Get rid of JS Plug-ins?

[Mayor of Simpleton]

So.. I went a little crazy with plug-ins & downloaded a lot of them. Things have gotten unwieldy plus Reaper takes forever to load, too.

I moved my entire plug-in folder to another drive. I then created an empty folder called "New Plug-in Folder" (genius, huh?). I deleted all my former plug-in paths in Reaper, & I set that new folder as the only path.

I then told Reaper to clear cache and rescan for plug-ins, thinking that Reaper would only find the empty folder & the Cockos plugs, & I could start adding A FEW plug-ins back in.

The "All Plug-ins" list now shows only the Cuckos Rea- plug-ins (good!) but also a whole bunch of "JS" plug-ins, JS:Avocado Ducking Glitch Generator, JS:Chebyshev 4-Pole Filter, & on & on. They will load into a track if I click on them.

Anybody know where they came from, why they are still there, and how to get rid of them?

TIA for your help!

[fakemaxwell]

This isn't a dig at you- thank you for posting this in "newbieland". I think this section should be renamed, as there are a ton of questions in General that belong here but I imagine it can seem a bit pejorative, especially to already experienced audio people who are changing DAWs. Call it the Kenny Gioia Corner!

THAT being said- JS plugins are part of Reaper's stock plugin list. They aren't slowing the load of Reaper in any way. In fact once scanned no plugins should be holding up Reaper loading, so my guess is that some of them were buggy or they were set to load on start.

[Fabian]

Originally Posted by Mayor of Simpleton

Reaper takes forever to load

This shouldn't happen. Did Reaper re-scan the plugin path on every restart? Then there's something off with the paths that you have set, like some plugin writing data into it.

Originally Posted by Mayor of Simpleton

The "All Plug-ins" list now shows only the Cuckos Rea- plug-ins (good!) but also a whole bunch of "JS" plug-ins, JS:Avocado Ducking Glitch Generator, JS:Chebyshev 4-Pole Filter, & on & on. They will load into a track if I click on them.

Anybody know where they came from, why they are still there, and how to get rid of them?

These come with Reaper's installation, so these are part of the "stock" install. They live in <Reaper's resource path>\Effects. You can get rid of them by deleting them from that folder, but why bother? They do not take up much space, and will probably get re-installed when you update Reaper.

[schwa]

JS plugins don't affect load time at all. Actually no plugins affect load time once they are scanned, but JS aren't even scanned that way, so there's just no impact at all.

Having said that, if you want to hide the JS category in the left hand pane of the add FX dialog, you can right click the pane and uncheck JS under "show in FX list."

If you want to wipe out all JS plugins completely (not recommended), you can open the Actions dialog and run the action "show REAPER resource path in explorer", and delete (or move) the Effects folder. But that will also remove the dozen or so Cockos branded JSFX like the media item channel mapper, general dynamics, loudness meter, super 8 looper, etc.

[ashcat_lt]

If you wanted to “reset to default”, you could make a portable install and replace the Effects folder in your resource path with the one from the portable.

[Mayor of Simpleton]

Originally Posted by fakemaxwell

JS plugins are part of Reaper's stock plugin list. They aren't slowing the load of Reaper in any way. In fact once scanned no plugins should be holding up Reaper loading, so my guess is that some of them were buggy or they were set to load on start.

Well! That would explain why they were still there! I knew that Rea- plugins were built-in, but not JS ones. No, I don't want to get rid of them if they are stock.

Thanks everyone for your fast replies.

[Mayor of Simpleton]

Originally Posted by Fabian

Did Reaper re-scan the plugin path on every restart? Then there's something off with the paths that you have set, like some plugin writing data into it.

Yes, a couple of plug-ins were buggy - took a long time to load or even crashed Reaper.

Reaper does rescan every time it loads. Don't I want it to rescan to check for new plugs?

[Fabian]

Originally Posted by Mayor of Simpleton

Reaper does rescan every time it loads. Don't I want it to rescan to check for new plugs?

No. As Schwa said "no plugins affect load time once they are scanned".

Reaper asks the OS if something has changed in the folder, and only if so it re-scans. Re-scanning on every start-up takes too long time (as you have discovered)

[karbomusic]

There's a new option to skip that check when reaper launches FYI.

It is true that it only asks the OS for the list of files in the VST directory, then compares that list to the list reaper already knows about. This tends to get slow if one has more than just the VST in the folders, such as all the VSTs and all the settings, manuals, and/or other files that come with a VST that don't need to go in that folder.

If there are enough files, Reaper is waiting on the OS to enumerate that huge list, and that is the delay. I've helped other users here and found that there were 10s of thousands of files... therefore...

When installing VSTs and it asks where you want that other data, don't choose the VST folder. There's a reason it's asking.

[bolgwrad]

It's more likely to be the case that one single plugin is causing the load lag, rather than the total number of plugins.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by bolgwrad

It's more likely to be the case that one single plugin is causing the load lag, rather than the total number of plugins.

It's not the total number of plugins, it's the extra files that go with the plugins. It's not always the case, but when it is, it is - plugin installers often ask the non-VST files (related to the plugin) should go, in order to keep them separate. We've seen this happening on more than one occasion:

https://forum.cockos.com/showpost.ph...4&postcount=74

You can check out the entire thread for more details.

[Roger Mallison]

Could you give an idea how to remove badly edited JS plugins from the list
I can't get Kenny's filtering procedure working so far.

Just to update this post, I created duplicate copies of the Tone Generator
and tried some editing, however I killed two of the copies and they stop oscillating
after I posted this question I went through the two not working and compared the code with the working copy
and found two errors that I created and now all are working OK ! my bad typing caused the issue.

Roger Mallison