Tez

I guessed as much, the iLok component that enables a fast VST load time is the "PACE License Services", stop this service and the load times go back to a protracted 20+ seconds, for those of us who use "Authorized to Computer". If you stopped this service as an iLok user I imagine your authorization would fail...

Hey @Billy86, glad you're in good shape, there is a temporary resolution for those of us who use "Authorized to Computer" and not iLok, and for the record below is an extract from the last response I received from an iZotope support assistant (iZotope Customer Care), acknowledging the issue: "My apologies for the delay we were able to reproduce this issue for the moment having iLok license manager on the machine is the best workaround for this. We also have another customer who reported the same issue so we have logged this so our team can take a closer look at this issue. " ... So if you have iLok installed you wouldn't have seen any problems...

It's a good thought, but the O9 issue has been, for the time being, resolved. See this post: And... finally an iZotope support assistant, acknowledged the issue despite claiming they'd had no previous reports, and the guy said he would try and reproduce it... ?

Yup, I thought maybe you might have iLok after I installed it! If you check the Task Manager you'll see for CbB with an open O9 window high GPU and Power usage, O7 is half or less, close the window and it drops to zero and low, iLok installed or not, the price of "Pretty" graphics ?...

For the Record see the post: @noynekker maybe this will help speed up your load times...

@Neil Cummins just as an FYI, O9 and O9 advanced component VSTs took 20+ seconds to load in CbB and FLStudio so, not specific to a DAW, and installing iLok, which I'm not intending to use, fixed this issue. 20+ seconds to load a VST is obscene especially since Nectar 3 and Neutron 3 Advanced didn't have this problem. Post load performance will depend on your spec, but if you have a protracted load time each O9 component instance compounds, which can seriously slow opening CbB projects that use multiples, if this is your situation maybe iLok can help. Update: FYI - It seems that the iLok component that enables a fast VST load time is the "PACE License Services", stop this service and the load times go back to a protracted 20+ seconds...

Wow... I should of listen to you 10 months ago... After getting no useful help from iZotope support I finally, out of frustration, installed iLok... All the O9 Advanced components now load swiftly, 2-3 seconds ?. So, thanks @earhears for the tip! iLok installs Apples "Bonjour Service", I guess it's used for iLok license management, but since I'm 100% computer authorized I stopped the service which, fortunately, had no negative effects. So why iLok fixed the load times is a still mystery. It's a pity that a 1/4 of Gigs worth of software had to be downloaded to fix it. Update: FYI - It seems that the iLok component that enables a fast VST load time is the "PACE License Services", stop this service and the load times go back to a protracted 20+ seconds...

Thanks for the response, I'm sure the elements might load quickly. I've got the Tonal Balance Bundle; Nectar 3 , Neutron 3 Advanced and Ozone 9 Advanced, the components exclusive to Nectar and Neutron all load quickly, none do for Ozone 9 including "Tonal Balance Control 2". Both the Nectar 3 & Neutron 3 VSTs (last updated 2019) have roughly the same high GPU and power usage as does the Ozone 9 VST (updated 2020), so I surmise the gui graphics techniques should be similar, but not vst load time is 20+ seconds for O9. Not all systems have this issue, it's a mystery what the significant system difference is!

Glad to hear it, and no pesky audio dropout (1)s here... Meanwhile I'm trying track down my O9 issue... Do you have Ozone 9?

@fossile Thanks for the response... I'm the admin, paths are fine, full control on everything & I even run CbB as an admin, but it was a thought. The significant difference between you and me is "Intel 4000 video" vs "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960", the driver's up to date, whereas the slow load times confirmed in the post above is on a system with a "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660Ti". So, despite having up to date drivers it could be GPU related depending on the graphics card, who knows, probably iZotope... Regardless, it's extremely frustrating. I set up a track template, audio out & midi for a vst3 instrument, buses with reverb FX & the master out and in the in the instrument's audio out FX rack is Ozone 7 with a match EQ and vintage limiter, and this loaded in seconds. The exact same setup for a template using Ozone 9, same EQ match, identical limiter preset, took way much longer to load. The GUI graphics are different & O9's EQ match is a separate module, but the functionality seems almost the same and for the limiter I see no difference at all. Yet, the O9 standalone has no major problems. It makes me wonder apart from the graphics, how much has really changed under the hood for the same modules and that the value of an upgrade is only for the extras... It's a pity it's inconsistent between the 2 version for some of us..

