As per the title, I’m looking for some assistance in utilizing the Whitelist feature to only let certain plugins be loaded on startup. Currently, Dorico searches for all VSTs which slows down startup significantly, and also requires me to click a bunch of “cancel” / “Skip” dialog boxes because I very rarely keep all my dongles connected to my home computer. My home computer is primarily use for composing, while my office/work computer is primarily for sound design. Very occassionally, I’ll need to take work home and so I have all my plugins installed for sound design at home, but the bulk at home is writing…
I only recently bought an edition of Dorico (Elements, by the way) to test the waters before making the Pro purchase eventually. I’m liking it a lot but this startup issue is REALLY a drag. I read in the manual (I think?) that Dorico has an internal whitelist for VST2 instruments, but I was wondering if there was a way to just simply Blacklist everything except for the built-in Steinberg instruments and perhaps maybe Kontakt 6.
Anyone know what to do here to speed up my initialization time? Is there some sort of VST management window I’ve missed or something? Ideally, I want to keep Kontakt at the ready but I guess losing it and only having access to the HSSE (I think is the correct abbreviation?) playback engine is acceptable-ish.
First of all, Dorico loads everything VST3 and by default nothing VST2, except for that what is on the VST2-whitelist.
There are actually 2 whitelists, one “factory” list and one “user” list.
The factory whitelist contains just Kontakt5/6 and NotePerformer and is not supposed to be edited by the user.
The user whitelist is empty by default and users may fill it up to their liking. In order to do so go to the Preferences dialog, choose the Play tab and scroll down. Somewhere there is a button to edit the user whitelist.
In theory you can also edit the factory list, but it will get overwritten again on each version update of Dorico.
Is that enough info? Maybe you could explain in more detail what you are after.
Ulf, I think what SoundGuyChris is trying to do is explicitly blacklist all plug-ins apart from Kontakt. I’m not sure how that might be done. It might be possible, perhaps, by editing the file Vst2xPlugin Blacklist VSTAudioEngine3.xml, which you’ll find in %APPDATA%\Steinberg\VSTAudioEngine3_64, but I don’t know what syntax you would need to employ.
Thank you both for the clarification on the VST3/VST2 stuff! That’s an important thing to know.
What Daniel is saying is correct: I’m trying to blacklist ALL plugins except for Kontakt. I can easily export a list of all installed plugins from my DAW and fill in as necessary for said blacklist. In the meantime, I’ll hope someone can chime in for what syntax I could use.
I attached a VST2 blacklist from a different user. Though it is from a Dorico version 2, the syntax is the same for version 3.
Do you just want to blacklist VST2 plug-ins or also VST3? There is a blacklist for VST3 plugs in this location:
%APPDATA%\Steinberg\VSTAudioEngine3_64\VSTAudioEngine3 VST3 Cache\vst3blacklist.xml Vst2xPlugin Blacklist VSTAudioEngine2.zip (706 Bytes)
Thank you very much, Ulf! This is very helpful for filling out what I’m trying to do! I am indeed looking to blacklist both VST2 and VST3 - the reason is less about compatibility and more about not having to click through a bunch of “skip” / “quit” dialogues, it’s not like I ever use the compressors or waves plugins or reverbs and etc. that pop up in Dorico. This is very helpful, especially that there’s also a VST3 blacklist. The ideal situation is to simply blacklist everything, and whitelist the one or two instruments I’ll ever use in Dorico, but this is hopefully workable method in the meantime. After work tonight or tomorrow I’ll attempt to integrate my own blacklist and I’ll return here if I need any help with the syntax (the Filetype member is basically the only part that seems like it may get finicky without any reference material to work from, but otherwise looks okay).
SGC, What I’m thinking of doing is to make a separate VST3 folder for everything but Dorico. Since Dorico seems to be hardwired to the regular default VST3 folder, I was thinking of making a VST3x folder for the DAWs and anything else I use where you can tell it where to look. So I’d delete the regular VST3 folder reference with them and create a new folder and put everything there. Then I would copy to the VST3 folder meant exclusively for Dorico and copy any plugins I want to use there. I’m fearing that won’t work with Waves plugins as they seem to have their own way of doing things. I’m brand new to Dorico Pro 4 but I intend to try this.
