KVR Audio

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:25 am

Most hosts, even the most professional ones, do a scan of plugins, sometimes even block the work until its done. If you have a lot of plugins it will fail 100%! And its not necessary at all! And sometimes it needs, even if it finally after x restart finishes, hours...
Some even restart the process after it got stuck and get stuck each time at the same plugin which works in other hosts and you wouldn't even need it for the project you want to work on. (Last occurrence of that I have with DaVinci Resolve, the devs obviously never heard about a technique called time-out...)

Why is it not necessary at all? Simply because you could scan a plugin just when its needed for the first time, and then write the result into the same database you now fill with the results of a complete scan...
Or like Bitwig, do it seamless in the background. Bitwig doesn't even need to be closed after you installed a plugin. It just works! If a plugin fails, its listed. No need for extra windows or anything...

Pseudocode:

List plugins from the file system for user selection;
if choosen plugin is in the database and marked as passed: load plugin;
elseif choosen plugin is marked as failed: error message (with option to rescan);
elseif choosen plugin is not in the database: scan with timeout.
loop while time < timeout time
if scan result is passed: enter result into database and load plugin
elseif scan result is failed or timeout: enter result into database and error message
end loop

Can't be that difficult...

End of rant and I am open for arguments why developers believe its a good idea to annoy users for no good reason...
If host developers agree to my rant and do it differently, please if you know some who do not lurk on KVR, share this with them...

DJ Warmonger · Post by **DJ Warmonger** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:35 am

Why is it not necessary at all? Simply because you could scan a plugin just when its needed for the first time,

In order to "need it", DAW first needs to know if a plugin even exists so it can show it in a plugin browser. That's why scanning is necessary ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mystran · Post by **mystran** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:43 am

DJ Warmonger wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:35 am
Why is it not necessary at all? Simply because you could scan a plugin just when its needed for the first time,
In order to "need it", DAW first needs to know if a plugin even exists so it can show it in a plugin browser. That's why scanning is necessary ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nonsense. There are hosts like FL where you need to scan explicitly (ie. there's a button in the plugin list) and even then get a "fast scan" option where it just finds all files that look like they could be plugins (ie. basically all DLLs for VST2, etc).

I'm pretty sure there are also some (smaller) hosts where you can pretty much just drop any file into the host and if it looks like a plugin the host will try to load it and give you an error if it isn't.

The only reason to "need to" scan is if you insist on trying to automatically categories plugins, but we all know that doesn't work anyway, so it's just entirely pointless.

melomood · Post by **melomood** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:45 am

I disagree with your premise, Tj

mystran · Post by **mystran** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:47 am

Tj Shredder wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:25 am Or like Bitwig, do it seamless in the background. Bitwig doesn't even need to be closed after you installed a plugin. It just works! If a plugin fails, its listed. No need for extra windows or anything...

In FL you need to open the plugin list and rescan if you added new plugins (but "fast scan" just does a directory listing basically, it doesn't try to actually load stuff), but if you just want to update an existing one then you just unload all instances (so it'll unload it from memory), update the file and reload, no need to close anything beyond that (which is superb during development; nothing sucks more than having to restart the DAW just to recompile a plugin, because the DAW insists on keeping the DLL loaded even if there are no instances).

fese · Post by **fese** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 11:55 am

Plugins can be uninstalled, moved, renamed and so on, that’s why it is necessary to scan plugin folders once in a while, and the best time for that is on program startup.
Generally I would prefer it being done in the background, but that could lead to race conditions:
- move plugin “supercomp” to a different subfolder
- double click on a project file
- plugin scan goes into background while loading the project
- project loads but cannot find file for supercomp, throws an error.
- then plugin scan detects the new location for supercomp. What now? Reload the project? Continue with a missing plugin, even though it is actually still in the plugin folder? Periodically try to reload missing plugins?

Actually, I am really interested in how DAWs that do background scanning solve that...

