had to exit startup usingTask Manager. But having disabled McAffee AV and firewall, a second attempt succeeded and following that no problems with startup and the startup time seems to be quicker on the new version.
Taking a cue from the anti-virus crowd, I also disabled my McAfee real-time scanning but not the firewall. Cubase 6.5 started up real quick. I exited and restarted, this time with McAfee real-time scanning enabled, and Cubase started up in about the same amount of time.
So it looks like turning off any real-time scanning will fix this problem. Because I usually have a Web browser open when I’m really Cubase and other DAWS, I prefer to leave the McAfee real-time scanning and firewall on.
