Where Do I Save My Vst Plugins For Reaper

Guest post by Brandon S. Hire of The Noise Floor. Brandon recently went hell with getting his Waves VST3 plugins all into REAPER. He got through it and I asked him to share the experience to help others in the same situation. Any clues to solving problems like this are gold.

The source to the REAPER extension mini-SDK is now available via GitHub. The necessary header files are included, along with a couple of example plug-ins, and the source to some of REAPER's built-in plug-ins (such as the control surface plug-in and mp3 decoder). To force a re-scan of the plug-ins do the following: Windows and Mac. Go to Options Preferences VST. Set your VST Plug-ins path, and click 'Re-scan' or 'Clear cache/re-scan'. Audio Unit plug-ins (Mac Only) are scanned by default on launch. Reboot Reaper and your plug-ins will be re-scanned. Label the new folder as “Plug-ins”. Drag it into your Sidebar Favorites section to make it available as a shortcut there. Go to your VST plug-ins folder. Right click on each plugin you want and choose “Create shortcut” (multi-selection works too). Move these shortcuts to your new folder, and create sub-folders to organize. Bidule is another option that works with Pro Tools First. Using Reaper in Pro Tools to Host VST Instruments and Plugins Reaper is a good option to use VST plugins in Pro Tools because it has a 60-day free fully-functioning demo and it only costs $60 to purchase. Plus it's a full DAW and not just a plugin like the other options. Nov 30, 2020 32bit Reaper: C: Program Files (x86) Vstplugins. Additional Troubleshooting. 1) Ensure the plugin is installed on your system. 2) Ensure the iLok License Manager app is up-to-date on your system. 3) In some cases, you may need to hit 'Clear cache and re-scan VST paths for all plugins'. This will force Reaper to rescan all plugins.

Where Do I Save My Vst Plugins For Reaper Pc

Where do i save my vst plugins for reaper 2020

Where Do I Save My Vst Plugins For Reaper 2020

This was my (and everyone's) first method of browsing for plugins in REAPER. It works fine until it doesn't anymore-once you've got enough plugins that aren't close enough to each other in the list that it's hard to even remember what your options are, let alone quickly assess which one is best for the task at hand.

Waves recently announced a new subscription plan which allows users to subscribe to their Silver and Mercury bundles. I decided to give this a try and download the Mercury Bundle. As a long time REAPER user and long time Waves user, I didn’t anticipate any problems.

To put it bluntly, I had problems. But the problems were neither the fault of Waves or of Cockos. The folks at Waves’ tech support team were awesome at helping me figure out the problem, and I want to document the issue here in case any of you are experiencing something similar.

Note that I’m not advising you to take these steps yourselves. If you’re having issues, there may be other factors that are causing your issues. Your best bet is to contact support at Waves or Cockos and see if you can get assistance with the issue. With that being said, here’s what happened:

To make a long story short, I noticed that about half of the Mercury bundle plugins weren’t showing up in VST3 format in REAPER. The same plugs would show up in VST and AU formats, which indicated that the plugins were in fact installed on the system. So I decided to clear the cache in the plugins preferences and rescan the plugins folder.

As it scanned the VST3 plugins from Waves, it stalled at Greg Wells MixCentric. Then REAPER flat out crashed. When I re-launched REAPER, there was still no sign of the missing VST3 plugins, and MixCentric was one of them.

So I contacted Waves support. After trying a couple of things, we were able to remedy the problem with a clean install. This required that I go through a few steps to uninstall everything Waves related on my system, and then allow only the newest versions of everything to be installed by Waves Central. The whole process took a couple of hours, but by the end of it all I was back up and running. When I loaded REAPER again, I cleared the cache and re-scanned again. This time there was no crash, and at the end of the scan I had all of the missing plugins.

