Steinberg announces Windows VST Plug-in limitation issue

Thanks for that Niles.

Do you know what constitutes a unique instance of a plug-in? Are you saying that if you use a plug-in inserted on multiple tracks, that is still counted as one unique instance as far as the dll limitation goes? Does it vary between track types? Group versus audio versus FX channel?

Sorry for all the questions. I just want to make sure that I do not run into this problem.

To be honest I don’t think this is going to be an issue for my regular productions, outside the Cubase Plugins I own Valhalla, Console 1 and Arousor. And some vsti synths.
Not sure how others work in real world projects, but a 100 unique plugins sound like a lot to me?
Makes me think how much plugins one needs to have installed and loaded to discover this in the first place :laughing:

Exactly. When Plugin X is loaded on 16 channels, it’s counted as 1 unique plugin with 16 instances. Or in other words, once a plugin is present in your project it won’t add toward the limit when loaded again somewhere else in the project.

No, it’s application wide.

I won’t come remotely close either, but people building huge templates with preloaded VST’s could be affected.
Also in case the DAW is able to load several active projects within it’s own single instance (exe), things can add up pretty fast.

I’ve stopped building templates prepopulated fully stacked with 3rd PTY plugins on every channel and subgroup long time ago.
Those “fully armed” templates just suck bandwidth. Now I’ve got my physical outboard sources and repetitive stuff configured and routed, but on the VST side of things everything is empty. Plugins get loaded depending on what the track needs. Don’t want to make a judgenent call on workflow, just happy it doesn’t affect mine.

Exactly. VSTs are just DLLs which are loaded into shared memory if it’s on the same process. So each subsequent instance of a VST will use the DLL instance already loaded and (presumably) another set of memory allocated to the new instance for storing variables, etc.

Hi all

I’ve been having this issue lately when trying to complete a couple of projects and getting very frustrated by it! I have been experimenting to determine what the exact limitation is. And I think I’m pretty close. It looks like on my system (Windows 8.1, Cubase 8.5 & 9) that I can only use 64 unique vst plugins. I can have multiple instances of each, but just can exceed 64 different plugins.

So by at least knowing this I can restructure my project.

Hope this offers some insight
Brent

On the PreSonus forum a Microsoft representative told us the FLS limit will go up from 128 to 4000 in the next release of Windows 10 (19H1) if all goes well (PreSonus Forums | Song stops allowing some VST inserts | Page 8 | Studio One Forum Community Support).

As noted elsewhere on these forums - Microsoft have fixed the FLS limit in Windows 10 and will be released with build 19H1. Which should be 1st quarter(ish) this year.

(edit) forgot to post link to annoincement: Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 18312 | Windows Insider Blog