Live 11 sloooooow vst scanning

[thecontrolcentre]

I started Live 11 after installing 3 new plugins (vst2). Took all of 17 seconds ...

[Bulbizarre]

Some plugins are slower to scan than others. IIRC Brainworx are cancer. Anything iLok is very slow too. Arturia is slow. Launch the scan from inside Live and you will see the culprits.

[steffensen]

As alread stated and mentioned several times, vst scanning isn't the culprit.
Neither does it help knowing how fast some of you lucky ones can boot Live up.

I do wonder if you are experiencing the same speed in startup after a computer reboot however.
For me Live takes waaay longer the first time i open it after a reboot.

[psynical]

Here's some dev info from the beta forums:
____________________
Hey everyone, for Live 11.1, also driven by technical constraints, we've overhauled and updated the VST2 plug-in scanning mechanism indeed. It actually behaves now as the VST3 plug-in scanner (introduced in Live 10.1), with all its benefits and downsides.

- Plug-in scanning of VST2 now also happens in the background after Live starts and doesn't block Live's start-up sequence anymore. So you can keep working already while VST2 plug-ins are still being scanned.
- On the first scan, if you open older sets, this might raise the wrong impression that some plug-ins are missing, if they are still about to be scanned.
- Live's VST2 scanner is a bit more strict now towards VST2s that don't match the VST2 SDK standards and excludes some of them now that were accepted and shown in the browser before.
- Also, the VST2 scanner seems to be more restricted in what file links / aliases it accepts for VST2s being linked only. Again, this would be inline with the VST3 behaviour, but we have planned to look into this again to figure out a good state.
- Secret debug options for Live (as -NoVstStartupScan) have never been official features and supported as such. They're mainly there for internal development needs and might be removed anytime for technical reasons.

______________
So, you can only symlink now and no more aliasing to organize.

[steffensen]

Thanks for the info!

[JonSolo]

That is not actually all that bad. I like what I am reading. I am a bit worried about blocking plugins however.

[thecontrolcentre]

I do wonder if you are experiencing the same speed in startup after a computer reboot however.
For me Live takes waaay longer the first time i open it after a reboot.

It took Live 3 seconds longer to start after a reboot ... that's 20 secs instead of 17. Nothing to cry about.

[aMUSEd]

Here's some dev info from the beta forums:
____________________
Hey everyone, for Live 11.1, also driven by technical constraints, we've overhauled and updated the VST2 plug-in scanning mechanism indeed. It actually behaves now as the VST3 plug-in scanner (introduced in Live 10.1), with all its benefits and downsides.

- Plug-in scanning of VST2 now also happens in the background after Live starts and doesn't block Live's start-up sequence anymore. So you can keep working already while VST2 plug-ins are still being scanned.
- On the first scan, if you open older sets, this might raise the wrong impression that some plug-ins are missing, if they are still about to be scanned.
- Live's VST2 scanner is a bit more strict now towards VST2s that don't match the VST2 SDK standards and excludes some of them now that were accepted and shown in the browser before.
- Also, the VST2 scanner seems to be more restricted in what file links / aliases it accepts for VST2s being linked only. Again, this would be inline with the VST3 behaviour, but we have planned to look into this again to figure out a good state.
- Secret debug options for Live (as -NoVstStartupScan) have never been official features and supported as such. They're mainly there for internal development needs and might be removed anytime for technical reasons.

______________
So, you can only symlink now and no more aliasing to organize.

Doing it with symlinks is better anyway as you can use this method to organise VST plugins for all hosts

[Atlatnesiti]

Live 11 Suite latest version - Scan for old or any new installed plug-ins takes couple of seconds on my Mac M1 mini.
If I blink in this process, I will not notice that it takes place
Btw; I have more than 90 plug-ins installed…
Ps; Actually Ableton is the fastest one to recognise my plug-ins.
Logic and Cubase usually takes much longer initially, but loads instantly there after.
On the side note - Reason scans for new plug-ins in less than 3 seconds
Btw; browsing through posts and I think that majority of issues are due to users modifying destination folders of app installers.
Personally I always leave it as default option and let the DAW or plug-in installer do the job for me
Works like a charm 100%

[Harry_HH]

I do wonder if you are experiencing the same speed in startup after a computer reboot however.
For me Live takes waaay longer the first time i open it after a reboot.

