Plugin Installation - Let Me Count The Ways

There are so many plugins available on the net, it's not even possible to begin thinking about trying to
list them all in any single location. People get plugins from major manufacturers such as Toontrack or Native Instruments, while others get plugins from free plugin collection sites or even budding developers themselves.
Over time, you might collect dozens or even hundreds of plugins (like yours truly), and become somewhat of an expert at how to install them and configure your daw of choice to find and use them.

Let's say you want to record yourself singing, but you're no "Whitney Houston", so you find some plugin called "instant whitney" and you download it.

VST 2 Plugins

IW might come with an installer which puts it in a pre-defined locations, or even allow you to choose the location. In this case, it's usually best to leave it to the default location, which is typically something common to most daws, Such as C:\Program Files\vst, or C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VSTPlugins.
Your daw will most likely check those directories each time you run it, and find your instant whitney on it's own.

If the installer wants to place the plugin in an odd location, there will be two things to consider.

• Is this plugin written by a reputable company, or will it crash my daw, causing me to curse the daw developers for making crappy software?
• Do I know how to tell my daw where this strange new location is so that it will load the plugin?

So considering both points above, you might either abandon your plans of installing instant whitney, or continue and plan to point your daw to it's location.

In a DAW such as Mixcraft, you can add directories in preferences, or simply drag and drop a plugin DLL file onto the interface.

VST3 Plugins

Unlike the VST2 standard, all VST3 plugins must install into a directory on your windows PC, here "C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3".

So there is no changing the installer to point elsewhere and all this guess-work will be eliminated if you are only installing a vst3.

Something to keep in mind: If you installed Instant Whitney and it doesn't show up in your daw which only supports vst3, then IW may be vst2 only.

These days, most plugin manufacturers are going by way of the vst3 standard and will abandon vst2 completely at some point.

That might panic you because you love some plugin made 26 years ago and the manufacturer retired into the mobile yogurt stand business.But I assure you, it's a good thing. Chances are your yogurt dealer's plugin isn't going to play nice with newer daws anyway, so eliminating it from possible daw support trouble tickets in the future, will save us all time and money.

No Installer/Zip File

In some cases, Instant Whitney might come without an installer, and could be zipped up in a zip folder along with other files like config or resource files. In that case, you simply unzip the file, and then place the newly unzipped folder, into the vst folder such as C:\Program Files\vst, or C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VSTPlugins.

If you do not know what a zip folder is, or how to unzip it, look it up, Chuck!

Plugin File Types

DLL/VST2 - Windows and some other OS. 

VST3 - Windows and some other OS.

RTAS - Pro Tools 10 and earlier only.

AAX - Pro Tools 10 and later only.

AU - Mac OS.

DirectX - Older proprietary Windows type. Support being dropped by many daws.

My Favorite Plugins

To close out this blog entry, I thought it would be fun to list off a few of my go-to fav plugins that you might want to try!

• Fabfilter - Everything these guys make is just phenomenal! I use their Pro-R, Pro-C2 and Pro-MB in almost every project.
• Toontrack - I am a faithful Superior Drummer 3 user. Here in my studio, I use it for everything from live drummers, drum sound replacement, to simply mousing in notes.
• Native Instruments - You can't argue with Kontakt! So many libraries made by third party developers, an endless supply of studio grade awesomeness!
• S-Gear - The most metal sounding guitar amp sim in my library.
• Studio Devil - The Studio Devil VBA Pro is the big bro to the VBA that ships with Acoustica's Mixcraft Pro Studio, and it is my bass tone.
• Antares - I freaking love their Harmony Engine EVO! Check it out.

Be cool!