Manual NEW VST scan

After installing or copying a new VST plugin, Bitwig takes quite a while to find it. This would just be an option or button on the plugins or locations settings to “SCAN FOR NEW PLUGINS/VSTs” and not scan the all plugins.

What is this feature about?

Manually scanning the vst folder for only newly installed plugins.

What problem(s) would this feature resolve?

Not having to wait for Bitwig to index any other files based on whatever priority it is set to.

How does this feature fit in Bitwig as a product?

Is there already an alternative way to achieve this on Bitwig?

Some have mentioned it could be a sandbox setting that is causing this, but it’s not worth the trade off of setting to no sandboxing.

Could it be implemented using Bitwig components or APIs, without Bitwig team’s support?

Not sure

Could it be provided by a VST or something else reasonably integrated with Bitwig?

No

Are there other products that offer this feature?

Yes, Reaper has this under its VST options menu to scan newly installed VSTs even if the plugin is installed while Reaper is running. This way you can get right into the plugin and not need to reload projects. Reapers is also very quick when first launching at finding newly installed plugins and does only that.

Relevant links (optional)

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Interesting, this is not my experience, and it would be interesting to know what other users think. In any case, are you referring to VSTs saved in a directory defined in “Plug-in Locations”? If yes, and if the VST takes “quite a while” to be detected, have you tried to turn off and on the “reload” icon? :arrows_counterclockwise:

I have also noticed that Bitwig can take a while to scan new plugins. occasionally It doesn’t scan, and I have to re-index my whole plugins folder (This happened last night, when updating soothe). I think request this is a good idea. To me, What would be very cool would be if we could manually select a subfolder within our plugins folder to rescan, or simply select the individual plugin from our plugins folders.

Interesting, my experience has been that Bitwig has consistently recognised newly installed VSTs pretty much immediately. I’ve never had to wait - by the time I switch back from the installer to Bitwig, it’s there.

@pjelli @icaria36 @andrei_olenev may I ask what platform you are using? It would be good to try to nail down whether this is only in a specific version/platform. I’m using macOS by the way.

Having said that, there’s no harm in having a manual refresh icon anyway. Personally I don’t have a problem sending this to #features once the draft is ready. It would only have to happen once that it doesn’t auto-scan and I’d be glad of the feature :wink:

I’m using Linux (Ubuntu Studio) and I don’t recall having got any problems detecting VSTs. Then again, I’m not a heavy VST user either.

In any case… isn’t turning off & on the :arrows_counterclockwise: icon the same as “Manual NEW VST scan”?

You can do this with the Browser panel, using the Files option with the :desktop_computer: icon.

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I am on Win10 Pro with a Ryzen 7 5800X and my VSTs are installed on a Samsung NVMe SSD.

It seems like it varies on priority of what Bitwig scans at any point, but one thing is for sure, once I disabled monitoring of about 80% of my “Sound Locations”, VSTs now show up within seconds after installing. A work around, yes, but not knowing which sound locations folder is clogging things up would still make the need for just a quick way to do this, a great option.

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I just discovered this! Would this help?

image

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Hmm “Update Index” and “Reindex” look promising. Would you mind installing a VST and then seeing if either of them achieves the desired result?

Thanks for letting me know