It took Live 3 seconds longer to start after a reboot ... that's 20 secs instead of 17. Nothing to cry about.

Good for you. I’m still crying.
I have two Win 10 DAWs, laptop and desktop, both rather new i7 RAM 16+.
Startup vary from 0,8 - 2,2 minutes (without any new plugin installed).
Laptop: about 200 plugins
Desktop: 300+ plugins.
Both vst2 (majority) and vst3 in use.

[LarryAW]

Live 11.1 update is indeed very different in scanning, and it's taking way longer than previous updates, or previous versions and their updates. The problem, for the most part, is my having way too many plug-ins and that will be rectified. I also have VST2 and VST3 versions of many plug-ins and that needs to be fixed, too. I think it took around 30 minutes to scan my folders, but it's now done and ready to go. All this said, previous Live 11 versions "always" rescanned my plug-ins both before, and after the program started loaded after Max, and I just restarted Live 11.1 and it didn't. Therefore, it was well-worth the 30-minute wait for the Update's initial scan.

[Kinh]

When it does the scan watch to see which plugins it stalls on. Take that plugin out if your folder and do another scan. Keep doing it until the problems fixed then update those plugins, installing them back into your folder.

[SHall1000]

Since I have started adding/duplicating VST3s with VST2 versions the scan on every launch of Live is very long and does seem to slow things up even though running in the background. Is there any reason I shouldn’t just cancel the scan in the preferences tab, except when I have installed something new obviously?

[davidhokney]

Code fidgets. Of course it takes longer. It takes MUCH longer. Why? Use something like winternals process monitor and you'll see. Don't make unqualified statements like "Ableton plugin scanner is no quicker or slower..." blah. Your wrong.

Ableton is now only matched by image line FL Studio in it's slowness.

The reason I call people "code fidgets" is because anyone who has used FL Studio and Ableton for decades like I have KNOW that both FL Studio AND Ableton used to have the fastest and best plugin scanners out of just about all sequencers. They were lightening, rock solid and fast even doing full validation of the plugins. Until the code fidgets decided to change something that was working perfectly.

You know what they share in common? Image-Line FL Studio and Ableton have both changed in exactly the same way. They no longer look through your plugins path for ".VST3" and ".DLL" files and try to scan them.

They now check through EVERY file and EVERY folder and follow EVERY shortcut (yep, they even follow a shortcut and check out all of it's subpaths and every file type!). Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself. These are the only sequencers I know that do this.

The problem with this approach is simple. Have you got Bluecat plugins? Have you got any U-he plugins? They have skin image files and have paths to their resources (or those skins resources themselves) inside your plugins folder (in the case of u-he they use shortcuts). Take u-he Repo. 5900 files. 122 folders. That's ONE plugin, not even including it's presets. BC Patchwork 1480 files. 247 folders. Again, that's ONE plugin. Adam Monroe Rotary Organ 2. 8415 Files. 75 folders.

Either Ableton and Image-Line aren't testing their plugin scanners in real world situations or they don't care and expect you to only be using their built in devices.

The worse by far is Ableton, because it re-scans ALL of these files folders again every time it starts. The only thing that doesn't happen is that it doesn't verify plugins previously checked. But every single file and every folder and subfolder gets read. If you have any of the above plugins your waiting 10 minutes for the Ableton plugin scanner to settle before doing serious work. Then you've got to wait for Ableton Index to troll through your entire Ableton Library again as well. It's a complete joke.

[mholloway]

It's slow for me as well. I get beachball, twice, every time Live opens. It hangs on the M4L initializing (short) and then hangs beach-ballin' on the plugin scan, just about every time. Anywhere from 20 seconds to a full minute, plus the occasional super weird (but more rare) multi-minute beachball on opening.

It drives me crazy, because the cursor will re-appear, I'll "start working" and then it will turn into a beachball again for another 30 seconds. Freakin maddening.