Hi, long time Audacity user, and thanks to everyone who’ve worked on it. I have kind of a trivial question; but I’m was wondering why the Audacity ‘Effect’ menu has different (or lengthier) names for vst effects, or where it gets the name info from… for example if I have ‘Chorus CH-2.dll’ plugin, it shows up as ‘Ag-works: Chorus CH-2…’ in the drop-down menu.
Really, I ask because some of the effect names are pretty unwieldy and when you have a bunch it starts to be kind of a pain to navigate. So, I’m wondering, for the sake of mere convenience, if there’s any way to tinker with a file’s properties that would allow me to change the name that shows up when scrolling through effects?
The whole Effect Menu system is a sore spot and has been for a while. Audacity does not have the ability to assign effects to hot keys and it doesn’t have the ability to ad-lib create groups of effects (that I know of). Either or both of those are necessary before a tree or hierarchy of effects is produced. One version of Audacity long ago helpfully grouped effects in a neat, orderly tree configuration and it was a nightmare because of the need to apply the same effect multiple times (no real-time effect adjustment, either). It instantly tripled the amount of time it took to use some of the tools and multiplied the click errors.
If you’re a fumble-fingered doofus on the best of days, this change made some of the tools unusable.
So as awkward as it is, it’s far better than a unmoderated tree or grouping structure. Wouldn’t you like the ability to create your own custom group?
I think that the names of VST effects are compiled into the effect, so just changing “properties” of the file would make no difference. You would probably need to either, obtain the source code for the VST plug-in, modify it and rebuild the .dll from your modified code, or, modify Audacity so that it can substitute shorter names (custom names) for effects. The first option is a non-starter for VST plug-ins if they are not open source because you probably can’t get the source code. The second option is part of a non-trivial task of managing effects better in Audacity (which I hope that someone with the skills to do it will have a go at, but it’s a big an complex job).
Find the Audacity folder for application data - the folder will be called “Audacity” . Note the green box a bit farther down that page that explains how to show hidden files and folders.
In that “Audacity” folder, open plugins.cfg in a text editor.
Each plug-in has a number of lines in the .cfg file. If you remove the line starting with “Vendor=” for any plug-in (or remove the text after the “=”), then that plug-in’s entry in the Effect menu will begin with “VST:” instead of the vendor name. I agree starting with the vendor name is an annoyance for many people.
You can edit the text after “Name=” to choose the text that appears after “VST:” in the plug-in entry. If you put a number before the name you can force the display order to follow that numerical order.
