Really I should have posted this earlier. It’s not like it’s new information. Nevertheless it surprised the hell out of me when it happened.

I’m a newcomer to the good ship energyXT, so I had no working or emotional attachment to the earlier versions. From what I understand it was the business for cool MIDI tricks and all kinds of weird modular routings. The kind of audio/MIDI Fu I’m only just beginning to tap into. The release of version 2, which included a Linux version, was not without controversy. Some features were dropped, more emphasis was placed on the sequencer, and Windows die-hards thought the Linux version was a waste of development time. Then the updates stopped for something like - gasp! - two or three months (normally they’re quite regular) and a lot of glaring bugs hampered the program. Suddenly: an update that includes an OSX version. Cue much grumbling and bitching about the still-unresolved bugs, missing features, yadda, yadda.

Personally, I’m impressed. I can completely understand why a coder would want to go back and build out his code to be more future proof, to be more portable. If that meant sacrificing some of your platform-specific code, so be it. I think it’s (as they say around these parts) wicked cool that were I suddenly to switch my OS I could still use a program with which I am familiar. An academic point to be sure. But if the program survives (who knows these days) and continues to become more stable and feature-rich there’s more potential for a good community of resources.

Yeah, there are still some head-scratchers and some weird glitches, but incrementally it is coming along nicely, and with just a minimal amount of creative thinking and a handful of well-chosen plugs, you can get it to do some amazing things.

There had been this one glitch that had crept into my audio production that I had been working around for months.

In Sonar 6 certain plugin went missing from plugin menus. So we had gotten this great plugin manager but I was losing menu access to a lot of my favorite plugin instruments. I first noticed with microTonic, a synth I use a lot. I could see it in the list of installed VSTs, and I could add it to the menu editor. But in the actual menu they just weren’t showing up. Oatmeal & V-Station were two others I know of off the top of my head that went MIA. I could get to some through track templates (yea for remembering to create them), but some were apparently lost. to Sonar. I was hoping 7 would be the magic number and it would all be good. Nope.

And not only that, there were a lot of ghost plugins showing up in the Sonar plugin manager and SoundForge, listed weirdly, some of which probably dated back to when I was using the fxpansion VST wrapper.

Yet I was hesitating going back to a completely blank slate, wiping the system and buiding from scratch. Why? A lot of reasons I suppose: because it would have been tedious reinstalling all my plugins - digging out installers, updates - not to mention having to reregister a whole lot of ‘em, but also because I was just curious to see if I could figure out what was wrong.

So in frustration, I ripped all my versions of Sonar off the computer, along with a whole lot of old software. Old Project 5. All those versions of Sonar I had going back to version 2 - outta there. Gone. I didn’t touch my plugins too much, including Dimension Pro and Rapture, but I washed the registry several times with two different registry cleaners, including by hand. I was careful but thorough.

But no luck. The plugins were still not showing up in the menus and the ghost registry entries were still there.

So I started thinking of strategies to clean out my plugin folder. I knew there was a lot of detritus in there. I’m pretty good at deleting what I don’t want, but it was way too easy to tuck stuff out of the way and not really think about it. Freebies I thought might be cool, mag-ware I might have used once or twice, some of lesser SynthEdit creations. I whittled it down to just the commercial plugins and the free/donation-ware I know works and use a lot. I created a 2nd vst folder that sits right next to the current where I moved everything else. So I can still use these miscellaneous VSTs in other programs; perhaps bring some into Sonar using eXT as a plugin. I also tossed any overall folder structure (”c:\program files\audio_plugins\instruments\samplers\..”) and went with just splitting them up by developer and project (”c:\program files\audio_plugins\u-he\zebra2\..”).

Then, with the very helpful configuration information that the Plugin Manager provides, I used a block of CLSID numbers to ferret out where they were sitting in my registry. (I used Registrar Lite 5.5.1 if it’s helpful.) Just a huge block of dead info. So scappled it out. Did a complete update on XP (using the quasi-illegal post-SP2 updater).

So now my Sonar 7 is a lean, mean plugin machine.

Seriously, it’s easier sorting through them, rescanning them, changing properties, and the whole plugin manager just operates faster. Whatever your platform, whatever your host, I highly advocate getting a good handle on what’s going on in your plugin directory.

I’m not a big advocate of moderation when it comes to plugins - whatever you can afford, why not? - but there is something both cathartic and useful in really simplifying your plugin structure.