Is there any way that Cubase can be told to use a newer version of a plugin rather than display a missing instrument?
I’ve been opening some old tracks and it’s frustrating when they ask for version 4 of a plugin and I have version 5 installed (which does everything version 4 does)
Is it possible to ask substitute new plugins?
any help appreciated
I never had this issue. Maybe the newer plug in was installed to a different folder?
Regardless, try this…
Choose “no vst” at the top of the list [or whatever it’s called) then choose the new plug in. Unfortunatly you may have to do this on every track.
Regards. 
Cheers, will give it a go
It doesn’t happen with general plugin updates, but does happen on thinks like Kontakt - if there is no v4 I’d like it to load into v5
Cubase seems to recognise plugins purely on the name of the dll so if the name is different (Kontakt 4.dll, Kontakt 5.dll) the plug is seen as a completely different plug and there is currently no way to assign it as such.
If you re-select the new plug inside of the project you lose all settings of the old one which is not what you want when trying to recover a track.
There is a somewhat inelegant hack that should work for most plugs (at least in Windows and vst2 plugs…you haven’t listed your o/s so I don’t know if this applies to you)
All you do is make a copy of the new plugin dll file in your vstplugins folder and rename it to the old version. With Kontakt bear in mind there are multiple dlls so either copy them all or work out which version exactly is in the projects.
No promises that this will work with every plugin or that some incompatibility between versions won’t crash it but for the most part it seems to work. I’ve never tried it with vst3 plugs…but if there is no vst3 version of the copied dll Cubase should use the vst2 anyhow.
Thanks for the reply and the idea.
Maybe this is a feature that Cubase should have - a replace plugin function that takes as much from the previous plugin settings as it can and applies them to the replacement plugin.
Would be great with old tracks
This is more of a plug-in manufacturer issue than it is a Cubase one.
If the software developers would just keep the names the same even when they go to the next version, we wouldn’t have this issue most of the time. A great example of that is Omnisphere. They didn’t change the name when they went to version 2 and songs with version 1 still open up perfect.
I wish other software developers went this route.