Plug in management software?

by **nk_e** » Sun May 13, 2012 5:05 am

Does anyone know of a plugin management program for OSX? Something that lets you define and activate or deactivate groups of plugins? I used to use PlugAdminPro for this years ago, but it has not been stable in a long time.

Seems simple enough to write (not that I could in any reasonable amount of time) and there must be a need...

I'll ask elsewhere too. If I find anything, I'll post back.

by **nk_e** » Sun May 13, 2012 5:43 am

Ha. Found my own answer. From SOS

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct07/a ... p_1007.htm

Power User: If you're a power user there's potential for plug-in pandemonium. Your Mac is a hotbed of audio production and you utilise your vast collection of plug-ins and virtual instruments using DP, rival DAWs, Rewire applications and other hosts in whatever combination proves necessary. What you need is the ultimate flexibility in controlling your plug-in collection. In this case, the Disabled folders approach, though a possibility, could become tiresome and confusing. Likewise, intervening in DP's AU examination process is too inflexible, and too time-consuming to do very often. What's needed is a proper plug-in management system, and for this I can wholeheartedly recommend AudioFinder by Iced Audio. This is a massively useful audio utility — in fact I'll be looking in more detail at how it complements DP next month — that includes a fully fledged Plug-in Manager. With it you can create cross-format plug-in sets that can be recalled using a simple pop-up menu in AudioFinder. It then does all the hard work of creating Disabled folders in your OS X Plug-Ins folder, and moving groups of plug-ins about en masse. To give an example of how this feature might be used, you could create a 'DP' plug-in set, which disabled all Audio Unit and VST plug-ins that had MAS counterparts. But if you then wanted to switch to using Logic or Live for a while, you could instantly load a 'Logic' plug-in set that re-enabled those Audio Unit plug-ins. If you found that a certain plug-in was crashing one of your hosts, how about creating a 'safe' plug-in set that excluded just that one? And if you're using Waves plug-ins with DP — problematic right now, because DP5 no longer automatically blacklists crash-prone plug-ins and Waveshells in Audio Unit and VST formats — you can make up a plug-in set that excludes these (or any non-MAS Waveshell) every time you want to use DP. Once you try it, you'll wonder how you lived without it. AudioFinder costs $69.95 and is available from http://www.icedaudio.com. There's a demo version there too.

A good lesson on knowing your tools. I actually own AudioFinder and didn't realize it had this built in... :oops:

by **James Steele** » Sun May 13, 2012 10:30 am

nk_e wrote:Does anyone know of a plugin management program for OSX? Something that lets you define and activate or deactivate groups of plugins? I used to use PlugAdminPro for this years ago, but it has not been stable in a long time.

Seems simple enough to write (not that I could in any reasonable amount of time) and there must be a need...

I'll ask elsewhere too. If I find anything, I'll post back.

Are you using DP7? You CAN have different plug in sets within DP's audio plug-in prefs.

by **daniel.sneed** » Sun May 13, 2012 12:50 pm

+1 on AudioFinder.
IMHO, it's a magic tool, or swiss knife, in many situations.

by **nk_e** » Sun May 13, 2012 1:06 pm

James Steele wrote:
nk_e wrote:Does anyone know of a plugin management program for OSX? Something that lets you define and activate or deactivate groups of plugins? I used to use PlugAdminPro for this years ago, but it has not been stable in a long time.

Seems simple enough to write (not that I could in any reasonable amount of time) and there must be a need...

I'll ask elsewhere too. If I find anything, I'll post back.

Are you using DP7? You CAN have different plug in sets within DP's audio plug-in prefs.

Great point, but I need a more general solution...

by **stubbsonic** » Sun May 13, 2012 8:18 pm

I'd especially like to organize my plug-ins into sub-directories by category. I think this may have been brought up in another thread recently.

*** Just checked the AudioFinder manual and it doesn't appear to support that function.

by **daniel.sneed** » Tue May 15, 2012 1:11 pm

AFAICT, DP allows one level deep nesting in plugin folders.

But each time you update DP, you'll have to organize manually again.
I'm pretty fast at this job now.

BTW AudioFinder works fine with nested plugin folders.

by **stubbsonic** » Tue May 15, 2012 4:25 pm

I wasn't able to do this with AU's (components).

I thought there was something in the headers that caused them to appear in sub-menus.

by **James Steele** » Tue May 15, 2012 10:47 pm

daniel.sneed wrote:AFAICT, DP allows one level deep nesting in plugin folders.

Unfortunately I think that only applies to MAS plug-ins, not AU.

by **twistedtom** » Fri May 18, 2012 11:28 pm

My issue is I have s few programs that use AU and they want to load all of them. For example if I am using FCP it wants to load all the AU but I use DP7 for any real sound work. So does AudioFinder do this easy?