How Do I Remove Unwanted Plugins?

How do I remove an unwanted plugin from Audacity? I often try new plugins. When I find that I don’t want them, there’s no way to remove them from Audacity. This makes for a growing list of unwanted plugins cluttering up my plugin file. Further, I was trying a trial version of a plugin that turned out to not work with Audacity. Now every time I open Audacity, I have to wade through notifications that Audacity is trying to open a file that doesn’t work.

This is getting annoying. (I’m using Audacity 3.2.3.)

I’ve looked through Audacity’s user manual, and I’ve searched through this forum. Can’t find anything. So I’ll be grateful for any help.

You can disable plug-ins using the Plug-in Manager. This should stop Audacity from trying to load them.

If that doesn’t work you’ll need to find the locations of the plug-in files and delete them.

– Bill

Does this help?: Where are third-party Audio Units plug-ins installed on Mac?

I tried this. Found some of the unwanted plugins and removed them. But not all. It’s still a mystery to me where all these unwanted plugins reside. Damned if I can find them. And I don’t understand why it’s such a hassle to remove unwanted plugins. Why doesn’t Audacity’s plugin manager have the option to remove them?

By the way, Audacity 3.2.3 has proven buggy for me. So I trashed it and reinstalled version 3.0.5.0.

Audacity does not install plugins, you do. So it’s not Audacity’s job to uninstall them, it’s yours.


Consider if there are 4 user accounts on one computer, and each user uses Audacity. Audacity is installed globally (for all users), but each user account has its own Audacity settings. The settings include telling Audacity which plugins are enabled.

Now imagine that you install a plugin that is needed for your project. By default, Audacity will enable that plugin for all users.

Now let’s say that another user doesn’t want that plugin. Audacity allows each user to enable / disable whichever plugins they want, and that is recorded in their (per user) Audacity settings. So the other user can disable the plugin that you have installed without it affecting you.

Now imagine if the other user uninstalled the plugin - the plugin would no longer be installed, so it would no longer be available to you or any other user account. Fortunately Audacity does not do this.