Reaper and FL Studio are quite fast on Windows. Also on Mac. Logic just takes a second or two longer. SSD in both machines.

 

I disagree. The question here is not how fast different DAWs are in comparison, the question is whether one thinks the time one waits is reasonable or not, regardless of system or DAW.
4 secs is obviously great. 15 is sort of borderline, a bit tiresome. 2 mins is way off!
My Cakewalk installation was very fast to begin with when I installed a new version about 4 months ago. It has slowed down a lot since then. And it's not the plugins, it's something else and I don't know what.

 

Pro Tools 12.5 (Happy Xmas Edition) about a week.

No, seriously about 75 seconds for a fully laden project.
Win10, 32 Gigs RAM, however somewhat dependent on CPU architecture.
Currently i5 on MSI 'gaming' motherboard, with rather pleasing performance overall.

 

Check for viruses. Neshta has a habit of lurking out of sight till things one day go horribly wrong, but can considerably and "inexplicably" slow a system down noticeably on the way there.

 

Another thing to consider is if your PC is online or offline.
My studio PC is offline and openning an empty Cakewalk session (plugin scan disabled) takes much longer to open because it calls home (13 sec.).
Opening the same on my online PC takes only 2 sec.

 

Pro tools Intro with 10 plugins on Skylake Hackintosh/32GB RAM takes around 40s. Then a project needs another 10 secs.
Reaper takes 8 secs in total, but I'm searching for 10 minutes to get things done, so that compensates with PT..

 

The point for discussion should be the reason for slow loading: main reason is organizing of the plugins in the file system.

1. Do not put plugins on C:\. Put them on e.g. D:\VstPlugins or so.
2. Do not put data of the plugins - sometimes 10.000 or more files - on C:\ or into the VstPlugins folder. Put them into e.g. D:\VstPluginsDATA or so. Scantime is reduced by a large amount.

Not slowing down the start but interestingly VST3s must not be on C:\Steinberg blah blah but can be moved out into the normal VstPlugins folder. At least in Reaper.

This way my Reaper starts within 5 seconds with preloading of a bunch of plugins in the start template and with around 2.000 plugins installed all in all.

 

Windows is slow for me, period, right now. Time for the cleanup...

 

Hang on .... your online PC takes 2 secs and offline PC takes 13 secs?
Is the offline PC trying over and over to call home?

 

I doubt there's a virus involved.
I have a powerful virus checker and firewall running. My other programs are behaving normally, only my DAW takes longer to load than it used to.

 

I suppose so. This is my point.
Cakewalk calls home when lauched and waits for a response, probably to validate the license. If it doesn't get a response after a certain amont of time it just move on and open. After 3 months of not getting a reply, you then need to do an offline validation, which I'm doing from my online PC.

There are other software doing the same thing and I have noticed that because of the supplemental delay on offline pc vs online.
By the way, my offline pc is way more performant than my online pc so it has nothing to do with the specs in this case, it's a programmed delay for a certain "hand shake" of some kind.

 

FL Studio 21 launches immediately.
New computer, though.

 

2:19.34
Pro Tools 2022.12.0
MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7
16 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
AMD Radeon Pro 5300M 4 GB
Audient iD 4.0.0

Approximately 1 minute is spent initializing the audio device (since updating to macOS Monterey)

 

Logic, 8 seconds.

 

Cubase Pro 12.0.50, Windows 10 Pro 21H2, Samsung 970 EVO system drive - under 5 seconds.

 

FL20.9 win10 2-3sec

 

Agree with ArticStorm.

But how is something so subjective useful to anyone else? Plus most, if not all, (didn't check every single one) of the comments make no mention of it being an acceptable time or not.

Personally I could wait 15-20 mins without complaint. Turn on bunch of hardware synths, FX, processors ect, turn on on mixer> turn on audio interface> launch DAW> turn on speakers> turn on guitar amp> tune guitar or guitars again> wait for some synths to warm up> finally get going is one possible scenario.

The DAW takes a few seconds, never timed it.

No shade but how is that information useful to anyone?