PlugInfo utility for macOS users curious about their plug-ins

[Lady Gaia]

I've seen a fair bit of conversation about "M1 native" plug-ins, with confusion around what is merely compatible, but still running under Rosetta, and what is truly targeting Apple Silicon.  On another forum I posted a Python scripts to scan your system and report on non-native plug-ins but it was a clunky enough process that lots of folks gave up.  So a couple of weeks back I finally decided to write a more polished utility that does the trick with quick and easy discovery - and was amazed at how many people found it useful:

 

 

I've tinkered and added a few more features since the original version:

• Sort, filter, and type-to-select.
• Additional columns show an identifier, which names the publisher, and the path each plug-in is installed at.
• Copy the path or full details to the clipboard.
• Open a Finder window with the selected plug-ins highlighted, handy for removing plug-in types you don't use.

 

So if case folks here would find it useful, go ahead and download it for free at my ThinkerSnacks hobby site.  There's an App Store version, too, but it's largely there because some folks wanted a way to leave a tip, and it simplifies getting updates down the road.

 

I haven't been especially chatty here of late, but I always enjoy catching the perspective of working musicians as distinct from the more tech obsessed crowd I normally spend time around.  I expect I'll finally have a lot more to say when Expressive E finally starts shipping Osmose to their early adopters!  What a long, strange journey that has been.

[KuruPrionz]

This looks like an awesome plugin and I don't mind paying $2.99 at the App Store in the slightest. 

 

Just so you know, I've had no luck downloading from your linked site. The download button shares a pop-up that says there are two ways to download the app but there is no link that starts a download that I can find. I'll update my password on Apple and snag this, I've been avoiding cleaning out my plugins but I really want to run straight Apple Silicon moving forward and I have tons of plugins that probably need to go away. Cheers, Kuru

[Lady Gaia]

@KuruPrionz I’m glad to hear it looks useful to you, but I’m sorry the site is giving you trouble.  When the pop-up appears after you click the Download button, the text immediately below “Two ways to download” should be a pair of links: clicking on the text “App Store” should take you straight to the App Store page, and clicking on “Direct” should download a .zip file containing the app (which Safari will then automatically unzip.)

 

The ThinkerSnacks site uses Google’s “Material” design language that styles links with color rather than underlining them, which may have contributed to the confusion.  If you still have trouble please don’t hesitate to reach out with a post or PM.

[KuruPrionz]

20 minutes ago, Lady Gaia said:

@KuruPrionz I’m glad to hear it looks useful to you, but I’m sorry the site is giving you trouble.  When the pop-up appears after you click the Download button, the text immediately below “Two ways to download” should be a pair of links: clicking on the text “App Store” should take you straight to the App Store page, and clicking on “Direct” should download a .zip file containing the app (which Safari will then automatically unzip.)

 

The ThinkerSnacks site uses Google’s “Material” design language that styles links with color rather than underlining them, which may have contributed to the confusion.  If you still have trouble please don’t hesitate to reach out with a post or PM.

Got it, yes I am a bit color blind. 

This is fabulous, a must have for any Apple Silicon user. Now I can quickly and accurately clean up my plugs!!!!!

You win the interwebz!!!!! 😁

[David Emm]

That's a classy little app. Fortunately (and suspiciously), everything I had that was on the Keep list marched over to the M1 evenly. The few new things I acquired from Spitfire & Cherry Audio did likewise. I chalk part of it up to choosing judiciously. Valhalla's SuperMassive is my main go-to reverb and Valhalla Delay my main delay. There's enough to do in just picking the right sounds and tweaking them to fit, right?

 

So I've had no Kuru-sized overhauls. I used to grab freebies and cheap pieces with both hands, but the cost/benefit ratio gradually turned into a system-screwing bog. I have a stout enough rig, but lean & clean keeps Mr. Wonderful a bit more sane.

[KuruPrionz]

1 hour ago, David Emm said:

That's a classy little app. Fortunately (and suspiciously), everything I had that was on the Keep list marched over to the M1 evenly. The few new things I acquired from Spitfire & Cherry Audio did likewise. I chalk part of it up to choosing judiciously. Valhalla's SuperMassive is my main go-to reverb and Valhalla Delay my main delay. There's enough to do in just picking the right sounds and tweaking them to fit, right?

 

So I've had no Kuru-sized overhauls. I used to grab freebies and cheap pieces with both hands, but the cost/benefit ratio gradually turned into a system-screwing bog. I have a stout enough rig, but lean & clean keeps Mr. Wonderful a bit more sane.

With the help of Lady Gaia's magic app, I got rid of most everything I didn't want or need yesterday evening. 

 

One surprise was how many .AAX plugins were lurking in Application Support>Avid>Plugins, I tossed everything since I don't have or use ProTools, that was over a 1 gb of useless nothing. 

Today I went back on a third scouting trip and while everything was now ARC compatible, I found a good number of duplicates. Not all plugin installers provide a choice of type (AU, VST, VST3, AAX).

