Hi devs,
As i am quite new to Ardour it might sound stupid to you, but the Plugin manager is not that great if you have a lot of plugins, as there is no way of arranging the plugins in to groups.
So why not create a tab design like in most all web-browsers that can (either manually or automatically) put instruments and effects apart in two separate folders?
It’s a small change really, but it would make browsing through plugins A LOT easier!
It isn’t a really small change. It might seem that way to you as a user, but in terms of programming. it is quite a lot of work because plugins do not (in general) come with their own categories. So “automatic” grouping is not possible. This is worse on OS X (where most plugins are in the AudioUnit format, and there is absolutely no categorization) than Linux (where most plugins use a plugin format that can support the plugin declaring the “category” it thinks it belongs on. Instead of the PluginManager, consider taking a look at the menu you see before you select the Plugin Manager - not what you want, but it is a small step in that direction.
Your suggestion was filed in mantis (tracker.ardour.org) a couple of years ago.
Its a pain in the beginning , but once you find the plugins that are usefull, you can just favourite them, there is also a hide button that will hide plugins you dont use at all in plugin manager.
If you want to sort on the fly. Type instrument and it should show any plugin that contains the word instrument, you can also change what field you can search.
Ill give you a quick list of plugins that i find to be the most usefull and what i use most
Calf EQ ( there are a few to choose from depending on how many bands of control you wnat)
Calf Compressor
Calf Reverb
Calf Delay
EQ10Q - i had issues with this plugin, but i believe it is now fixed in recent KX studio updates, in other distro it may not be and may need to be compiled from source.
Hybdrid Reverb - This is a very configurable reverb and very natural sounding, however it can be resource intensive. It would not run for me when running low latency (below 10ms)
FluidSynth - you will need soundfonts to load into this (sf2 files)
I agree there are a shit ton of plugins to go through, personaly i try and stick with LV2. I dont like the ladspa GUIs and there are so many of them that i just dont want to sift through them to find the ones that actually work as expected or sound good.
If you search for what your looking at, that should mostly narrow it down.