Manual: Plugin Manager

Plugin Manager window

The Plugin Manager dialog can be found from the View menu or a song′s General Tab and allows you to register new plugins with OpenMPT and load them into the current track. It lists all plugins in a folder list, where any folder can be opened and viewed by clicking on the + next to it. Effect plugins are shown with a speaker symbol next to them, while Instrument plugins show a keyboard symbol. If you want to remove the current plugin assignment, select "No plugin" from the list.

• Plugin Filter: Input a few letters to filter which plugins are shown. Only plugins whose name, vendor name or tags contain that character sequence are shown. Erase the contents of this field to show all plugins again. Several tags can be searched for at the same time by separating them with spaces.
• Plugin List: Shows all plugins that have been loaded into OpenMPT. DirectX plugins that have been registered properly in Windows show up automatically in this list. Other plugins have to be added manually by using the "New Plugin" or "Scan Folder" button.
• Put in FX Slot: Click on this button to load the selected plugin into the current plugin slot of the current module. When opening the Plugin Manager by a shortcut key or from the main menu, the slot number given will be the first available slot.
• Cancel: Closes the window without adding or removing any plugins to the current module.

The Tags field can be used to enter arbitrary space-separated tags to facilitate finding your favourite plugins.

For managing the list of known plugins, the following options are available:

• New Plugin: Opens a file picker so you can locate one or more plugins to load into OpenMPT’s list of known plugins. OpenMPT supports plugins that follow the Virtual Studio Technology 1.x and 2.x standard (commonly abbreviated VST).
• Scan Folder: Scans a complete folder (including sub folders) for new plugins.
• Remove: Removes the selected plugin from the list of known plugins.

Plugin Bridge

For plugins that do not run natively in OpenMPT (e.g. 32-bit plugins cannot run in a 64-bit instance of OpenMPT), a plugin bridge is provided. It is automatically used for plugins that require it, but can also be enabled manually. This is usually not necessary, but can be used with plugins that tend to crash OpenMPT. If they crash within the plugin bridge, they will only stop outputting sound, but OpenMPT itself will still work.

The Plugin Bridge may also be used to avoid an issue in Windows versions prior to Windows 10 version 1903, where in the worst case only up to 64 different plugins could be loaded at once; bridging some of the plugins bypasses this limitation.

It is recommended to only make use of this feature if required, though, as every bridged plugin adds latency, which can easily add up to an amount that makes low-latency audio processing impossible.

• Use Plugin Bridge: If checked, the plugin is loaded into the plugin bridge instead of the main OpenMPT process. For plugins that cannot be loaded natively, this option is always enabled.
• Share Bridge between all Instances: Some plugins (e.g. sidechain compressors such as SideKick) can only work if all of their instances are loaded into the same process. Enabling this option will load all instances of the selected plugin into the same bridge process. Otherwise, every instance is loaded into its own process. Sharing a bridge process can also speed up plugin loading, but if one plugin instance crashes, it may break all other instances of the same plugin, too.
• Increase Compatibility for broken Plugins: This option should only be enabled for plugins that are not compatible with Data Execeution Prevention (DEP), Large Address Awareness or 64-bit address space layout randomization (ASLR). The plugin bridge for these plugins will not use any of these security features.