How do I fix a plugin when opening a file on another system/platform?

Nuendo
1

I was planning to make the jump from Windows to macOS later this year, but circumstances have forced me to do so earlier than anticipated. I’ve copied all my Nuendo projects from the old Windows machine to my new MacBook Pro and have had a lot of good results immediately. Unfortunately, I have a category of problem that’s proving tricky to resolve: fixing a plugin that’s actually installed properly on both platforms but doesn’t load right.

For example, I have a project that uses a few of my go-to plugins all of which open fine on Windows yet none of which open properly on macOS, the two most prominent examples of which being In Music’s BFD3 and Cherry Audio’s CA2600. The plugins are installed properly on both systems and work just fine when loaded into instrument tracks on either box. But when I open a project file on macOS that was created on the Windows machine using both of those, I get errors such as:

The plug-in “BFD3” could not be found for Instrument Track “Drums”!
The plug-in “CA2600” could not be found for Instrument Track “Square Synth”!

I don’t really understand that in the first place because all I have to do to load the plugin correctly is navigate to the track in question, bring up its inspector, find where it has the plugin name surrounded by exclamation points, and then click in there and give it the same name that’s already present. It makes no sense to me that it doesn’t work in the first place. So maybe if there’s a way to fix that my subsequent problem goes away.

But if I manually “wire up” the correct plugins to the tracks, then I still face an obstacle that I’d be surprised if there isn’t some way to fix. I know Nuendo stores not only the plugin name (or whatever) in the project file but also all the settings for that plugin; e.g., which preset I have chosen, any tweaks, etc. My selecting the correct plugin wipes all of that out, and I can’t find any easy way to get it back.

So I guess I’m asking: is there any way to fix the senseless plugin-doesn’t-load problem in the first place? And if not, is there a way to get the correct settings restored once I manually fix up the plugin?

2

Did you possibly use the VST2 version of the plugins in your project on PC?

3

My vote goes to VST2 as well.

Do vst2 still work on macs, by the way?

If they do, you have to enable them in the VST Plug-in Manager

4

Try running Nuendo in Rosetta mode. Right click Nuendo icon, hit get info. Check “open in Rosetta” and they should open.

5

Sorry it took a while, but I had to figure out whether I wanted Rosetta on my new computer and then how to open Nuendo using it. But once I did that, my problems with opening the project went away. As it turned out, that let me export the BFD3 session as a preset and identify which preset I was using for the CA2600 plugin. So I was able to launch Nuendo normally (i.e., without Rosetta) and correct my issues. Thanks for the help!