They operate just fine for me once loaded, vst2 or vst3 in CbB. I can see in the task manager CbB's power usage is low, GPU usage 0%. Open an O9 window and the power usage steps up to very high and GPU usage to 17%. That's not a problem for me... What is a problem is if you insert a new O9 or one of it's components into an FX rack it takes 15-20 seconds to load. Ozone 7 and any other iZotope plugin that's not an O9 component takes about 2 seconds to load. I've used many instances of O7 in prior projects, and the projects open quickly. With O9 or it's components each instance adds to the time to open a project which would take several minutes to open if lots of O9 instances or it's components are used, not ideal nor practical. That's why I asked just how long on your system it takes to insert a new O9 into an FX rack until it's loaded. If you could check how many seconds it takes, that would be terrific and I'd be most grateful ?

Thought I'd ask... My new quest: Fix the O9 vst components load times ?

You're most welcome... Got Ozone 9? ?

That's great... How about the vst load time for O9 components in CbB?

As I said before: "Meanwhile, there's no guarantee spikes won't occur", but with the power tweaks ACPI should be better, another spike source, and I guess you could adjust the power management on your network adapters, if you feel they're a problem. I can live with an odd and hopefully rare audio dropout (3), if the endless (1)s have stopped. One final thought on the “Dell SupportAssist Remediation” service, and as I understand it, it requires the internet to communicate with a Dell node. Hence, I speculate that by disabling the network adapters, ergo the internet in a manner that differs from say pulling an Ethernet plug from a router, then this may inhibit the service's functionality and prevent it from interacting with hardware devices and in this way is effectively equivalent to disabling it. Which if true should be reassuring... Meanwhile if you have Ozone 9, I'd be obliged if you could confirm the slow vst load times mentioned above, as I'm trying to get iZotope to fix it, and any quotable confirmation would help ?

Then it's an issue across the board! I've contacted iZotope support regarding this... The more people who do and just maybe they'll do something!

I agree, I've got an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz, 4008 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) -- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960, but the OEM is Dell, it's an XPS 8900, and that means it comes with a bunch of Dell software that's part of the system not just bloat ware, that's why asked who manufactured your machine. In trying to figure out why only Ozone 9 components, that's the latest version, might be different from all my other iZotope plugins, I realized O9 comes with NKS support and none of the others do. I've other plugins with NKS support that load just fine, but who knows, O9's implementation might have a bug that affects only some systems. So, is your machine a Dell?? That might be a clue... I'd really like to find a fix, and use O9 like I used O7 ?... Cheers...

@fossile My issue is just the VST load times, 15-20 secs. With prior projects which use a lot of O7 instances, projects opened quickly, not so with O9, each instance adds those seconds making it impractical to use very many instances and have a reasonable project load time. In your case what's your O9 VST load time? Bye the way I have O9 Advanced and it's the same issue for the individual module VSTs. The only difference I can think of between the O9 components and my other iZotope plugins is that O9 has NKS support and the others do not...

Ditto... I also got the Tonal Balance Bundle, everything but O9, the O9 individual module VSTs and Tonal Balance load quickly, but these slow pokes take 15-20 seconds, once loaded no problem, and the standalone starts up fine... @noynekker Out of curiosity what machine do you have I'm wondering if it's an OEM issue as this slow load time also occurs in another DAW not just CbB & Splat for me. If it's a registry issue iZotope support hasn't helped, and all my other iZotope plugins load just fine!