DJ Warmonger · Post by **DJ Warmonger** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:06 pm

Nonsense. There are hosts like FL where you need to scan explicitly

In Ableton you can force rescan if needed.

But when a newbie opens a DAW for the first time, he/she may expect the plugins to be already loaded and ready to go. Every other scenario is rare. It's not a good idea to start first DAW contact with deep dive into settings.

mystran · Post by **mystran** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:13 pm

DJ Warmonger wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:06 pm But when a newbie opens a DAW for the first time, he/she may expect the plugins to be already loaded and ready to go. Every other scenario is rare. It's not a good idea to start first DAW contact with deep dive into settings.

When a newbie opens a DAW for the first time, they certainly don't expect the DAW to crash on load, because of some random plugin they installed 10 years ago. That's the bigger usability issue to solve here: you don't want to start your relationship with every new DAW by debugging why it refuses to start.

ps. I'm aware quite a few hosts also like to put the "rescan" into their settings dialogs with is equally non-sense. FL does this one right: the rescan option is right in the plugin selector window. Don't see your plugin in the list? Hit the rescan button, it'll even highlight the new ones it found.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:16 pm

That's a strange argument considering that plugins need to get scanned at some point to be able to use them in the DAW. Apart from that, I always thought that's what blacklists are for. And, apart from the fact that what you wrote didn't happen to me in 10 years of using DAW's now.

I'm sure you know better than every single DAW vendor though.

frizzbee · Post by **frizzbee** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:17 pm

mystran wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:13 pm When a newbie opens a DAW for the first time, they certainly don't expect the DAW to crash on load, because of some random plugin they installed 10 years ago.

DJ Warmonger · Post by **DJ Warmonger** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:23 pm

frizzbee wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:17 pm
mystran wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:13 pm When a newbie opens a DAW for the first time, they certainly don't expect the DAW to crash on load, because of some random plugin they installed 10 years ago.

Guys, just don't old plugins that crash your DAWs. Problem solved.

Last occurrence of that I have with DaVinci Resolve, the devs obviously never heard about a technique called time-out..

Well, that sounds like an undesired behavior for sure.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:24 pm

They are newbie sleepers. They install a plugin, then hibernate for 10 years, just to wake up and make music one day.

mystran · Post by **mystran** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:58 pm

frizzbee wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:17 pm
mystran wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:13 pm When a newbie opens a DAW for the first time, they certainly don't expect the DAW to crash on load, because of some random plugin they installed 10 years ago.

I'm serious. You see, you might have experimented with some (possibly other DAW) ages ago. You never got very far, you forgot that it's installed, but there's some broken plugin in whatever is set as your VST path now. Some day you decide you want to try again, you install a new DAW and it insists on crashing when you try to load it and you have no clue what it's about because you can't remember installing any plugins (perhaps it was bundled) and you have no idea where your VST folder even is.

I want to emphasize I'm not necessarily against the idea of automatic scanning, just the idea that you stall the application startup to load every plugin and see if you manage not to crash. If you want to scan automatically go for it, but write a small helper program to do it for you [edit: the key here is that you don't need a full bridge or anything, just something that sanity checks that a plugin is a plugin and doesn't crash on load; this is many orders of magnitude easier than trying to sandbox plugins when you actually want to use them for processing] and launch those as slave processes once the application is running. It's really not a hard thing to do.

Z1202 · Post by **Z1202** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 1:51 pm

FWIW fast scan in FL has been broken for me since they rewrote the plugin manager. Maybe it's fixed by now, didn't bother to try. Otherwise, this has been an awesome feature.

mystran · Post by **mystran** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 1:59 pm

Z1202 wrote: Mon Mar 01, 2021 1:51 pm FWIW fast scan in FL has been broken for me since they rewrote the plugin manager. Maybe it's fixed by now, didn't bother to try. Otherwise, this has been an awesome feature.

Oh?

I actually mostly still use the old version with the older UI as the new vector based one doesn't quite scale to small enough size for my taste...

Most annoying uneccessary technology: Pre scanning of plugins, please DON'T!!!