Quite a few plugins will install all 4 and some will install 3 or 2 versions of the same plugin. 

 

Just for one, I updated Valhalla Supermassive today (I'm a fan too) and it installed AU, VST3 and VST. I only need one of those so 2 of them died. 

 

I think I"m done for now and it the app made it super simple and fast. Thanks again!

[Stokely]

Not an Applle Silicon user just yet, but this does look useful simply to list all the many plugins I've gotten (and sometimes forgotten I had).    In other words, I'm now aspiring to be more like David Emm     If I added up all the great deals I got on plugins for the ones I don't use much or at all, it would be a sum that would be sadly pretty large I suspect.   I refuse to do it for fear that it would be the cost of Omnisphere or the Komplete Ultimate upgrade or something else I pine after....

Very cool!

I'm pretty miffed at Izotope for not updating R4, Excalibre or Phoenixverb for Monterey (let alone M1).    I didn't pay much for them, but downright fraudulent that they continue to sell it to Apple users, and unless they turn that around I've cancel-cultured them onto my do-not-buy list.  (It's been a while since I looked at those so if they've mended their ways, I'll take them off the list!)

[Lady Gaia]

1 hour ago, David Emm said:

Fortunately (and suspiciously), everything I had that was on the Keep list marched over to the M1 evenly. The few new things I acquired from Spitfire & Cherry Audio did likewise. I chalk part of it up to choosing judiciously. Valhalla's SuperMassive is my main go-to reverb and Valhalla Delay my main delay. There's enough to do in just picking the right sounds and tweaking them to fit, right?

 

You definitely did your homework in choosing vendors.  Spitfire Audio took their time with a few of their home-grown plugins (the Eric Whitacre choir was notably quite slow in getting out of beta - but they did a great job of resolving some issues I encountered in the process.)  Valhalla, like FabFilter, seems to properly understand that keeping their software current is a critical part of doing business and were on top of the migration fast.  Quite unlike some of the corporate aggregators out there that just acquire revenue streams over time without any real plan for investing in the products their customers increasingly rely on.

[KuruPrionz]

2 minutes ago, Lady Gaia said:

 

You definitely did your homework in choosing vendors.  Spitfire Audio took their time with a few of their home-grown plugins (the Eric Whitacre choir was notably quite slow in getting out of beta - but they did a great job of resolving some issues I encountered in the process.)  Valhalla, like FabFilter, seems to properly understand that keeping their software current is a critical part of doing business and were on top of the migration fast.  Quite unlike some of the corporate aggregators out there that just acquire revenue streams over time without any real plan for investing in the products their customers increasingly rely on.

Truth, Native Instruments and IK Multimedia both more or less hosed me at this point. NI has Kontakt ready but what about all the goodies that load into it? Nothing else is ARM ready and lots of it will never be updated. 

IK got Syntronik 2 ARM ready and supposedly SampleTank but again, what about all the libraries? Some of them run without SampleTank but they aren't ready for prime time. Miroslav Philharmonik2 is probably doomed. Almost (but not at all really) makes me wish I used Windows.

I don't have Spitfire but I do have a bit of Cherry Audio and Eventide and my hat's off to them for keeping things current and useful. I felt zero remorse tossing EQ plugins because Eventide Split EQ (which I recently bought) can do everything the other plugins can do plus it has tricks no other EQ can touch. It's my go-to EQ plug in, I do use Apple's High Pass and Low Pass filters on some things becasue they are so simple and work great. 

[KuruPrionz]

31 minutes ago, Stokely said:

Not an Applle Silicon user just yet, but this does look useful simply to list all the many plugins I've gotten (and sometimes forgotten I had).    In other words, I'm now aspiring to be more like David Emm     If I added up all the great deals I got on plugins for the ones I don't use much or at all, it would be a sum that would be sadly pretty large I suspect.   I refuse to do it for fear that it would be the cost of Omnisphere or the Komplete Ultimate upgrade or something else I pine after....

Very cool!

I'm pretty miffed at Izotope for not updating R4, Excalibre or Phoenixverb for Monterey (let alone M1).    I didn't pay much for them, but downright fraudulent that they continue to sell it to Apple users, and unless they turn that around I've cancel-cultured them onto my do-not-buy list.  (It's been a while since I looked at those so if they've mended their ways, I'll take them off the list!)

Izotope has made RX9 ARM ready, although it is broken down into 18 different plugins and 2 of them are still Intel only. Even though I've yet to use it, it seems to be the gold standard for curing audio boogers and I got it on sale. I don't see any reason to update it for a long time. So far I've been careful to record things with a low noise floor and to sing back a ways from the mic so I don't have snorts and pops and such to get rid of, yet. 

 

The reality is that many plugin vendors are will be introducing new plugins and only updating the old ones if they still sell. They really can't afford to do otherwise in a dog eat dog market like plugins. 

