Which DAW is fastest to load?

[ClayUlti]

Fl loads in about 3 seconds

[nnned]

For me the fastest is Reaper.

[Blco]

Reaper and Ableton 11 which loads much faster than 10. Studio One always scans every single plugin then asks about unplugged hardware which ends up taking forever.

[TS-12]

cubase is the slowest for sure

[fmr]

cubase is the slowest for sure

In my experience, REAPER is the fastest. Cubase is much slower, definitely, and Digital Performer is one of the slowest (even in macOS, but worse in Windows, although latest version seems to have improved the behavior in that area).

[jancivil]

Cubase Pro 11.0.0 takes maybe 5s today. there are... 121 items in VST, 93 in VST3. One supposes say a thousand of 'em takes more time.
A number of things happen more slowly than they used to, something going on that may be untoward here.

[antic604]

Studio One always scans every single plugin then asks about unplugged hardware which ends up taking forever.

You can disable both:

[Romwell]

@Halonmusic

energyXT and Reaper

And here I was, trying to see if there's anything comparable to EnergyXT or Reaper in terms of startup time.

[Fornicras]

Studio One always scans every single plugin then asks about unplugged hardware which ends up taking forever.

You can disable both:

When I do this it does not load some plugins even if they are already scanned. So I have to re-scan at startup all the time. And it was taking about 3 seconds until 2 weeks ago, now it takes about 30 seconds or so, because iZotope plugins suddenly take too long to scan, I don't know the reason.

[aMUSEd]

Waveform is very fast if you disable scan plugins on startup

I think Studio One for me has by far the fastest plugin scanning routine, but not the fastest startup overall - too much time spent loading other processes

[melomood]

It takes me longer to start up these days so I don't mind if mine isn't busting out of the gate

[Iconoklast]

Well, Not many conditions to go by & including scanning doesn't work as everybody has different quantity of plugs to scan...

Eliminating plugin scanning puts most apps equal but still issue of faster vs slower processors

Here's my fastest open Protrekkr 2.6.2 on 15 year-old dual core 2.0 GHZ Speed-




As far as using plugin scanning the DX-DXi architecture way superior to any VST-VSTi versions...

[Iconoklast]

Going through see quite a few fast on old machine here...

Here is LUNA 8.4 PR (old MuLab)-

[Iconoklast]

Here is Cakewalk Project5 Version 1.5...

A little slower than previous 2 but full listing of DX-DXi plugins as well as wrapped VST plugins at start-



As before same OLD 2.0 GHZ dual core (Dell D820)

[Iconoklast]

Once again old clean code the ruler of quick in old slow-poke 32bit 2.0 GHZ dual-core...

Here IoNeo Aero Studio 1.13 is actually parsing VST plugins directory of @ 500 DLLs looking for new DLLs during splash screen duration, since none then pretty quick, if one would be found maybe a few seconds longer, ten maybe 5 seconds longer...

Also app from 2003, go figger-