VST3 plugin scan hangs on new iLok protected plugins

Cubase
,
1

Hello,
I am facing a weird situation. As a plugin developer, we’ve updated some of our plugins during December and January. These plugins are using PACE (iLok) protection based on PACE SDK 4 and 5 (we’ve tested with both) and cause the hang of startup VST3 plugin scanner so Cubase doesn’t start at all.

Previous builds of the plugins (using SDK 4) work as expected. Once I copy some of the new VST3 into VST3 plugins folder and delete Cubase caches, Cubase hangs on startup scan and I have to manually kill “vstscanner.exe” process to make skip the plugin and continue.

We’ve reproduced this situation on Win7 and Cubase 9.5.41 as well as on Win10 and the latest Cubase 10.

I am in contact with PACE support but as Cubase is the only DAW having this trouble, I would assume this is Steinberg VST3 scanner related trouble.

Please let me know if you’d need more details or even the VST3 plugins causing the troble.

Best regards,
Vladimír

2

Hi,
you can download the vst3scanner binary on https://sdk.steinberg.net to investigate this.
The scanner does nothing more than just call LoadLibrary on your dll and checks the factory for exported classes. If you (or PACE) do any UI stuff during this phase and expect to have a HWND then this may be the issue as the scanner process has no HWND. For further discussion, please use sdk.steinberg.net. Thanks, Arne.

3

Dear Arne,
just to close the topic where it was opened - PACE confirmed there is a bug in their wrapper. This can cause vst3scanner to hang as described above.

They’ll release the fix in the next Eden SDK version (the next one after 5.0.1).

Vladimír