Mark has released a new version of this very interesting software package that is designed to check that a user has the latest version of plug-ins in your plug-in folder. Many Pro Tools instability problems end up being traced back to incompatible plug-ins and to make in more difficult the list on the Digidesign web site is incomplete and not always accurate which has led Mark to produce his own database. You can more info and a history on this software package Plug Tools on the Sticky thread at the Digidesign User Conference here. This is Mark’s new post…

I have made a new version of Plug Tools available that can automatically detect out of date plug-ins!

There is a small catch though…. I chose to create a database of plug-ins that Plug Tools can reference rather than using the Digidesign compatibility page. Digi’s page is incomplete, as users have mentioned in this thread, and the names it uses for the plug-ins doesn’t necessarily correlate to the actual names of the plug-ins as they appear on your hard drive. For example, sometimes it lists plug-in bundles without actually naming the plug-ins that make up that bundle… this posed problems for me when trying to parse the page to get meaningful data from it.

Making my own database poses a problem of it’s own though – it needs to be maintained. What I would like to see eventually is for Plug Tools to be able to not only pull information from the database, but to be able to edit the database directly. Say, for example, if a user has a newer plug-in on their system than Plug Tools knows about, it would update the database with the new plug-in information. (It would be even cooler if plug-in developers would update the database themselves whenever they released a new version of one of their plug-ins…) But for now, though, I have to rely on myself and Plug Tools users to update the database manually.

At the moment, the database only has accurate information on the plug-ins I have on my own system. In order for Plug Tools to be useful, that database needs to be more complete, and the only way for that to happen at this point is for users to get involved.

I encourage everyone to checkout the new version of Plug Tools, and if they have a plug-in on their system that it doesn’t recognize, then to go ahead and add that plug-in to the database using the simple web form I have created. There is no authentication required, I’m using the honor system at this point, so there is nothing stopping anyone from deleting all the plug-ins if they wanted to. I didn’t want to bother with authenticating though as I see this as a temporary measure until I can get Plug Tools to read/write MySQL directly. Please be kind. This could turn out to be a disaster but I didn’t know of any other way to complete the database.

Download Plug Tools here.

View/edit the plug-in database here.
(Plug-ins that need to be updated do not have a “filename” listed. This is name of the plug-in as it appears on your drive and needs to include the “.dpm” file extension.)

What’s new in version 1.3:

• User can edit reference plugins. File stored locally.
• User can “update” reference plugins from the net, replacing local plugs with those from server.
• preference to “update” reference plugs on startup.
• If not internet enabled, will use local reference file instead of getting new.
• updated server backend to MySQL rather than a plain HTML table. Plugin page is now dynamically created.
• (for now) users can add/edit/delete plugins on server via web interface.
• Main window redesigned. Web page now shares a tab view with the reference plugins table.
• Plug Tools now downloads plug-in list from server.
• Plug Tools can mark out of date plug-ins automatically.
• No longer necessary to specify where Pro Tools is installed.
• No longer necessary to specify out of date plug in folder.
• Plug-In table is sortable.
• Plug-in table colum order, width is persistent.
• You can activate/deactivate plug-ins via a checkbox in the Plug-in Table (moves them to Unused folder)
• clickable links to download plug-ins appear in Plug-In Table