Best Practices for Plugin Mgr and Registry

[Sleetah2000]

Through the course of several versions of Cakewalk/Sonar, I've amassed a number of duplicate and obsolete plugins. Over time, I've employed the lazy man's approach of excluding plugins that I no longer have a use for.  While this relieves the symptom, I know that I'm just sweeping some concerns under the rug.

Has anyone found or offered a best practice for auditing and cleaning up the plugin manager and associated registry entries?  I'm primarily concerned with identifying the low hanging fruit items rather than hand wringing over entries that should potentially stay.

Thanks

[scook]

12 hours ago, Sleetah2000 said:

I'm primarily concerned with identifying the low hanging fruit items rather than hand wringing over entries that should potentially stay.

Chances are you've already overthought this. Often, excluding plug-ins is the best solution. They are effectively unavailable for new projects while still loading in existing projects and templates. Going any further runs the risk of plug-ins missing from existing projects.

That said....

 

Here is a post about a tool to display all VST2/3 plug-ins found by Sonar Xn Producer/Platinum/CbB. It may be helpful.

 

If the VST2/3 plug-in binary is not in the scan path, the next scan removes it's information from the DAW's VST Inventory in the registry. 

Whether this is done by removing the scan path from the DAW configuration, moving the plug-in files from the scan path or uninstall the plug-in is up to the user.  The last option is the most complete as the plug-in is no longer resident on the machine.

 

DX format plug-ins are host bitness specific. 32bit DX plug-in are not even seen by 64bit DX hosts like CbB. Unlike VST plug-ins, DX plug-ins are registered during installation using the Windows utility regsvr32.exe and do not need to be scanned by the DAW to be available. The same regsvr32.exe is used to unregister plug-ins. This is a manual process and may be performed at the command line. The command needs to be run as administrator. Like all Windows command line utilities /? brings up its help. But I feel like this is already TMI about the handful of DX plug-ins on your PC.

[Sleetah2000]

Thanks.  That really is reassuring. 

I'll look into the tool for a better understanding, but I'm happy again to just cash in my chips and walk out of the casino.