I’m having the VST scanning issue where Dorico rescans VSTs during every startup. Diagnostics attached.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.9 MB)
While we are here, is there a way to get Dorico to rescan VST’s without having to quit and restart, in the way that Cubase allows?
No. You can clear the cache, but it requires a restart.
Hi @tonycore ,
actually, your case in an interesting one. You have over 1700 plug-ins, but the scanning is not the problem, because all except for one will not get scanned at startup, because the cache file tells the scanner that they got already successfully scanned on the previous run. Son only the WaveShell does get really scanned every time, but that is expected and also requested by the plug-in itself. Also, the WaveShell scanning is very quick and the overall scanning takes place in less than a second on your machine.
However, I do see that the overall startup is quite long, and it appears to me that the logging is somewhat the problem here. For each plug-in 3 lines get written to the log file and looking at the timestamps, it takes 30 seconds to write all the plug-in info into the log file. So I suppose that we need to optimize our internal logging.
Or only enable the VST logging for debug/diagnostic purposes, as an option? As an end user I don’t care about such logs, especially when they are crunching time like this.
Oh man, did you have to say this in public? Now everyone will be raggin’ on me 
Hey everyone, before you get started, i use them ALL EVERY DAY and I will spit on the shoes of anyone who says I don’t!
Seriously, though: as well as the optimization, please consider having something like configurable plugin sets or something - there is only a highly limited subset of my vast plugin collection that I will ever use with Dorico.
And/or what And/ro said.
Actually, we do have since recently a yet undocumented feature to allow for such.
In a file you can specify a list of plug-ins that you want Dorico to ignore, so they don’t get scanned or displayed in the plug-in selection drop down list.
The implementation on the audio engine side is already in place, it just needs a nice GUI on Dorico side in order that you can nicely create such ignore list.
I can send you a script which creates an ignore list with all of your plug-ins. You then can load it into a text editor and prune it out, i.e. delete entries for the plug-ins that you want to see/use in Dorico.
Yes, please!
Okay, here we go:
The script is rather trivial, the difficult part is tricking Apple’s security system. So first create a plain ASCII text file and open that in a text editor (Apple’s built-in TextEdit.app is not good, as it uses formatting. E.g. Atom.app is free to download, if you have nothing else.)
Into that text file you copy and paste following lines:
#!/bin/zsh
outfile=vst3ignorelist.xml
echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<pluginpaths>" >> $outfile
(find -E "/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3" -type d -regex "(.)+(vst3$)") | while read line
do
echo "<path>"${line}"</path>" >> $outfile
done
echo "</pluginpaths>" >> $outfile
Then save the file to your Desktop under the name CreateVST3IgnoreList.sh
Next open a Terminal window (do a spotlight search for Terminal.app)
Into the Terminal window type
cd Desktop
and hit the return/enter key. Then the command
chmod 777 ./CreateVST3IgnoreList.sh
and again return/enter. Now you should be able to run the script with
./CreateVST3IgnoreList.sh
and hitting return/enter as usual. By now you should have the file vst3ignorelist.xml on your Desktop as well. Next step is to open that file in your plain text editor from before. Since this is the ignore list, you need to delete now all the lines for the plug-ins that you want Dorico to “see”. Right?
Then save the file and the last step is to move it to /Users/whoever/Library/Preferences/Dorico 6 AudioEngine/Dorico 6 AudioEngine VST3 Cache (arm64)
where you change ‘whoever’ to your user name on your Mac. That’s it, start Dorico again and see how it goes.
Don’t hesitate to ask in case of question.
thanks, I will give this a shot and report back.
That right there, that is best of Steinberg caring.
Script version for Windows 11? (Please…)
Why? Do you have a problem with your VSTs?
The vast majority of us do not.
Hello @Ulf …sadly, following the steps you gave me and saving the resulting vst3ignorelist.xml to the /Users/~/Library/Preferences/Dorico 6 AudioEngine/Dorico 6 AudioEngine VST3 Cache (arm64) directory with the desired VST3s deleted did not change the behavior at all. All VST3s are still being scanned every time I open Dorico.
Shame on me, indeed, tried it myself and didn’t work. I will find out why and come back. Sorry for that…
That’s ok, that’s what you get for working on a Sunday!
Hi @tonycore ,
my bad, I’ve found it, it was a tiny mistake in the script that I posted earlier. I’ve edited and corrected it above, so please do the whole thing one more time as described above and it shall work now.
What was the difference? Plug-Ins instead of Plug-ins.
Or if it is easier for you, you could take the current ignore list and do in a text editor a find & replace operation.
@Andro the Windows script I will post tomorrow.
OK, still not working. I re-made the script and files, and still no joy. Still scanning all my plugins every time I open Dorico.
Here are the first few lines of the ignore list, so you can check them:
<?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8?> /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/FreqShifter.vst3 /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/OSS.vst3 /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/B-3 V2.vst3last lines:
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/UnplugRed/Scope.vst3
and here’s the path to the ignore list:
‘/Users/*****/Library/Preferences/Dorico 6 AudioEngine/Dorico 6 AudioEngine VST3 Cache (arm64)/vst3ignorelist.xml’
Hi @tonycore , my bad, I really need to apologize since there was another mistake in the script that I forgot about, namely the quotation marks in the first line need to be escaped. I corrected that again in the script text in my earlier posting.
Please excuse me for all the hassle.
Essentially, you need to create an XML file that looks like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<pluginpaths>
<path>/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/Bad_Plug-in.vst3</path>
<path>/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/Worse_Plug-in.vst3</path>
</pluginpaths>
… where each path is to a VST that you want to ignore.
And then save as vst3ignorelist.xml to:
~/Library/Preferences/Dorico 6 AudioEngine/Dorico 6 AudioEngine VST3 Cache (arm64)/