I’ve been using Cubase for many years on my 2018 Intel Mac mini, currently running Cubase 14. Because Apple announced this machine will not be supported in macOS 26, and because Apple was running a great deal on refurb’d M4 Studios, I picked one up. It’s stunningly faster, quieter, and cooler.
Because I’m moving from Intel to Apple Silicon, I did not use Migration Assistant; I wanted a fresh start. The last thing I’m migrating from the mini to the studio is Cubase and my music making setup. I’ve downloaded and activated the latest Cubase 14 and Toontrack software (my main plugins), but I know I have a bunch of other plugins installed. I looked at Steinberg Library Manager and while there are some differences, I think I’ve gotten every currently supported product from Steinberg that’s compatible with my machine.
What I’m not sure about is all the third party plugins. I’m sure I have some old and unsupported Intel plugins that just won’t port over, and there’s not much I can do about that. But how do I find all the plugins that are installed and chase down new installations where possible? I know about plugin manager in Cubase but it’s not the most convenient interface.
I guess I’m looking for both technical suggestions and best practices from other folks who have done similar migrations. I will eventually move all my projects from my mini’s disk to my studio’s disk and will try to open them one by one. I expect a lot of incompatibilities, but I’m trying to reduce that as much as possible.
I was forced into a sudden upgrade back in the summer of 2023, when my MacPro trash can from 2013 wouldn’t turn on one day. At that time I got a maxed out Mac Studio M2 Ultra, but I shared the same concern as you regarding plugins in silicon.
At that time in 2023, I was pleasantly surprised with the success rate in finding silicon versions of all my plugins. And I should say I have a lot of plugins collected over the years between Waves and UAD and numerous plugin suites/bundles (my current VST3 folder counts 1,140!). Turns out, already by then around 90% were available in Silicon – and all of my major/frequently used ones except UAD which were still being ported to VST3, but they successfully finished that by early 2024. A handful of smaller devs followed. Now I can say it’s fewer than 10 plugins I used to use which have not been ported, primarily because the developer has closed up shop or discontinued the plugin for good. A slight bummer, but considering it’s been less than 10 out of 1000, I’d say that’s a pretty great success rate. There were a few cool ones in that small list but nothing I can’t survive without and have since forgotten and moved on from. I also think I had even more than this from before – I elected not to waste time installing old plugins I never used or didn’t like, even if they were available for Silicon.
Long way of saying - by now here in 2025, I think you won’t have many issues finding what you need (unless you happen to use a lot of discontinued plugins from dead developers).
Fortunately I did have my drive backed up so I was able to restore preferences from that, but I also decided to start fresh manually rather than migrate. I think you can view a plugin list. For me it was a tedious process of manually going to all the dev websites and downloading from scratch, but it wasn’t so bad – I think I finished after a couple days.
Not sure exactly what you’re asking…plugin manager on the old machine will show exactly what you have installed. If you don’t have access to the old machine there is obviously no way of knowing what you had installed.
If it’s just the plugin manager interface you don’t like export a report and import to a spreadsheet.
KVR Studio Manager looks pretty interesting. I’m downloading plugin-by-plugin and it’s taking FOREVER, but it does seem to be working, except for dead plugins, of which I have a few.
The other thing I need to transfer over is my presets and settings.