@tech

Over the course of 5 years My buddy John and I have accumulated 100’s of audio plugins for music production with Reaper.  Some seemed interesting but we never tried, others didn’t do what we thought they should, and some we use all the time.  Then John’s hard drive failed.
Replacing hard drives is nothing new but John opted for a newer machine and OS so we could update software all around.  The process involved downloading and updating all those plugins, or at least those we actually use.  It also allowed us to pare down how many we had.  This of course is not a terribly fast process but once he had many of them installed he started opening projects to see what was still missing.  Here’s where the scope of the issue came into focus.

Many of the new plugins loaded into projects and worked as expected.  Many did not.  What we discovered was plugins which he now had were newer versions of those we had used.  Often this is not an issue but quite a few were due to the newer versions were named differently and Reaper didn’t like that.  More than an issue with Reaper I consider an issue with the plugins.  Or more specifically the developer.  “My Great Plugin”, instead of remaining the same but showing a software revision change, was now “My Great Plugin 2”.  In several instances “My Great Plugin”, the original, was no longer available to download as the developer removed it with the release of the new version.  So we had no choice but to search every instance of every project (hundreds of them) and replace the old with the new.  But compounding that is I needed to keep the old version long enough so I could load it copy the settings into the new version.  Had the developer simply changed the revision number and not the name this would have been a quick and flawless update.

Another problem we saw, fortunately only with a few plugins, was licensing.  There were a few which had one time only licenses.  Why?!?!  We were not going to pay again unless it was something critical, so in those cases we had to search out and not only remove them, but find others to replace them with.

The only thing that made this a little less painful, was since we both use Macs, we could open the terminal, change to the directory our projects are in, and run the following command:

find ./ -name "*.RPP" -type f -exec grep -H "My Great Plugin" {} +

… changing “My Great Plugin” to what ever plugin you’re needing to find in a Reaper project.  It’s quite fast.

SO, the lesson learned here is:
1. Make sure licenses are not a one time only thing.
2. Be careful where plugins come from and see what the developer does with multiple versions.
3. Stop collecting so many plugins.  Do we need more than 6, maybe 12, EQ’s, delays, reverbs, etc.?

I lay this at our feet for chasing every shiny new pluin, but also at the feet of developers who do thoughtless things making life much more difficult.  We will not be having so many now, and ignoring a lot of new offerings.