Plugin manager/selector issues

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

Plugins marked “New” in Plugin Manager are not showing up in Plugin Selector until I manually select them > “Scan selected” one-by-one. See below:

Ardour - New plugins not showing in selector

Obviously this gets tedious when migrating or installing/updating plugin collections. Is there any workaround to scan all “New” plugins at once? “Scan Faulty” does not work, I’m guessing that only scans plugins marked “Error” (or “Stale”?). The manual says “New” plugin means it “has just been discovered and successfully loaded” —then why don’t “new” plugins show up in selector?

In general, I find the Plugin “Status” and “Scan Actions” quite confusing and annoying… My humble requests/clarifications below:

  1. [Clarification] Which scan actions should be run when? The names don’t give much intuition. If user adds a new plugin or updates an existing one, should they run “Discover New/Updated” or “Update Index Only”? Or both — if so, in which order? And how does “Discover New/Updated” differ from “Re-scan All”, since manual mentions that former also performs “a full scan”? When would a user want to “Re-scan All”?
  2. [Clarification] As mentioned above, “Scan Faulty” seems ambiguous: does it strictly refer to plugins that have status “Error”, or also “Stale”/“New” plugins that aren’t available in plugin selector?
  3. [Request] Could “Re-scan Selected” allow selecting multiple plugins at once, instead of forcing 1-by-1 selection and scanning.
  4. [Request] Could columns in Plugin Manager and Plugin Selector be reorganizable via dragging? Currently about half manager’s display shows metadata only (Status, Ign, Fav, Hide, Type, File/ID, then finally “Name”) and Creator/Tags aren’t visible by default. Would be helpful to either have horizontal scrolling hotkey (Shift+Scroll) enabled for the manager/selector windows or atleast allow column reorganizing.
#2

The former only scans newly installed or recently updated, now stale, plugins.
The latter does a complete rescan of all VST2/3 plugins.

#3

It seems that “Discover New/Updated” does a complete rescan.
Also everytime I update/install the latest nightly build not all previously discovered plugins are listed.
I always have to rescan…

#4

Any ideas about this?

I just migrated to new OS and really don’t want to spend 2 hours manually just hitting “Scan selected” for hundred of plugins… That would really suck. There must be a way to scan/add all “New” plugins automatically in Ardour??

:frowning:

#5

As you migrated to new OS it might be you’ll have some libraries trouble if you don’t re-scan, thus it’s up to you spend some time launching Ardour+scan then do whatever you like while it works for you or in near future lose many hours trying to cope of find whatever mystery it is the mix/recording crashed or barfed. To each its own :wink:

#6

Did you read the post? None of the scan/re-scan options are actually adding the plugins marked “new” except manually selecting + “scan selected”, one-by-one. That’s the issue.

If the scan actually worked I don’t care if it takes an hour. I just don’t want to manually add hundreds of plugins one-by-one.

#7

I always have to restart Ardour before new plugins get usable after a scan. Maybe it’s the same here?