How to export list of VST effects and instruments?

Cubase
1

Before the recent (most welcome) Plug-In manager, I was somehow able to export a list of my plugins in a format (csv?) that I could then open in Microsoft Excel.

I have too many plugins and would like to remove many and organise the rest. I would like to do it with Excel. This could also help me plan Collections to set up with the Plug-In Manager.

Now, in C Pro 8 I cannot find the way to do so.

Any ideas, suggestions?

1 Like
2

I don’t see a way to export from the plug in manager page like we used to be able to in CB7.X. You can export from the plug in information page. That’s it. See op manual page 400.

Maybe someone else figured this out and will chime in here.

Regards :sunglasses:

3

I found a potential workaround. If you go into your Cubase Appdata folder (which on Windows is C:\Users\username\Appdata\Roaming\Steinberg) you will find your folder for your current version of Cubase, in my case 10.5. Inside that folder is an xml file called PluginManager. You can right-click and ‘open as’ with Windows notepad. The list of your plugin collection is there to save or print. It does include some numerical gobbledygook at the end but if you focus on the left-hand side and look down through you will be able to see your list. It could be saved as a txt for printing out or whatever. Hope that helps!

4

Thank you very much, Carbon2501, for contributing to answer a question I asked 4.5 years ago!! I had “too many” plugins then, and it is even worse now! I will give this a try this weekend.

5

There are lots of places in Cubase where it would be nice to print out something but we can’t. My quick and dirty solution is to use the Windows Snipping Tool (or its new replacement whatever it’s called). Everything is of course converted to graphics, so no text searching. But this is almost always adequate for what I need.

6

On Windows, this PowerShell one-liner will give you a list of all plugins:

Select-Xml -Path .\PluginManager.xml -XPath  "//plugin[@name]" | ForEach-Object {$_.Node.name}
1 Like
7

I also need to export a list of all the VST / VSTi that I have installed on the computer. I looked inside my PluginManager.xml file and there is no list of plugins. So, in what path and file does Cubase 10.5 store information about installed plugins so I can extract a list?

8

On Windows, “%APPDATA%\Steinberg\Cubase 10.5_64”. I just tried that PowerShell one-liner above and it works (currently on C10.5.12).

9

Thanks MrSoundman, I solved it. I also used the Powershell command to get the list of names, it works!
Could you modify the command to get a list of 3 columns (plugin, brand, vst3/vst2) sorted by name?

10

The Plugins.xml file might be a better place to start, but there are a bunch of XML files that are not documented, so feel free to experiment!

Select-Xml -Path .\Plugins.xml -XPath  "//plugin[@name]" | ForEach-Object {$_.Node.vendor + "," + $_.Node.name }

I don’t know where the information is stored as to the VST3/2-ness of a plugin, but the items seem to have a “object ID” which appears to be unique.

11

I am probably coming in too late with this, but I just discovered that if I press Plug-in Report at the bottom of the VST Plug-in manager I get a txt file with all the information I would have wanted about my plugins. Of course, it needs further editing, but this looks quite easy to do. Perhaps this will still be of use to somebody.

1 Like
12

Fantastic! I had not noticed this – I don’t know when this feature was added, but it’s exactly what we needed. It even lists them in different groups, VST2/VST3, which makes it very useful in hunting down the last VST2 plugins!