Plugins Not Showing

[Darryl Ramm]

Look at some point when somebody has been messing around with their system and if they are not sure what they did, or they don't know how to find and restore stuff the best/cleanest/safest way is to reinstall plugins from the installers. It's not a bad thing to do, and gives a chance to check stuff is up to date.

But basic Windows command help, to find all the .aaxplugin file on the C: drive...

dir /s c:\*.aaxplugin


But now the user better be sure what he's moving back to the plugin folder, and say it's not some other old set of plugins. Again my advice would lean to just downloading the right installers (checking carefully) and run them.

[Ben Jenssen]

Thanks Darryl.
Just trying to stay solution oriented.

[gabrielrf1]

I did not realize that Pro Tools doesn't open VSTs. I guess I must have some AAX plugins scattered around that were opened before I moved them. You're right that my computer is a bit of a mess organizationally. I'm overdo for a purge of my unused plugins so I'll do some organizing. If you have any suggestions for how to get this done quickly, let me know

[gabrielrf1]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

But basic Windows command help, to find all the .aaxplugin file on the C: drive...

dir /s c:\*.aaxplugin

Where do I input this command?

[Ben Jenssen]

Originally Posted by gabrielrf1

Where do I input this command?

I know nothing about windows, but you must have searched for a file before, haven't you? A "Find…" command in a windows menu. Just do a search for '.aaxplugin'. All plugin files have the .aaxplugin ending. Hope is that you'll be able to locate the misplaced folder and move it back to where it's supposed to be. That is, where the avid plugins are now.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by gabrielrf1

Where do I input this command?

Where you enter every Windows command: The Windows command line aka CMD. Look this is just reinforcing my belief that you are in over your head and should probably not be moving files around and doing brain surgery on installed plugins. Go get the right installers and run them. You could have had all this fixed days ago if you had just done that.

Separately you can worry about learning more about Windows and Windows administration when not under pressure to get stuff working.

And the command example I gave you is the right/most robust way to do this, when stuff is screwed up/cannot be found you want to actually search the filesystem not rely on an indexed find command.

[gabrielrf1]

I ended up running the installers for plugins I wanted. That was easier than I thought it would be you were right lol. I did end up having a bunch of .aax files scattered around, but running the installers worked best since Pro Tools sorts everything for you so nicely. Thanks again to both of you for the help.

[Darryl Ramm]

Great you got going. I really like to leave installers saved somewhere, in case they are needed again. And a spreadsheet with links to downloads, or install notes can help.

[Darryl Ramm]

If you do want to learn more about the Windows command line this is a good resource: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Windows_Batch_Scripting.

[Darryl Ramm]

(short replies because DUC is messed up yet again with Access Denied failures).

And I'm talking about the default/classic Windows CMD command line, descended from MS-DOS. Not talking about Powershell, a more recent command line environment intended for power users. Powershell is fugly/inelegant, poorly designed, and diverges from every other UNIX inspired shell environment (which was really stupid as Microsoft now supports Linux under Windows).