Lightningfast Startup

Ideas & suggestions
1

Hi
Im using Renoise on our studio-computer and we have a lot of vst effects and instruments and Renoise takes over 80 seconds to start first time and between 30 and 40 seconds when starting the second and consecutive times, as XP has cached the VST directories in its memory.

I have a Pentium 4. 3 Ghz which otherwise is fast, but those 80 seconds of just crunching my harddrive are feeling pretty long.

How about skipping the whole “scan for new VST instruments”-phase during startup and just starting the program in 5 seconds? Is this possible?

Renoise 1.5 used to start in approx 5 seconds on that computer when I had no VST installed. Since then we have installed more and it has gradually slowed down.

If this was implementable here is how you would do it instead:
If there has been newly installed or uninstalled you could just press the “rescan” button in the settings.

This could maybe be an “tickbox” option with default set to “Rescan VST directories” rather than use “Cached data” so that newcomers have no problem learning about this in their first startups.

2

With this I meant use cached information from the last time that the EXACT SAME scan was performed.

And if something has changed in the VSTlibrary you can start the scan manually to get a new cache.

Im not a crazy ADHD maniac :w00t: like this guy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBVmfIUR1DA

But it would be nice to be able to start renoise up quickly just to jam a little with a vsti and close it down again without it takeing a minute and a half of grinding the poor harddrive.

3

Yes, I also wonder if this is possible. Why does Renoise have to scan for new VST’s anyway? Couldn’t this be done manually from within the software?

4

I do have quite a fancy collection of mainly freeware-plugins and I do always install the data of a vst on some other drive (sampletank, virtual gitarist etc. come to mind here) and renoise takes about 15 seconds to start … I really don’t get what you people have installed ?! (no pun intended)

5

Lightning fast startup would be the best, but I think Renoise does not take up that much time?

80 secs seems like Cubase to me :D Ewww… :D Its true that it should not really take that long…

6

Thanks to bantai for bringing up this previous thread.

I seem to be in a minority with my problem, but here is my case:

I did a search of .dll files in my two VST directories and it found 372 VST/VSTIs. Most of them are free, but a great deal has been bought. We are 3 groups sharing a studio and have divided the costs among us. Its a bit much but over time these plugins have been meshed into all of the songs and it would be hell to start removing.

We do defrags every 3 months on all our computers. The HDD is in UDMA-5 mode, which could be
faster but at least its not PIO.

The 80 second benchmark is after just doing a restart of windows. So this is for me basically every time I start Renoise.

And I know its much, but Ive seen this go gradually from 5 seconds to 80 over time, as more and more VSTs has been installed and it seems to be a rational explanation.

Yes I agree with this. The only way it could be, would be as a clickbox option with default set to “always scan” as it is now.
And as mentioned before, if this option was unclicked it would be set to “use cached data since last scan”.

7

Only arguments I have for the simpler implementation is that it would probably mean 80% of the functionality for 20% of the effort (of the full implementation). And it would work equally well on mac and pc.