Plugins slow to load

[wyman]

Hi folks. Almost overnight, my HD Native system is incredibly slow to load plugins. Opening sessions takes many times longer than I am used to, and inserting a plugin - especially while playing back during mixing - can take up to thirty seconds and is often accompanied by the spinning wheel. These are sessions that were working fine not too long ago.

I have noticed that Trigger and Waves plugins (particularly the CLA Compressors) are almost always the culprit. On the load screen, when initializing plugins, it stalls on Trigger as well.

I saw a post about disabling ethernet and wifi. I tried that no no avail, and frankly, that's hopefully not the culprit since both are pretty integral to workflow (C24, out of town clients)

Thanks for any insight you might have.

Pro Tools HD 10.3.5
Mac os 10.7
6 Core Mac Pro
C24
AD16x
192

[Drew Mazurek]

I'd trash all prefs and let PT rescan for plugs.

http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=340741

[Bob Olhsson]

Something that worked for me was removing duplicate DAE versions of any AAX plug-ins.

[wyman]

Thanks for the inisght. I trashed prefs again using that utility (thanks, Drew!), repaired permissions, emptied trash, and restarted, and even re-installed Trigger, but it's still slow to load plugins, especially while the transport is rolling (like, over a minute slow).

With the Waves CLA-76, the first instance of the plugin bogs down the system (audio plays, but spinning wheel), and subsequent instances pop up quickly.

Opening a session with multiple instances of Trigger takes a good long while...a couple of minutes at least.

[Drew Mazurek]

Sorry that didn't help.

This seems like an Authorization issue.

Have you tried to simply unplug and re-plug the iLok?

Are you using Waves 9 with its License Center or still on iLok there?

[wyman]

Hey folks,

Just wanted to check in, as I resolved the issue, though I have no idea why. After tons of troubleshooting, and even installing a brand new system on a new drive in my Mac Pro, the symptoms persisted.

Avid Tech Support eventually suggested removing all other drives in the machine except the new system drive.

Sure enough, it ran perfectly.

One at a time, I reinstalled other drives (the design of the Mac Pro makes this really easy), starting with my original system drive. I could once again make it the startup disk and ProTools ran fantastically.

The culprit seems to have been a 2 TB SATA drive in bay 2 that I was using as a backup. I have no idea how to explain it, but since I took that drive out, the system is back to normal.

I figured I'd follow up here in case anyone else came upon a similar situation.

Thanks for all your input. And by the way, Avid Tech Support was awesome. Yes, I had to pay for it, but they continued to call me back until the problem was resolved. Completely worth the dough in terms of the time it would have taken me to figure that out on my own.