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

[Scotty]

Cubase does a full scan from scratch when the clocks move forward or backwards. It is very inconvenient at times. It quickly scans and updates at any other time except for twice a year I always sigh as I watch the process slowly unfurl in front of my eyes and apologize if I have someone in the studio and I have forgotten to run it earlier that day. First world problem and all that jazz.

This is gone for nearly 2 years now....

I am running 9. 5 so that would explain it. I have a licence to 11 but I am waiting for a 5950x so I can build a modern PC ... my current system is on Windows 7. I'll move to windows 10 with the new build. Can't get parts now.

[rasmusklump]

I think the change came with 10.0

[zerocrossing]

Last time I had Maschine scan for plugins it took a full day. It would get stuck on demo plugins that had iLok protection and just sit there waiting for me to click “skip.” Fantastically annoying.

[zerocrossing]

Why not scan for files and build a database of what’s in your plugin folders, but then do a full scan upon trying to open the plugin for the first time?

[Psyclapse]

Thing that bugs me in S1 startup is "Starting Melodyne Integration". That step takes longer on my system than all the other steps added together. What's it doing? Super annoying, especially as I only use Melodyne in about 1% of my songs. I've even thought about uninstalling it, in spite of having the paid version. But I don't know if its Melodyne itself or the S1 infrastructure to support it.

[codec_spurt]

kjkj

[camsr]

Plugin scanning in REAPER was the only reason I didn't like using it.

[Kr3eM]

Did you know you can't just stop REAPER from scanning for plugins sometimes? I didn't know that. Not a power user. But f**k me, what a pain in the f**king arse!.
...//...
So REAPER is fast when on certain systems and under certain conditions, but boy, can you stop the f**ker scanning when it just decides it is going to anyway? I'm probably doing something wrong. My bad. I'm a dumb arse.

Didn't read all of your post so may have missed the context and or point (specially since I'm really tired atm) but, FWIW just wanted to say that it's not the case anymore.

Reaper has got an option to abort the scanning process on start up and there's a option now to disabled it all together...as well as a few manual Re-Scan options...like for new or modified plugins and so on.

[Tj Shredder]

I'm not going to waste paragraphs arguing your ridiculously finite statement about plug in scanning
If you're having a problem,figure it out and stop blaming the tools

Ok you don’t have an argument. I am mainly using Bitwig, they figured out how to do it.
I just loaded DaVinci they failed, but at least they did not prevent me from working except for an annoying window which even tells me on which plugin it fails. But why should I go to my plugin folder throw that plugin out, which works fine in Bitwig, and later move it back? And that with a couple of plugins? Roli wants a permission each time, others need to talk to their authorization servers before advancing, little unique gems of hobby programmers have other problems... All that interferes the process, and for the task you want to do you even don’t need it, but they all are capable to load plugins...
Programmers who insist on that are bureaucrats in their minds. I prefer the browser of my OS over any more sophisticated browser in a host if it helps to get rid of that “scanning all in advance” paradigm... Bitwig has a gorgeous browser as well btw...
Its actually great to install plugins while Bitwig is open. If a plugin needs some attention for authorization for example Bitwig will notify me and I can proceed immediately. If it just passes I can use it immediately as well...

[mystran]

Reaper has got an option to abort the scanning process on start up and there's a option now to disabled it all together...as well as a few manual Re-Scan options...like for new or modified plugins and so on.

Reaper's biggest problem is that the whole UI seems to be designed with the primary intention of violating every UX principle anyone has ever come up with. It is literally pretty much a text-book example of what not to do. It's not about being "different" either as others like FL, Renoise, even Live are quite "different" from your traditional "linear DAW" yet with all of these, once you get the basic hang of it you can guess where the stuff is probably found. Meanwhile in REAPER, you spend 15 minutes staring at the export dialog trying to figure out why there's a gazillion buttons and none of them are labelled "Save" or "Export" even if that's literally the only thing you're interested in.

I've never noticed there being any abort-button in the splash-screen where it's scanning. If there's an option for it somewhere else, then it's yet another UX failure.

[Kr3eM]

It was added very recently but the scan window with a cancel option has been around a little bit longer...I think.

