Where's the Vegas Category Sorting in the Audio Plugin Manager?

Rednroll wrote on 7/4/2025, 8:46 AM

I'm setting up a new PC with my typical A/V tools and 3rd party plugins. One of the more tedious tasks when doing this was always organizing my plugins in Vegas by creating Category sub-folders. After I installed my Waves plugins, I fired up Reaper and noticed "Wow! Reaper put my over 650+ Waves plugins into category sub-folders within its plugin manager view for me, what a HUGE time saver!". I then proceeded to Install Sound Forge Pro 18 and immediately noticed a similar category organization folder view in the Sound Forge Plugin Manager view. "Oh how nice! VST3 Audio Plugins must now support a category label field which can get populated by the plugin developers, so the host apps can automatically put them into category folders for me, that is similar to what Vegas Pro does for Video plugins."

Well, let's install the latest Vegas Pro 22 on the new PC and see what happens there. I mean the Magix team did say how they realized how the audio side of Vegas has been neglected and Gary was brought onto the team where they were going to start focusing more attention on the audio side development of Vegas and started by adding VST3x64 plugin support. So certainly, Vegas would be also supporting the Audio plugin Auto Category organization so it could better match the Video plugin views in the Vegas plugin manager? Obviously someone at Magix must be aware of the plugin category feature now supported by VST3 plugins since it was added to Sound Forge Pro right? Oh wait....where is this feature in the Vegas Pro 22 Plugin Manager view? Vegas really isn't focusing on ensuring to bring the Vegas audio features up to date?

Gary???

Comments

rraud wrote on 7/4/2025, 10:31 AM

 Hi Red,, good to see you are still around.
Vegas does not have a plug-in manager (aka, Organize) like in Sound Forge. When you the open the chainer to add Fx to a track bus or event, the plug-ins are semi-organized: All..Vegas Third Party, Automatable, Trk Optimized, 5:1 and Fx Chains" ,Beyond that, you have to organize them manually creating additional folders. Vegas has other more serious audio issues though that renders it unusable for more than basic mixing, See the recent topics in the (Vegas) Audio forum.,

Rednroll wrote on 7/4/2025, 4:12 PM

Thanks for the heads up @rraud. I guess it’s not the end of the world since on my past systems setups I had to setup the plugin categories on 4 apps. Vegas, Reaper, Forge and Acid. Now with this plugin auto category I’m down to 1 app (Vegas) and already have an Excel cheatsheet created. Just disappointing seeing an obvious omission missing from Vegas. I miss the days from when SF, Vegas and Acid all functioned consistently with their common features. At least Vegas ran the x64 VST3 Waves plugins unlike Acid Pro but AP has been abandoned and I no longer have a use for it.

Rednroll wrote on 7/4/2025, 6:02 PM

I take that back. After further exploration my Waves VST3 x64 plugins don't work in Vegas Pro 22 Build 250. However, they work fine in Sound Forge 18 and Reaper. Thought I was going to try and get away with just installing the VST3 x64 bit versions. It seems like too tall of an order to expect.

VEGASDerek wrote on 7/4/2025, 7:13 PM

It is unfortunate Acid, Sound Forge and Vegas broke off into their in development teams. When Magix purchased the product suite, it was stated that they really only wanted Vegas. We asked repeatedly if they had any thoughts of resurrecting the other products (including Movie Studio) and the answer was always no. The only other product they did like was DVD Architect because they had nothing else like it in their product lineup. Sound Forge and Acid and Movie Studio were seen as competition for their existing products.

Well, the time came for us to make the decision about continuing to support SF in the master Vegas code base because we were beginning to make some significant restructuring of the code. Since no new versions of SF were planned, and upper management gave their blessing to us deprecating the application in the code base, we ripped it out of the code.

I kid you not...2 months after we gutted the codebase of Sound Forge and rewrote large amounts of code in preparation for the release of VP 15, management came to us and asked what it would take to do a new release of Sound Forge. We told them it was not possible without dire consequences for the Vegas release. This was true for three main reasons. Number one, engineering resources. At the time we had 5 people working on Vegas. We could not take on another project...we were barely surviving developing Vegas, DVD Architect and Movie Studio. Second, no one on the Vegas engineering team that came over from Sony had any significant experience with SF or audio engineering in general. Finally, if they wanted any of the progress we made restructuring for the SF project, it would had to have been done by scratch again resulting in rewriting a lot of the stuff we had done since the acquisition making it impossible to release Vegas on time.

The company really wanted/needed revenue from SF. Quickly after the acquisition the company became a bit dependent on the bonus revenue. After some time they realized even the old, stale version was still selling well, even with no updates or engineering support.

So, the decision was made to take an old branch of the code base that was about 4 years old, cobble together a small team of engineers who worked on the other Magix audio products and they put together a new version of Sound Forge.

The new version contained none of the infrastructure changes that Vegas contained and it was developed completely independent from the Vegas team, causing the loss of some of that similarity and cross functionality the old product suite had.

The same happened with Acid a few years later...except they had to start from an even older code base.

In the end, it was some poor foresight that resulted in where we are at with these applications now and it is a real shame. If the willingness had been there to develop SF (and a lesser degree, Acid) when Magix had bought the applications, there were more people who could have come over from Sony to work on that code. As I said, Vegas was the main focus of the acquisition. A couple years later, it was really a revenue grab that resulted in the relaunch of the other products.

Rednroll wrote on 7/5/2025, 9:50 AM

Wow! Thank you for sharing that insight @VEGASDerek it contains a lot of what many of us have speculated over the years and it is truly welcome getting some insightful and clear communications.

In regards to Sound Forge, I really see 2 camps which have evolved over the years. The younger user camp have come to develop a workflow using their DAW for many of the tasks and tools which are built within Sound Forge. The older camp who are more like myself and view Forge as their more focused, precision audio file editor outside of their DAW workflow and on the PC side of things, there are only 2 options in that market space being Sound Forge and Wavelab. It sounds like Magix may have observed some market share sales from us old school workflow folks. I noticed the bundled offering of Forge with the newer releases of Vegas, so hopefully Magix and their userbase continue to see some additional benefits with those promotions.

Sound Forge is like an old good friend, it was the 1st audio app I used in my transition from MAC to PC when I was looking for replacement tools for my back then combo of ProTools + Sound Designer II. I couldn't afford the Hardware needed to support those MAC tools. Sound Forge did exceptionally well as a SD2 replacement. So I will therefore always view Forge as that non-DAW, Stereo editor and precise forensic analysis tool which evolved into supporting multi-channel surround format audio and as a complimentary and non-competitive tool to Magix's other DAW product offerings.