Waves Tech Support Representative

Uninstall the latest v9.6 of your Waves plug-ins for the system:
  1. Quit all audio related software.
  2. Launch Waves Central and login. Choose: Install->Uninstall Products (at the top).
  3. Choose All Waves plugins V9 click ‘Uninstall‘.
  4. Once the uninstall is finished – quit Waves Central.
  1. Quit all the audio related software on your Mac.
  2. Please use the Waves uninstaller to remove all the Waves software from your computer, located in Applications > Waves > Utilities > Waves uninstaller and check “Remove All” to remove also the old versions. (If not available skip to the next step)
  3. Delete “Waves” folder located in your Applications folder
  4. Go to the following locations and delete any WaveShell file/s of any version number found:
    1. HD > Library > Audio > Plug-ins > Components
    2. HD > Library > Audio > Plug-ins > VST
    3. HD > Library > Audio > Plug-ins > VST3
    4. HD > Library > Application Support > Avid > Audio > Plug-Ins*
    5. HD > Library > Application Support > Digidesign > Plug-ins*
      * This location is only present if Protools is installed
  5. Delete the “Waves Preferences” folder located at HD > Users > Current user > Library > Preferences (this folder is accessed by going to the Go menu and holding down the Altoption key. This will reveal the Library option)
  6. Delete the folder “Waves” located at HD > Current User > Library > Caches (this folder is accessed by opening the Go menu and holding down the [Alt/Option] key. This will reveal the Library option)
  7. Go to Mac HD > Library > Application Support and delete the “Waves” and “Waves Audio” folders.
To reinstall Waves Central and your Waves V9 products –
  • Download the latest version of Waves Central from this direct linkand install it on your computer.
  • Follow the instructions on theInstalling your Waves products and demos article on our support page in order to reinstall your activated products.
Afterwards, please launch REAPER and re scan again for the plug-ins.

As a long-time waves user, I’ve been slowly accumulating a collection of plugs prior to this subscription being available. That means I’ve been installing them intermittently over the last two years on this machine, and there have been updates since then. Those updates most likely were conflicting with previous files I’d installed, causing some to go missing and others to trigger a system crash. That’s why performing a clean install of everything worked. There was no longer old stuff mucking up the works and conflicting with the new stuff.

As mentioned above, if you’re having an issue with the new subscription working properly in REAPER, you should be certain that you’re using the VST3 version of the plugin in question. If it didn’t show up, a clean install may be the answer. I would do this with Waves tech support, as there may be further issues. Now that I’m up and running with the supported VST3 plugins, everything is running exactly as it should. I couldn’t be happier.

Thanks to Brandon for writing this up and sharing the info.

Save

Save

Save

As shown some time ago for the Mac, today’s tip shows you how to organize your plug-ins on windows, in order to find and load them quickly into Blue Cat’s PatchWork or MB-7 Mixer.

As you will see, It’s no rocket science, and this will greatly improve your experience and reduce the time to load your plug-ins.

Spending Too Much Time Looking For Plug-Ins?

Some people have been asking for the capability to load the plug-ins directly from the menu instead of having to open an Explorer Window. While this may be added in the future to our software, be aware that it may never beat what you can already do today with the Windows Explorer or Finder, as you will see below…

How To

On Windows, whatever you do, your VST plug-ins folder will probably quickly look like a huge mess, unfortunately…

There is however a very simple way to overcome this issue and organize your plug-ins properly: it will just take you a few minutes!

To quickly access your plug-ins, without modifying the original install locations (for optimal compatibility), just do the following:
1. Create a new folder somewhere convenient on your system. For example in the ” My Documents” directory.
2. Label the new folder as “Plug-ins”.
3. Drag it into your Sidebar Favorites section to make it available as a shortcut there.
4. Go to your VST plug-ins folder.
5. Right click on each plugin you want and choose “Create shortcut” (multi-selection works too).
6. Move these shortcuts to your new folder, and create sub-folders to organize them.

Here you go! You can now access plug-ins quickly using the shortcuts, inside the appropriate folders:

VST Plug-Ins organized into subfolders, directly accessible from the Favorites Sidebar

Additional Tip: You can also choose to add several folders to the favorite bar instead of a single one, to access directly the mostly used plug-ins that you use most of the time.

One More Tip: It is possible to add a shortcut to the same plug-in in different folders, as it may be valid for several categories.

Not Fancy Enough? Add Some Icons!

Free software for vst plugins. Once you have properly organized the plug-ins thanks to shortcuts and linked to them from the favorites bar, you may want to add some colors to it and change the icons. You can set a different icon for each folder, and even for each plug-in:

Plug-Ins Folders with Custom Icons

With custom icons, it is even easier to find the plug-ins: a glance will suffice to pickup the right one! /solo-strings-vst-free.html.

Free Search Included!

Where Do I Save My Vst Plugins For Reaper Windows 10

And one more thing… Did you know that you can then use the standard windows search feature to find the plug-ins? Just type in a name and you’ll get it instantly!

VST Plug-In Search Included !

Conclusion

Where Do I Save My Vst Plugins For Reaper Free

Simply using the Windows Explorer properly and taking the time to organize things will greatly improve the plug-in loading experience. There are even features that are not available in most host applications (how many do provide custom icons and search?).

Where Do I Save My Vst Plugins For Reaper Download

Do you still need an included plug-in menu? Please discuss below!