Hi @JimGramze , it won’t work, because the VST3 SDK specifies that VST3 folder as the place where all VST3 plug-ins have to reside and Dorico or any compliant DAW won’t look elsewhere to find VST3 plug-ins.
The only thing you could do is, put the unwanted VST3 plug-ins into an own subfolder and then move that subfolder in or out of the VST3 folder. But you have to do that move always before launching Dorico as that is the only time that Dorico is looking out for plug-ins.
For what its worth, I basically ended up just doing what Ulf mentioned (dragging a subfolder in and out) but unfortunately, this wound up being frustrating enough that I never committed to Dorico beyond Elements, as much as I liked most of the rest of the product.
Keepin’ my eyes out for an update in the future that let’s me select what plugs to load and what to skip.
It is working brilliantly for me, ULF. Reaper, my current DAW, will get VST3 from a different created folder and after deleting its reference to the default VST3 path it will not look in that default place. So I can have Dorico with only the VST3s I want it to see and my Reaper DAW can still see everything without moving things in and out of the blessed VST3 folder. That must mean that Reaper is not compliant. I will soon be giving Cubase a trial to see if it will behave as Reaper does where VST3 location is concerned.
Hi @JimGramze, then Reaper is not following the VST3 spec. And Cubase should better do, otherwise it would be too embarrassing. We are the ones who wrote the VST specs
It would serve me greatly if Dorico could organize VST3s conveniently as Cubase does. Further, only reading in from various directories only when there are changes would greatly speed up loading either. In Studio One, for example, the user can turn off scanning the various directories and it will use the list it last compiled. When something new is added the user then must turn this functionality back on.
I just tried Cubase enough to see that it will not read and load up VST3s from a different folder than the default so I removed the trial. Until Dorico better handles large numbers of VST3s, my workflow demands that I only use the non-compliant Reaper.
Thanks for your informative and courteous feedback, Ulf! Much appreciated.
Hi there. I’ve been struggling with getting Dorico to whitelist a VST2 plugin for a long time here, scouring the forums and not having any luck. Wondering if any of you have any ideas!
I see in a lot of places talk of a whitelist/blacklist option within the VST tab of the Dorico preferences. But my preferences don’t have that option in the VST tab. Why? Here’s a screenshot.
I tried the older (I guess/it seems?) method of manually creating a whitelist text file but encountered some differences from all the instruction pages/forum posts/videos out there. First of all, there was no folder named “VSTAudioEngine” in my preferences folder. It was “VSTAudioEngine3”. Also the three files that it says everywhere to delete were not all present there exactly as described. So, here’s a screenshot of the current state of that area of my preferences folder – the closest thing, I think, to what was described in instruction posts.
Any ideas what to do now?
FWIW – It’s funny – all I’m trying to do is use the MTS-Master ODD Sound plug in to retune VSTs, something which Dorico has such amazing and advanced features for within its microtonal/tonality systems, but for my specific purposes here, I need to use standard sharp/flat/natural notation and retune playback within the VST using scala files.
Kinda confused. I am able to use this same plug in without issue in several other DAWs on my computer. (This is the plugin: ODDSOUND). Not familiar with the Silicon issue but what you’re saying sounds like it would be a system-wide issue, which it isn’t, rather than a Dorico one, right? Or am I misunderstanding.
I’m sorry guys! It’s working! Thanks for the help. I figured out the issue (below).
FWIW: I’m still not seeing the whitelist/blacklist thing in preferences (that’d be cool) but the whitelist txt file as I’ve done it in the above screenshot seems to have worked! Yay!
But, the other issue (perhaps better for another thread — will search around shortly) is that Dorico is identifying this VST plug in as an instrument, whereas it’s actually supposed to be a plugin in the chain before the instrument. This plug in takes the standard midi note message and retunes it (using whatever protocol the VST reads). In Reaper, for example, I simply put the MTS-ESP plugin prior to the VST instrument I’m using in the chain, and it works. Maybe that isn’t possible in Dorico.
