Which DAW is fastest to load?

[BONES]

You really need to uninstall all those expired demos. Some basic computer maintenance can go a long way.

Those things don't have installers, they are just DLLs sitting in the folder, completely harmless but an excellent indicator of what's going on. Orion, Cubase and Studio One all manage to deal with them and start in a few seconds, only Maschine and Komplete Kontrol take forever and trip over those files.

That is most likely also the reason why Maschine takes so long to start. Most DAWs have some kind of blacklist for plugins that can't be scanned properly (like those expired demos) so they will not get scanned again in the future. Maschine does not have such blacklist, so it will attempt to scan those demos at every startup.

There are no plugins in Studio One's Blocklist. It scans those plugins and deals with them perfectly well every start-up. I think that some hosts perform deeper scans than others. Orion, for example, never seemed to scan plugins at start-up but it always found new ones if they were there. Studio One seems similar - it does a scan but it's quick unless it finds new plugins. It probably knows what was there before and what's new, skipping over things it knows about and only looking closely at the new stuff. But the NI hosts seem to do the deep scan every time.

[Reefius]

It's not really a blocklist, it's more a list of unrecognized files or files that cannot be scanned properly. A DAW somehow remembers those files so they are never scanned anymore, but Maschine attempts to scan them every time.

[MLR]

On my system Maschine is the fastest, almost instant, then Reason and after that Live which is the slowest to load.

[andrei.tuduran]

Reaper is the fastest. It even checks for new plugins at startup. Still fast.

[dougjg]

You can't beat Reaper.
But LPX is pretty painless too (if you don't have new plug-ins installed)

[Carbonboy]

FL Studio is only fast because it doesn't check for new or updated plugins at startup. You need to do it manually every time and their plugin scanner is extremely slow.

Why should the DAW scan for new plugins every time it loads?

That is a non-optimal strategy to say the least.

FL Studio scanning only when you ask it is how all DAWs should work IMO. You know when you installed a plugin so you know when to scan.

The fact is, FL Studio starts faster than most other DAWs. Regardless of why.

[ReleaseCandidate]

FL Studio is only fast because it doesn't check for new or updated plugins at startup. You need to do it manually every time and their plugin scanner is extremely slow.

Why should the DAW scan for new plugins every time it loads?

FL Studio scanning only when you ask it is how all DAWs should work IMO. You know when you installed a plugin so you know when to scan.

How long do you remember that? One hour, one day, one week, one month? And you have to rescan after updates too.
Either you start all of your programs (not only DAWs but notation programs, audio editors, video editing software, compositing software,... ) that use plugins after the Installation or you write that somewhere and have to read it before starting any of these programs or all scan automatically.

[Carbonboy]

How long do you remember that? One hour, one day, one week, one month? And you have to rescan after updates too.

First, you don't need to rescan after updates. The plugin database is in your User data folder, and that is not touched by an update.

Second. It's simple, any time you add a new plugin do a scan. There is nothing to remember, it's just part of the installation process.

As I said, its not like you install plugins every day. Most people only do it a few times per year.

It is a monumental waste of time scanning for plugins when it's not necessary, which is 99.99% of startups.

My video editor does this and I have probably wasted months waiting for it to start over the last decade.

[Hanz Meyzer]

I think Renoise is very fast in loading, too. You also can set plugin scanning/refreshing to manual, which makes a lot of sense, once you installed all the stuff already. But also the scanner is pretty fast, even it does not seem to use multiprocessing at all.

[ReleaseCandidate]

How long do you remember that? One hour, one day, one week, one month? And you have to rescan after updates too.

First, you don't need to rescan after updates. The plugin database is in your User data folder, and that is not touched by an update.

I'm talking about updates to plugins. If the signature changes, the plugin host has to do a rescan to find the plugin.

Second. It's simple, any time you add a new plugin do a scan.

As I said, that's simple if it's just a single program. When you have 5 or more plugin hosts that's a major PITA. More so, if you cannot manually check for plugins, but can only enable or disable startup checks, so you have to restart your program (that takes way longer than 3 times the slowest DAW

It is a monumental waste of time scanning for plugins when it's not necessary, which is 99.99% of startups.

