All DAWs will suffer the same restriction…if they use less dll for internal components they may allow more plugs, but a limit is still there.
I also have the disappearing plugin issue here. Cubase 8.5, Win 10.
It has literally ruined a project I’ve been working on. A project with 80% of plugins not loading is a worthless project. FFS.
The issue here is a limit on plugin slots due to Windows restriction…typically this shows as plugins failing to load at a certain point. It can happen that your DAW has less available slots on reopening but it’s only likely to be a few missing plugins.
If 80% of plugs that you managed to load into a project are gone on reopening it sounds like you have something different going on.
Thanks for the reply.
Not sure the Window’s restriction explains it for me. It’s on one particular project and if I remove all other inserts, I still can’t open certain ones. I might try 9.5 and see how it goes.
It would be interesting to see if there is the issue with 9.5 considering they increased the number of insert slots!
There’s a new tool to monitor the available slots:
Great - thanks for sharing the link, looks very useful!
how has Steinberg not come back to anyone on this yet? I’ve just bought 8.5 and installed today and i’m getting it on my first project. I bought 8.5 in the first place to stop any nonsense like this happening.
Both Cubase 9.5 and future Cubase versions mitigate this issue. Cubase 9.5 already allows you to load a fair bit more different plugins than Cubase 8.5.
I’m not sure what you were expecting from buying an older version. It’s of course not going to have the latest fixes and performance improvements.
I’m having this issue as well on Windows 7 and I have the latest Cubase Pro version installed (10.20.)
I do not have ANY UAD plugins on my system. It’s extremely frustrating! I may be using a lot of plugins in this project, HOWEVER, I am using the SAME plugins over and over and am not using more than 20 unique plugins in the entire project. So this issue is not isolated to having over 140 UNIQUE plugins. It has to have something to do with the total number of plugins being used. Either that or Cubase doesn’t actually allow you to use more than 20 or so unique plugins.
I’ve been on Win 7 until last year (obviously up to Cubase 9 only). Apart from the FLS slot thing the only other limit was CPU/DSP.
Installed the latest Win 10 update this week that lifts the FLS slot limit and now have to train myself to get rid of the paranoid limitations I’ve conditioned myself to use 
Don’t think that Win 7 will see that feature.
However that won’t help you. Try Takashi’s FLS checker (http://planetnine.jp/wp/2018/03/25/fls-checker/) to see if it’s an FLS problem at all or something else. In case of FLS slot troubles, go Win 10 or Mac.
July 2019. I STILL have this problem.
I am on a Mac by the way. Definitely not a windows problem. Mindblowing that this is still happening.
Imagine having a 70-80 track project, pressing play and never being 100% sure it is sounding exactly like it should. This happens to me in every template. With inserted plugins from all manufacturers.
When Cubase doesn’t feel like it, sometimes virtual instruments don’t make any sound until you press mute and then unmute.
Trusting my work to this piece of software has been by far the worst decision I have ever made. I used to make fun of Pro Tools because of the many quirks and workarounds you had to use, but this is on a whole other level.
No explanation or aknowledgement from Steinberg, they must be too busy implementing so many useless features. Maybe spend your time making sure your basics work correctly? Just a weird idea.
I’m on Window 7 with Cubase Pro 10.0.40. I’m having the same issue.
Just to summarize for others after spending lots of time understanding this issue and how to workaround it.
The loading issue stems from a limitation on the number of loaded plugins. You can install a very small VST named “VST Checker” that will let you know how many slots you can further load at any moment. Usually, if you’re experiencing this issue, you’ll see that you have 0 additional plugins to load. Here’s the page (and thanks to TakashiWatanabe for coding it):
The best way to overcome it is by freezing some of your channels, to free up some slots for plugins loading. However, before freezing, you have to SOLO the channel. Otherwise, in many cases your Cubase might crash. This workaround was found by Otchenga Zoom in this page:
Good luck.
The current version of Windows 10 has removed the FLS limits (or upped from 128 available FLS slots to 4000+). So for everyone still having the limit, updating to Win 10 is the way to go.