You're most welcome, I wish someone could have told me, and saved me more than 2 weeks of "Sturm und Drang" tracking it down! Just be aware if you're still in warranty, you might want to let it run at startup after which manually stop it. In my case I'm out of warranty so, it's completely useless to me and I disabled it... Happy music making ? Meanwhile I have another problem, namely Ozone 9! I have Ozone 9 Advanced as part of the recent iZotope Tonal Balance upgrade at a terrific price and just couldn't resist despite my O9 issue which is the VSTs including the individual module VSTs that's part of O9 Advanced all take 15-20+ seconds to load in Splat and CbB & iZotope support say's all is fine at their end. All other iZotope products I have load quickly, it's just O9. If you know anything please share , or for that matter anyone who sees this... ?

Sounds like a good idea, to keep things in context, and you may only need to bounce a small section...

And that also applies to MIDI input regardless. PDC is only for live input, so the only way around it is to bypass all effects or Isolate the heavy delay comp plugin & take it out of the signal path manually which is not too convenient and maybe a bit complicated to do, when the objective is to temporarily reduce the apparent midi latency to record a midi sequence... Pity...

If an FX is bypassed via the FX Rack, should this also bypass the FX delay compensation which adds to the apparent latency? Because it doesn’t seem to do so.

Yes, the reported issues are broader than XPS! I think I noticed ACPI potential issues when not using a tweaked "High Performance" power plan, so hopefully it's mitigated by the plan. The bios was updated recently, via dell's update service (manually initiated), and what the change log was I didn't find out. Dell notifications pop up for updates, but I've found it's best to ignore them as they can fail or worse a potential security risk, and then initiate the update manually. I'm highly disinclined to disable the network (goodbye internet), or any interdependent services. But this "remediation" service had no dependencies and is supposed to be explicitly a hardware check at startup, why it ran continuously is beyond my ken, and I surmise was interfering with hardware interrupts so, bye bye! Meanwhile, there's no guarantee spikes won't occur, if for example you have a SCSI drive that gets woken up to retrieve a large amount of data that could do it. Despite that kind of event, minimizing dropouts to near zero when exclusively using the DAW is the goal ?... Oh, and by the way another annoying service is the "Intel(R) Security Assist" Security Helper, which repetitively runs the isaAgent.exe pinging some intel back channel and failing, and no one seems to know for what reason? That also can be stopped, one less network stress!

Once pointed to LatencyMon I started running it to identify ISR & DPC spikes and spikes = audio dropouts! “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Well, that’s how it felt, I’d make changes to the system, do another run with similar if not identical results. Mostly graphics drivers, occasionally the HD Audio bus drivers and related kernel drivers would spike... But there were others though less frequently, and each time for the past couple of weeks, following a failure, I’d scan the drivers for viruses, google the web for potential solutions for these diver latencies. Power tweaks were all done, background apps were blocked in settings, USB, ethernet and power management options were changed, but every 20+ minutes or less a spike would occur depending on when I started a LatencyMon run. This is a ubiquitous issue for gamers, audiophiles and the like with a glut of solutions from tweaking the bios to re-installing or updating drivers and other tweaks. My drivers, bios and w10 are all up to date, and I concluded that LatencyMon shows what spiked but not why, and can send you off down a maze of rabbit holes, so I figured it might be specific to the machine OEM... I’ve got a Dell XPS 8900, and I noticed a “Dell SupportAssist Remediation” service running, and it turns out other Dell users had issues with this service. This service is supposed to scan the system on startup for hardware issues and auto generate a support ticket if any are found but only generates the ticket if you’re not out of warranty, and I am, hence a completely useless activity! What it’s doing beyond startup I dread to think! I disabled the service and ran LatencyMon for over an hour without spikes and similarly a CbB test project for over an hour without any dropouts... So, if you’re CbB on Dell user with a similar issue, maybe this tale of frustration and anxiety might help ☺️