I agree. But what's worse is having to re-enable plugin scanning at startup and restart your program in the middle of using it because you forgot to do this after installing a plugin.
If the program checks in the background after startup, there is no time wasted.

[morelia]

scanning only when you ask it is how all DAWs should work IMO. You know when you installed a plugin so you know when to scan.

Agreed. Although it a personal choice I guess. I frequently remind myself when I get impatient how long it used to take to fire up an Atari ST running Notator.

Still, for me it is Reaper and FLStudio. Hence why they get most use for getting ideas down. I use Cubase 10.5 when compiling a project but it takes a lot longer to load than the previously mentioned 2. When I was using Studio One it was in a similar ballpark to Cubase.

[Carbonboy]

I'm talking about updates to plugins. If the signature changes, the plugin host has to do a rescan to find the plugin.

When plugins update, their ID doesn't. In FL Studio you don't need to update your plugin database when you update a plugin, so long as it's the same ID. If its not the same ID, then they released a new plugin essentially. Like NEXUS 2 vs 3. In this case it's clear you just installed a new plugin and need to rescan.

This is also an even rarer case than installing plugins for the first time. I am not sure you understand how scanning works in FL Studio or how plugin IDs are used by hosts.

As I said, that's simple if it's just a single program. When you have 5 or more plugin hosts that's a major PITA. More so, if you cannot manually check for plugins, but can only enable or disable startup checks, so you have to restart your program (that takes way longer than 3 times the slowest DAW

You start FL Studio and you do a verify plugins scan. Even if all your DAWs worked this way, then I don't understand what's the problem?

But what's worse is having to re-enable plugin scanning at startup and restart your program in the middle ...

That's not how scanning works in FL Studio. You don't need to restart after performing a plugin scan. The plugins appear straight after the scan is completed. All DAWs should work this way IMO.

FL Studio's scan also has options to ignore previously scanned plugins, and only look for new ones, so it can be even faster if you just installed a single new plugin.

[ReleaseCandidate]

I'm talking about updates to plugins. If the signature changes, the plugin host has to do a rescan to find the plugin.

When plugins update, their ID doesn't.

Except when it does, and that's what I'm talking about.

In FL Studio you don't need to update your plugin database when you update a plugin, so long as it's the same ID.

I'm not talking about FL, but that's why I wrote 'if the signature changes'.

If its not the same ID, then they released a new plugin essentially. Like NEXUS 2 vs 3. In this case it's clear you just installed a new plugin and need to rescan.

If you really do think that this is clear to the average user, we can stop here, we're living in different worlds.

This is also an even rarer case than installing plugins for the first time.

If you don't often buy plugins it's actually the
opposite. Do you have some Wave plugins, for example?

I am not sure you understand how scanning works in FL Studio

I am sure I never talked about FL.

As I said, that's simple if it's just a single program. When you have 5 or more plugin hosts that's a major PITA. More so, if you cannot manually check for plugins, but can only enable or disable startup checks, so you have to restart your program (that takes way longer than 3 times the slowest DAW

You start FL Studio and you do a verify plugins scan.

Still not talking about FL.

Even if all your DAWs worked this way, then I don't understand what's the problem?

Yes, you don't understand what's the problém. That's why I'm trying to tell you that 'do a manually scan when it is needed' isn't a solution.

But what's worse is having to re-enable plugin scanning at startup and restart your program in the middle ...

That's not how scanning works in FL Studio.

Maybe that's because I've never talked about FL. I don't use it and I guess I never will.

FL Studio's scan also has options to ignore previously scanned plugins, and only look for new ones, so it can be even faster if you just installed a single new plugin.

Many DAWs handle scanning that way, specially if they always do a scan. That's why it's not a problém doing automatic scans after each startup of a program.

[3lu5iv3]

REAPER 1.39 seconds

[n9research]

I love Bitwig to death, I use it for almost everything these days - but my god, it takes a long time to start up, 20+ secs, and that's coming off a state-of-the-art m2 drive

I put that mainly down to all the encrypted/obfuscated java it loads - looks like about 50-60,000 class files in the installation directory