Regarding UX that's a whole other topic by itself and not something I'm going to discuss. However being one who switched to Reaper about two years ago (from 12 years of using Live and 15 years of Cubase before that) I can relate to the frustration.

My intention was only to inform that things has change

rprsc1.png

Like most of these kind of settings, they are located in Options/Preferences...

rprsc2.png

As a side note, I had to do a portable install and launch it in order to screen cap the startup splash to get a "scan window" since I almost never see it even though my VST folder contains 986 dll items (and 6,665 files in total)... I've read things been bad, specially with certain plugins and the amount of presets, however I would assume its a thing of the past now.

Reaper has got an option to abort the scanning process on start up and there's a option now to disabled it all together...as well as a few manual Re-Scan options...like for new or modified plugins and so on.

Reaper's biggest problem is that the whole UI seems to be designed with the primary intention of violating every UX principle anyone has ever come up with. It is literally pretty much a text-book example of what not to do. It's not about being "different" either as others like FL, Renoise, even Live are quite "different" from your traditional "linear DAW" yet with all of these, once you get the basic hang of it you can guess where the stuff is probably found. Meanwhile in REAPER, you spend 15 minutes staring at the export dialog trying to figure out why there's a gazillion buttons and none of them are labelled "Save" or "Export" even if that's literally the only thing you're interested in.

I've never noticed there being any abort-button in the splash-screen where it's scanning. If there's an option for it somewhere else, then it's yet another UX failure.

[polac]

Why would a newbie have 100+ plug-ins?

Why can't all DAW cache the information they gather once from a plug-in alongside a file modification date or something of the dll and be done with it until that file modification or something date changes?

In Jeskola Buzz we even don't look at the modification date(vst2), if it's in the data base the vst does not get scanned anymore. Theoretically shell plugins like waveshell(vst2) needs to be scanned everytime as they can contain effects and instruments at the same time, this can take minutes for scanning, the host has to instantiate all plugins of the shell plugin. Therefore in Jeskola Buzz we don't scan the shell plugins at startup, only on demand. Same goes for vst3 plugins as they can also contain multiple plugins.

Also a host should be able to handle crashes/hangs. In Jeskola Buzz all vsts(32/64bit) get scanned in a separate process in a sandbox, if something crashes it does not crash the host. As far as concerned hangs we give the vst 30 seconds for instantiation, after tihs time the user can select if it's an instrument or an effect or even unknown. Unknown dll can be still be loaded, if it is successful the database gets updated.

Background scanning should be also no problem for most hosts, not possible in Buzz as the plugins get queried on startup.

[innervisions]

I've written a few hosting apps for my personal needs that just load a VST from the file system/by file name/etc. It's definitely much faster to use for many situations, as well as debugging and all that.

But - the plugin format presents some problems because a single VST file can report multiple "Components". The classic case would be all the variants like Mono/Stereo/MonoToStereo, but some companies take it to the extreme. For example Waves just have one "Shell" plugin file which dynamically loads all the different plugins you have installed by them.

So unless you actually load the thing at least once, you can never know which plugins are really there to even be able to choose them from a menu.

I do agree that on many cases it would be great if the DAW could optionally start without scanning new plugins/just scan specific ones that you need. It would be a good UX addition but the downside would be that the experience could be confusing/frustrating for less technical-oriented users.

[polac]

Theoretically shell plugins like waveshell(vst2) needs to be scanned everytime as they can contain effects and instruments at the same time, this can take minutes for scanning, the host has to instantiate all plugins of the shell plugin.

I also forgot to mention that a shell plugin may contain a changing number of plugins. Therefore Renoise for example scans the shell plugins each time on startup.

[ccDuckett]

This thread is giving me bad flashbacks of Sony's godawful Plugin Manager nonsense in ACID 6/7... the sad thing is, from what I understand, Magix didn't re-write or replace any of what ended up making ACID unsuitable for a full-fledged DAW after acquiring the property from Sony.

I have literally thousands of plugins, and while REAPER does scan the new ones, it's been relatively painless; new REAPER version installs don't even re-scan all the folders the way they used to, but yes, having to set aside a good chunk of time, where I basically just check back to see if something ancient has given me some odd little Windows dialog box to close before the rest of scanning may proceed every ten minutes, for an hour... verily, it doth stink.