In the past months, reports by windows users have been accumulating (OS X customers are not affected), who — working with projects that contain many VST plug-ins — reach a point, at which no further plug-ins can be loaded. After selection of the required plug-in, the insert slot simply remains empty.
During our investigation concerning these events, indications have arisen that a technical limitation of the operating system could be the cause of that problem. In the next step we will therefore lead talks with Microsoft and exchange ideas with third-party VST plug-in manufacturers, to push for the solution of the problem.
We immediately inform you, when we have new findings available.
I read this on a non-Steinberg forum. The last “Announcement” is dated July 28th as of the time of this writing. Has Steinberg announced this on the forum? Has anyone received an email (I have not)?
I note that this has been reported by at least one user in W7, so it’s not purely a W10 issue.
It’s not just Cubase, same thing in protools and studio one. Or really any program using hundreds of plugins can be affected.
Can’t say I have experienced it yet, though.
The links i posted are a forum topic in which a moderator discusses the news (near the latter part of the forum topic) and another “news and announcements” link discussing it.
Not sure if i answered your question or not… Sorry if i didnt.
This has happened to me on Cubase 5 on Windows XP for years.
And it’s not just the included plugins in Cubase.
It happens most often with plugins which make more demand on CPU and/or RAM. I can recall it happening with Nomad Factory MAGNETIC on projects with a lot of tracks and plugins running. At some point I can’t add it to any more tracks.
Also with Nomad Factory ECHOES. I suspect that one, being a delay, demands a lot of RAM.
Maximum of unique plugins within the host. The maximum amount differs per system because it also depends on what other services/components/libraries are running in the current DAW application (host).
You can load (virtually) unlimited instances of the same (already loaded) plugin.
Hosts that are able to run VST’s in separate processes (e.g. Reaper, Bitwig) are not affected when they do so.
This freaks me a little. I haven’t come across this problem, BUT the question is what if I did? What would be the workaround? If you freeze tracks, would this allow you to continue on with your work. If so, what would happen if you thawed out the tracks to make adjustments?
Another idea, would a plugin chainer free up resources?
I would love to know what or if workarounds are available. Steinberg Developers, would love to have your input on this so we all have a game plan on how to approach our work if this issue arises.
This is unlikely to be fixed in a short time, being a matter of software architecture and having various parties involved. I can only recommend to use less UAD, as it looks like the limit is reached faster with those plug-ins, and move some of the unused components out of the C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 8.5\Components folder (do not move Baios, exceptiondumper, mediaservice, stepdesigner and VSTPlugManager). This will allow to load a few more plug-ins, but won’t keep you running much longer I’m afraid.
It’s hard to call an exact amount. On my system it stops loading unique plugins at 120 unique instances, the exact same number goes for all hosts on my system (Studio One, Cubase and Bitwig and Reaper both without bridge mode). But I’ve also seen people reporting it with less and more unique plugins.
If you slap a different brand and type of VST on each channel you can run into this issue. But if you have your regular set of VST’s that you use accross different channels, I won’t worry to much about it. In practice most of us never ran into the issue and it was always there. The only difference in the past was, our systems couldn’t even handle these amounts of VST’s.
