How to hide unwanted plugins

29 May How to hide unwanted plugins

Posted at 04:46h in GP4, Knowledge Base Articles, Tips by

If you have a plugin that you never use (and who doesn’t!), then you can disable it in the Plugin Manager by selecting the plugin and clicking the “Enabled” switch to disable it such that it will no longer show up in any plugin menus.

Plugin Manager with AU, VST3 and VST plugins in Gig Performer 4, audio plugin host for live performance

If you have a large number of plugins and you have them in multiple formats (VST, VST3 or AU) you may want to reduce the number of available plugins to make it easier to find what you want. One way to do this is to use the Quick Insert dialog filter to restrict the view temporarily (e.g, see this example where we only want to see phaser plugins in Audio Unit format)

Quick plugin finder allows you to easily filter out and find the desired AU, VST3 or VST plugin in Gig Performer

However, if you only want to work with a particular format (by the way, this is not necessarily a good idea as unfortunately some plugins work better in some formats than others) you can restrict the view on a more permanent basis using the Plugin Manager. Take a look at the following view of the Plugin Manager showing a small number of the plugins available on one particular computer.

The Plugin Manager in Gig Performer 4 on Mac; it manages AudioUnit (AU), VST3 and VST plugins.

There are two things to notice here.

1) You can click on any column header to sort the plugins by that column. For example, clicking on Manufacturer will sort the list by the Manufacturer

AudioUnit plugins (AU plugins), VST and VST3 plugins arranged by the Manufacturers name in Gig Performer 4

2) There’s a column called “Enabled” that can be used to totally hide plugins (by disabling them).

So for example, if you prefer to only use VST3 plugins, do the following:

a) Sort the list by Format and select the ones you don’t want (select the first one, scroll down, hold the Shift key and select the last one)

AudioUnit plugins (AU plugins), VST and VST3 plugins arranged by the plugin format in Gig Performer 4

b) Right click on the selection and select “Disable” from the popup menu

Plugin Manager contextual menu allows you to enable/disable plugins, set loading type and more.

Now, all the plugins you selected will be disabled and will no longer show up in the popup menus nor in the Quick Insert Dialog

The screenshot shows that VST plugins are disabled, and hence not shown in the Quick Plugin Finder window

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Related topics:
– Important workflow tools and tips (User Manual)
– Tips and Tricks (Community)
– Learn many tips with the Shift key (Blog)

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