I don’t know if some of you encounter this situation, but I think I’m starting to get fed up… Cubase 11, 13 and 14 (these are the ones that are still installed) take a looooong tiiiiiiime to initialize the VST3 folder. They also take an even loooooonger tiiiiiiime to open a file containing only audio tracks with effects from Cubase and 3rd parties.
A window named ‘Loading MixConsole’ remains inert for a very very very very very very very very loooooong time to finally see another window appear ‘Do you want to allow this application to access public networks…’ and finally see ‘Loading Channel x’ appear which seems to be frozen in time, motionless, just waiting for me to relieve it of this torture via the task termination of Windows ‘Task Manager’. What I did…
I have licenses for some products from Arturia, Roli, Softube, UA, NI, Waves and Plugin Alliance. I also use some free Plugins.
Why does Cubase take so long to load these plugins, sometimes it exceeds 10 minutes before I finish the task with Windows Task Manger.
We use plugins from most of the vendors you listed (apart from Roli and the free plugins). Cubase 12 and 13 typically took a bit less than 30 seconds to fully start up and Cubase 14 takes even less than that.
Audio projects open very quickly, projects with VSTi’s take a bit longer. The slowest are those loading Kontakt libraries, for whatever reason. But even then, I’m talking about somewhere between 30 to 60 seconds, depending, not minutes or tens of minutes.
The only time I see the Access Public Networks message is after a new version install, and only once. That shouldn’t be happening with every startup.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers to your problem, other than to say it sounds very much like a configuration problem rather than an app problem.
I currently don’t have those long startup issues, and I also run numerous plugins — quite a few overlapping with software makers listed in the original post.
However in the past, occasionally I had those long startup times, and the most common cause was a plugin triggering an activation attempt - but hidden during the initial plugin scanning phase.
The only way I was ever able to fix that, was to try to open each potentially culprit plugins (after Cubase finally started), and to check if it did throw an activation dialog. And if yes, I either activated or removed the plugin.
A common culprit in my case were Waves plugins. Possibly because Waves has this unique VST wrapper system, which seems to interact with Cubase in a rather unique way.
I used to have this problem a while back, and it ended up being due to an old system hard disk that was both relatively slow and, more significantly, starting to fail. It eventually did fail, and I replaced it with an SSD, and what could take 10 minutes or more (mostly the first time starting Cubase after a reboot as the plugins were cached in memory after that) became very quick. I’d also had past issues with audio track loading in my then-current DAW (SONAR or Cakewalk by BandLab) due to another disk’s starting to fail and needing to be replaced.
It is worth checking the health of your system disk. If you’re on Windows, CrystalDiskInfo is a good (and free) utility for this.
@KT66, @Nico5 and @rickpaul. Thanks for taking the time to give me some feedback regarding this unpleasant situation.
In total despair, I decided to reinstall Windows 11 and all my music-related programs and plugins, the other things will be reinstalled as needed. I took the opportunity to disable Hyper-Threading and C-Stares from the BIOS. I also uninstalled OneDrive, I had the impression that the synchronization of some folders and files could perhaps interfere. I also added the exclusion of the VST2 and VST3 folders for Windows Security. https://helpcenter.steinberg.de/hc/en-us/articles/18208450029330-Slow-VST-plug-in-scanning-on-Windows
For now everything seems to have returned to a normal loading state. I hope to be done with this inconvenience.