OK I’ve determined that updating my Slate plug-ins to the latest version on W11 23H2 and Nuendo 14.0.40 kills my setup. By ‘kills’ I mean that a project crashes on loading - the freezedump error’ System cannot find the file specified - Virtual Mix Rack’ so it seems as though the change to the VMR (which may be substantial, as the components are now able to be used individually) has Nuendo searching for the original. Worse, after I crash out Nuendo, re-open it and insert a VMR on the master output, the whole GUI goes into super slow mode. There is no Slate user forum that I have found. I have logged a request with them but is anyone else experiencing issues? Thanks.
I’m using Nuendo 14.32, with latest VMR, W11 23H2.
No problems. I think maybe you might wanna roll back to N14.32 to see if the problem still persists.
1 Like
It might sound a bit strange: I recently reinstalled a PC and AI strongly advised me against installing plugins from Slate because their VST architecture is so outdated that it slows down Nuendo. (The slate drums would not be affected.)
Important: Windows 11 25H2 behaves a little differently than 23H2. A lot has changed.
This is information from ChatGPT - I cannot verify it myself.
AI is wrong on that one. Slate plugins should perform just fine. What has been an issue is certain Pace/iLok releases which caused extreme slowdown in hosts (not limited to Slate). This has been fixed by Pace now (thankfully) but it requires developers to either use an old SDK before the problem was introduced or re-wrap their plugins with the latest SDK which contains the fix. All new Slate plugins should have been rewrapped with the Pace fix as they were well aware of the issue.
This is what AI told me in November 2025 a few weeks ago:
- Constant iLok license queries
- Constant background services
- Constant license heartbeat → blocks startup
- Plugin scanner often hangs
And generally no VST2 - they always slow the system down. Slate Access would have liked to install VST2 earlier.
Those are nothing new or unique to Slate. Pace and iLok is a pretty intrusive copy protection scheme. VST2 has long since been discontinued. Time to move on from that at this point.
I only have one fix for these things - boot from Acronis TrueImage on a USB stick and recover the C Drive, complete. I do a full backup before any updates. So I’m back to the previous version of Slate. I only use the VST3 versions of Slate and SSL. But the error looked like - I don’t know the technical term for this - the process which tells the DAW that a plug-in is missing and you can use this new version instead. I don’t think it’s PACE. But I could be wrong.
Ah okay. Well sometimes there are problems with VST3 versions of plugins, regardless of the manufacturer. I’m using Slate VST2 up till now, so far it’s been okay. Not sure if it’s PACE either. Sometimes VST3 expects certain conditions (OS version, other software updates, or any glitchy, in-between, out-of-nowhere- thing to be) to be in place, which may not be. So that’s why sometimes VST2 is a leaner, yet less demanding version. I dunno, perhaps you can give this a shot.
1 Like