Manually blacklist plugins

I use a few Waves plugins for DAW audio work, but I don’t use them in Dorico, and I doubt I ever will.

There’s a documented problem where Dorico will scan these plugins and, when a licence can’t be found, it will pop up dialogs behind the Dorico splash screen and prevent startup from continuing. I’ve also found on my machine that finding and dismissing these dialogs can sometimes cause a blue screen (not sure whether it’s a Dorico issue or a Waves issue).

I move my Waves plugins between machines using the online licence cloud, so one solution is to just licence the Waves plugins on whatever machine I’m using Dorico on (I also use the USB e-licenser for Dorico). But that’s an extra step to forget and/or get wrong, and it would all be unnecessary if I just had a way of telling Dorico not to bother with those plugins which I’ll never use. My DAW (Reaper) won’t try to load the plugins unless they’re actually used in the project, and it would be awesome if Dorico would do the same.

I understand there’s a blacklist file, but I think it’s auto-generated if a plugin causes a crash, or something, and I haven’t been able to find any information on how to manually add a plugin to the blacklist. Would appreciate any help if anyone’s found a way.

If you’re on Windows, one option would be to put the Waves plug-ins into a separate folder, and then make sure that Dorico isn’t looking in that folder; provided they’re VST2.x rather than VST3 plug-ins that should be sufficient. If they’re VST3 plug-ins, unfortunately that won’t work because all VST3 plug-ins live in a single folder. I’m afraid I’m not aware of a way to manually blacklist plug-ins at present.

I’d say that in theory you can manually blacklist plug-ins by simply editing the corresponding blacklist xml.
Here is an extract of a VST3 blacklist on Mac:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/RX 6 De-click.vst32018-01-27T00:33:49Z2018-01-27T00:33:47Z0

So it is basically just the path to the plug-in that you have to enter plus a fake timestamp.
I’m not sure if it is the same for VST2 plugs. Also, presumably it’s the same syntax for Win, but need to check.
What platform are you on and the plugs that you want to blacklist, are they VST2 or VST3?

This is what I’d like to do. I’m using Dorico Pro 3.5 on Windows 10, and I want to blacklist some of my VST3 plugins. There are a bunch of them showing in my plugin dropdown menu that I won’t be using in Dorico, and it makes the list unnecessarily very long. Is there any way to do this without removing the VST3 Plugin Files from the Common Files/VST3 folder? I still use those plugins in other programs, and it wouldn’t make sense to remove them just because of Dorico.

Hi Orbit-50, unfortunately the theory that I outlined in my posting from Oct 2019 does not work out. I’ve tried it out and in practise it does not work. Even it you edit the blacklist, on next startup a rescan takes place and the blacklist gets cleared again.
So with VST2 plug-ins its possible to achieve what you want, but not with VST3 plugs. At least not at the moment. Of course we could make it possible, but that’s a feature request then and we don’t know when we would have the time to implement it.

Thank you for your response Ulf. I’ll remove the excess VST3 files, store them in a separate folder, and put them back when I need them in other applications. I’m hoping to see the day that we will have the freedom to do this within the Dorico application itself. Thanks again.