 

One surprise for me was that all of the Plugin Alliance stuff that I had was ARM ready, although not everything they sell is yet. Still, they are making the effort at least - or were before the Native Instruments, Izotope, Plugin Alliance, Brainworx alliance took place (did I miss one?). 

[Lady Gaia]

A couple of revisions later, and the app now shows a concise publisher column (instead of the more wordy internal identifier), and double-clicking on any publisher takes you directly to their web site.  Thanks to several folks with immense plug-in libraries lending a hand, a subsequent minor release improved the reliability of this feature and expanded the list of recognized publishers to more than 300.

[Dockeys]

Downloaded it. Can I ask if an app is M1 compliant does it say "Apple/Intel 64" in the column? Im on a Mac mini 2018 so just wondering what plugins are compatible should I ever decide to go the M1 route. A few of my Plugins "Apple/Intel 64" but most are listed as "Intel 64" so I'm assuming they're not ready yet?

[Reezekeys]

This is fantastic and I happily got the App Store version. I'm not getting an M1 Mac anytime soon (mine is a late-2013 MBP). You might be giving this utility short thrift by describing it as a tool to identify AS plugs. I found quite a few "Intel 32" and "Intel 32, PowerPC 32" plugs I could trash! These plugins likely came from my older Macs via Migration Assistant when I went to newer models.

[Lady Gaia]

8 hours ago, Dockeys said:

Downloaded it. Can I ask if an app is M1 compliant does it say "Apple/Intel 64" in the column? Im on a Mac mini 2018 so just wondering what plugins are compatible should I ever decide to go the M1 route. A few of my Plugins "Apple/Intel 64" but most are listed as "Intel 64" so I'm assuming they're not ready yet?

Apple allows a single plug-in to contain code for multiple processor families, so the Architectures column is a comma separated list of all the directly support architectures.  "Apple, Intel 64" is indeed an indication that it is Apple Silicon-native, compiled by the developer specifically for Apple's M-series (M1/M2) systems, and that it also includes 64-bit Intel code.  It will be rare to see any plug-ins that don't also include Intel code alongside the Apple Silicon code for quite some time yet.

 

You're right in assuming that plugins that only list Intel 64 have not been updated to include direct Apple Silicon support.  Some hosts, like Logic, can still load many of these using the Rosetta translation technology - but they're not taking full advantage of your system, and it's always possible that some bugs will show up that weren't evident on Intel Macs.

4 hours ago, Reezekeys said:

This is fantastic and I happily got the App Store version. I'm not getting an M1 Mac anytime soon (mine is a late-2013 MBP). You might be giving this utility short thrift by describing it as a tool to identify AS plugs. I found quite a few "Intel 32" and "Intel 32, PowerPC 32" plugs I could trash! These plugins likely came from my older Macs via Migration Assistant when I went to newer models.

When people have shared parts of their plug-in collections with me while trying to track down publishers I've been quite amused at how many include PowerPC code!  I'm glad I bothered to show those older architectures, because it really is quite the trip down memory lane.  I'm glad you've found the app useful and I expect a lot of folks will find their own uses.  I've certainly heard from a few who were happy to track down and delete all their AAX installs because they're not Pro Tools users.

[Reezekeys]

5 hours ago, Lady Gaia said:

I've certainly heard from a few who were happy to track down and delete all their AAX installs because they're not Pro Tools users

 

Yep, I didn't mention the 1.2GB of AAX plugins I've never used and never will!

[Lady Gaia]

There have been a few updates to the app since I posted initially.  The biggest changes are probably the addition of a "Size" column that reports the amount of disk space each plug-in occupies, eliminating the need for Spotlight to be enabled, and making significant additional strides in performance.  Startup times should be no more than a second or two even with thousands of plug-ins on a system released in the last five years or so.

[RedKey]

Very helpful little app.  Thank you!

 

[Adam Burgess]

It's excellent. Thank you!

 

[Lady Gaia]

@Adam Burgess @RedKey I'm glad to hear it's working well for both of you.  It keeps growing organically based on feedback, but at every step I've also focused on finding new ways to further improve performance since that seems to be a major differentiator from other ways to review plug-in related information.

[Lady Gaia]

Version 1.9.0 should be live on ThinkerSnacks and the App Store any minute now. As is often the case, it was inquiries about how best to accomplish a goal that spurred the work on this one. Here's what's new:

• Improved filtering enables more sophisticated searches: matching across multiple columns, a "must not match" option, and matches limited to a specific column.
• The filter field now has a pop-up list of recent filter text used, plus two suggested filters that make use of the new filter syntax (plug-ins that need Rosetta, and obsolete plug-ins - which are those that don't have anything more recent than 32-bit Intel code.)
• An online user manual linked under the Help menu for extensive insight into features including the new improved filtering options.
• Added standard cut/copy/paste and undo/redo menu items to the Edit menu to assist with editing more complex filters enabled by this release.