Music & Audio

VST Folder Path Fix Tool

Here's a tool that I hope will help fixing the VST 2.x install path chaos. To set / repair both 32 and 64 bit VST paths like the above, you may use this new Windows tool:

The Story Behind

The dreaded VST path issue is such a complete and horrible mess! VST is meant to be cross-platform, and yet most of the conventions on finding the right path are Windows-specific (registry, "common files" folder etc.) And to add to the mess, the conventions are different between VST2 and VST3.

The best approach should have been a cross platform solution such as using an environment variable, e.g. VST_PATH as they sometimes do on Linux. This would also work in both Windows and Mac. But most typically this is missing, and most installers ignore it, and default to checking (or even destroying) the registry key (for VST2). And if these methods fail, they fall back to various horrible approaches to guessing a typical install path are used by installers. Typical guess are "C:\Program Files\Steinberg\VstPlugins" or similar.

Screenshot of Windows fix tool

Mac OSX

On Mac VST plugins are installed here:

For the current user: ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST directory
For everyone: /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST directory

Website by Joachim Michaelis