Plugoff - Plugin Manager - 100% Free

[Uncle E]

Thanks for answering. It's not giving me an option to change the destination.

[Midifex]

This is great - plugin scanning was extremely fast and no crashes so far - just offloaded 8GB of plugins to an external drive

The UAD support seems to be only if you have the hardware versions - not native - as it asks to connect to your UAD hardware.

Glad it's working well. Your UADx native plugins should just show up automatically under the "UADx" category in the sidebar — no import needed. The UA System Profile import is only relevant if you have UAD hardware (UAD-2) installed and want to see license status tags for those plugins. If you're just running native UADx, you're all set.

[aMUSEd]

This is great - plugin scanning was extremely fast and no crashes so far - just offloaded 8GB of plugins to an external drive

The UAD support seems to be only if you have the hardware versions - not native - as it asks to connect to your UAD hardware.

Glad it's working well. Your UADx native plugins should just show up automatically under the "UADx" category in the sidebar — no import needed. The UA System Profile import is only relevant if you have UAD hardware (UAD-2) installed and want to see license status tags for those plugins. If you're just running native UADx, you're all set.

Yes I see that but what confused me is it says it gets the profile from UA Connect, which I have running, but when I tried it it wanted me to open the UAD control panel not UA Connect. I thought the point was to be able to manage things like demos, which would still be useful.

[Midifex]

This is great - plugin scanning was extremely fast and no crashes so far - just offloaded 8GB of plugins to an external drive

The UAD support seems to be only if you have the hardware versions - not native - as it asks to connect to your UAD hardware.

Glad it's working well. Your UADx native plugins should just show up automatically under the "UADx" category in the sidebar — no import needed. The UA System Profile import is only relevant if you have UAD hardware (UAD-2) installed and want to see license status tags for those plugins. If you're just running native UADx, you're all set.

Yes I see that but what confused me is it says it gets the profile from UA Connect, which I have running, but when I tried it it wanted me to open the UAD control panel not UA Connect. I thought the point was to be able to manage things like demos, which would still be useful.

Oh I see...that's a typo in the app, it should say "UAD Control Panel" not "UA Connect." The license status detection is for UAD hardware. We will fix that. cheers

[Uncle E]

Cleared 10GB in less than a minute.

[Timfonie]

I installed Plugoff to check it out. It requires a user account to run, which I can't be bothered with. Uninstalled.

Same here. Quite disappointing.

[Midifex]

Yes we do ask you to enter an email address the first time, however Plugoff is 100% free. This is the only information captured rather than the alternative of making you sign up on a website to download. The app works fully offline after that and no plugin data is ever collected or further sign in required. Reach out if you have any questions as we want Plugoff to be a positive useful tool for our music community. Happy to help. Oliver

[jamcat]

You have to be online for it to work the first time you run it?

Why do you need an email address at all for it to launch?

[mutagen]

I think many of us would prefer the email / newsletter capture on the website before the download rather than have it be a part of the tool launch. Many users understand giving some of their attention for a free utility in the form of a newsletter signup and I'm happy to remain subscribed if the emails don't come too often. Given the utility of this tool I'll be looking for other Midifex paid products to support. Many producers run their music tools offline and are reluctant to deal with unnecessary network connections and so view that kind of signup as a hard block that prevents any further use.

[dionenoid]

Needs a lot of work :

- Doesn't scan VST2 folder (Steinberg/vstplugins) so doesn't find many VST2 plugins.
- UAD license status is NOT recognised and UADx plugins are labelled to be from an unknown brand.
- Can't find brands of many plugins, like Soundtoys, UAD or Melda (some 400 plugins unknown in my case).
- Removes plugins from brand folders but leaves those folders on your system after clean-up.
- Doesn't recognise Waves plugins, only various waveshells.
- Shows incorrect installed MB's of many plugins, like from Softube, IK or Arturia.
- Scanning is rather slow here.
- Doesn't warn about wrapped VST3 plugins that need to keep their VST2 version installed (like from Korg or Rob Papen).

I hope these things get fixed because so far it's rather useless. If all i want is to clean up my AAX it's way faster to just go to Common files/Avid and clean everything in there.

Also, in order to make it even more interesting for many users, i would add license status from more brands that install everything, like IK or Melda. But yeah, if it doesn't even work for UAD despite being advertised as such, i guess it's too much to ask.

[asstudioton]

Great app! It’s free now, but it'll be a paid version later once extra features are added?

[Midifex]

Needs a lot of work :

- Doesn't scan VST2 folder (Steinberg/vstplugins) so doesn't find many VST2 plugins.
- UAD license status is NOT recognised and UADx plugins are labelled to be from an unknown brand.
- Can't find brands of many plugins, like Soundtoys, UAD or Melda (some 400 plugins unknown in my case).
- Removes plugins from brand folders but leaves those folders on your system after clean-up.
- Doesn't recognise Waves plugins, only various waveshells.
- Shows incorrect installed MB's of many plugins, like from Softube, IK or Arturia.
- Scanning is rather slow here.
- Doesn't warn about wrapped VST3 plugins that need to keep their VST2 version installed (like from Korg or Rob Papen).

Hi, thanks for the detailed feedback.

We are really surprised to hear about the UAD and brand detection issues as these are working well and have had great feedback from many users. Feel free to email me with any additional information and we will work with you to solve your particular use case as Plugins like Soundtoys get the correct manufacturer detection every time from user feedback.

Only issue can be putting the plugin in the right category as many manufactures don’t include that in the meta data. To get around that we are adding customisable categories in the near future.

Custom plugin folders is something we're actively working on for an upcoming release. That might help in your setup too.

Regarding VST3 wrapper dependencies, that's good feedback and something we'll look into.

Regards,
Oliver

[Midifex]

Great app! It’s free now, but it'll be a paid version later once extra features are added?

Upgrades will be free for anyone who already has the product

[josb]

Any plans for a native version? Probably not, but I thought I'd ask.

[dionenoid]

Needs a lot of work :

- Doesn't scan VST2 folder (Steinberg/vstplugins) so doesn't find many VST2 plugins.
- UAD license status is NOT recognised and UADx plugins are labelled to be from an unknown brand.
- Can't find brands of many plugins, like Soundtoys, UAD or Melda (some 400 plugins unknown in my case).
- Removes plugins from brand folders but leaves those folders on your system after clean-up.
- Doesn't recognise Waves plugins, only various waveshells.
- Shows incorrect installed MB's of many plugins, like from Softube, IK or Arturia.
- Scanning is rather slow here.
- Doesn't warn about wrapped VST3 plugins that need to keep their VST2 version installed (like from Korg or Rob Papen).

Hi, thanks for the detailed feedback.

We are really surprised to hear about the UAD and brand detection issues as these are working well and have had great feedback from many users. Feel free to email me with any additional information and we will work with you to solve your particular use case as Plugins like Soundtoys get the correct manufacturer detection every time from user feedback.

Only issue can be putting the plugin in the right category as many manufactures don’t include that in the meta data. To get around that we are adding customisable categories in the near future.

Custom plugin folders is something we're actively working on for an upcoming release. That might help in your setup too.

Regarding VST3 wrapper dependencies, that's good feedback and something we'll look into.

Regards,
Oliver

Steinberg/vstplugins is not a custom plugin folder, it's the main VST2 folder for everyone who has any Steinberg products, and it was the default install path for VST2 for ages. Not including that path in your software seems rather amateuristic to be honest.

Categories are always in the Metadata for any VST3 plugin. I see the correct categories for pretty much all of my plugns in all of my hosts (even in chainers and in Audiogridder) so it's very weird how you state that many manufacturers don't include it.