How to disable VST scan at startup?

biggest dawback to moving all our plugs is that those which work in standalone mode will also have to have their internal paths changed as well, which you dont always remember to do. I lost B4II due to this - took me a while to figure out....

An option to turn off VST scan would be useful but for the issue of scanning a big plugin folder it would be great if Reaper could scan shortcuts to plugin dll's like Live can - then you could just make a folder full of shortcuts and point it to that and it will scan instantly - I do this with Live and it works brilliantly Alternatively for now, instead of moving plugins around try making a folder full of symbolic links to plugins and make reaper scan that - this way it will only ever be scanning the plugins, not the extra like samples.

bump +1 for an option to disable plugin scanning at startup (and let the previously scanned plugins still be usable) I currently have a project that crashes quite often. I don't blame Reaper for this, it's most likely a buggy plugin I haven't figured out yet, but additionally having to wait for plugin scanning each time I restart the project makes it even more of a hassle. If someone puts up a FR I'll support it of course.

Bump. +1 For an option to disable scanning on start-up. My Reaper .ini file got messed up somehow and it just started re-scanning all 461 plug-in DLLs. I didn't need any of them for the work I was going to do, didn't have the dongle plugged in for many of them and wasted a lot of time waiting for it to re-scan (with the only real option having been to end process, move the folders, and create problems for my other VST hosts instead). I don't have a lot of non-DLL files, but I do have tons of plug-ins that require dongles that are often on other computers. It would really help to have the option to only scan VST plug-ins manually. Is there a feature request for this somewhere? So far I have only found a couple other threads like this.

... I've taken to backing up my Reaper .ini files periodically (especially before an install), for just such an occasion.

I'm not too familiar with FL (anymore) but Reaper is different in many ways. It has hundreds of options to en-/disable and it's quite easy to mess things up. The first thing that would come up is the question "Reaper doesn't find my VSTs.. WHY???" In fact (having worked with a slow computer for a long time) to my experience Reaper (YMMV) is quite fast. Scanning VSTs in Vegas, Soundforge, Cubase... and many others a scan could take several minutes if you had a little (maybe even one byte) change in your VST folder, while Reaper just examined the changes instead of the whole folder. Sue me for ignorance, but here, reading a VST folder of about 2.3 GB the scan takes about three seconds on startup. Surely when having gigs and gigs of sample libraries in that folder it takes longer to read, because every single file (although not read entirely) needs to be opened to check whether it's a .dll or something else. Don't get me wrong: I'm not generally against such an option, but I think if you decide to use the VST folder for things it isn't designed for, you might have to take the disadvantages that come with this decision. However, I would neither fight nor put down your request :). Just my 2 cents. -Data

Hundreds of options is one of the top reasons why Reaper is so pro. The "let's drop this or that as option cause it might confuse people" is for amateur programs and obviously not Reaper's philosophy. :) Reaper is not extremely slow to scan the directory(ies), but it's not all that fast either. Yes I know there are other programs that organize and scan the plugins in a much worse way, but with respect that's not the point here; it's simply that some people like myself would like that there's an option to disable VST scan at every single startup which would sort out the whole issue.

I see your point and as I said, I wouldn't fight such an option. :) -Data

I had seen this or another thread and have been meaning to at least determine more about what the actual scan is. Just did so and here are the results. This is for no other reason than technical information.... Running process monitor then filtering for only VST scan activity.... reaper is only scanning each directory and getting a list of the filenames. It is NOT scanning VSTs in quite the same way where it opens each one and examines it like it would in the manual VST scan. There are two points to this... 1) It may save much time later in the session in responsiveness as you actually use the VSTs because it already knows about them properly. Its just seeing what files are there and should really take less time than anyone would really care about. 2) If #1 isn't the case there may be some value in the ability to disable it. Interestingly........ One thing I noticed (that D.Bop may be interested in) is that only his VST causes a complete load of the VST DLL file which I don't understand. I had previously witnessed that there is an long delay on my system while it is loading "Stereo Channel" every time I open Reaper and the delay is responsible for much of my Reaper load time. I can tell because process monitor shows the bytes being read in chunks from the disk where everything else is just "Query Directory". This could very well be my system but it made me wonder if this could be happening with other users and other VSTs. If so, I could see why scanning is generating complaints AND if we can answer why D.Bops VST does this on my system, maybe we could find/fix something we previously didn't realize was occurring.

As karbomusic has just mentioned, if you are paying attention on a 'clear cache and rescan' you can SEE which plugins there are that Reaper is getting hung up on when scanning. If you have added new plugins since last Reaper boot, you can also watch it discover and scan the new ones on the flash screen during boot. My machine and specs are nothing special, but the only time Reaper takes more than a very few precious seconds when loading is when it opens with a very large project. Now, someone here said his Reaper takes 15 to 20 minutes to boot? I suggest something else is very wrong in his system or config. Many others gave no indication of time required. Without this, I don't think any of us can have much to say. If you are saying 10 seconds or less, I'd suggest it is our time that is being wasted. If it takes 20 seconds and it turns out you have folders chuck full of the most complex, obese, and/or massive sample-filled plugins on the planet, I'd suggest you learn to deal with it or lose some weight. I think many of us have loads and loads of plugins of all sorts these days -- bulky on down to minuscule. Including instruments, at last count I'm loading 212 but only keep some 60 of those around because I can't bear to say goodbye to them. In any case, I always have Reaper boot up on a light project, and I've never bothered to time it as it's been so insubstantial -- can't be more than 5-6 seconds. If you have loads of plugins but are not opening to a massive project, it should only take those few seconds. If it is substantially more, I think you ought to assess your entire setup, as I'm quite certain something is wrong. Personally, I don't want any option that fails to look over everything IMPORTANT when Reaper starts. I think you just asking for (more) trouble by going that route.