Moving the VST folder

[diminished]

... to another drive. Win 10. "Officially", without completely fucking up the authorizations and the registry.. is it possible?

[WongoTheSane]

I've never tried, but I definitely wouldn't take any chances, and uninstall/reinstall everything. I keep a folder of all my installers handy, just in case. I had to reinstall recently, about 100 VSTs (mostly free ones) takes only about 2 hours, except Komplete which takes two to three days (~500 GB download...).

[boingy]

I have a large number of VSTs (around 400), both paid and free. A while back I moved most my VST2s into a subfolder of my main VST2 folder. (* the reason I did this is at the end of this post in case you care!)

I had very few problems with plugins complaining or problems with authorisation. The few that did complain just needed reinstalling and did not "use up" an authorisation so I consider it a success. I did take the precaution of making a copy of the whole VST folder before I started messing.

So go for it (but don't blame me if you crash and burn!)


* The reason I moved stuff into a sub-folder is because I have some plugins as VST2, some as VST3 and some as both. I also use various DAWs which have different quirks in their treatment of VSTs. If a particular DAW supports VST3 I do not want it to scan the VST2 version. So my main VST2 folder contains only VST2s that also come as VST3. The subfolder contains all the other VST2s. VST3s have to be in their standard location. And the reason it has to be in a subfolder is because poxy Ableton Live only lets you have one custom VST location. Really? What were they thinking??? If none of this makes sense - don't worry. It works for me! (I've skipped the bit where I have a shortcut to yet another folder containing jBridged 32-bit VSTs...)

[zumBeispiel]

... to another drive. Win 10. "Officially", without completely fucking up the authorizations and the registry.. is it possible?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

[Carly(Poohbear)]

... to another drive. Win 10. "Officially", without completely fucking up the authorizations and the registry.. is it possible?

I use Mklink for this...

Use for RE's, Games and other software (I have some software that if you install it anywhere but the default has issues with addons, but with Mklink I can move it and it's happy)...

I have a small SSD C drive..

e.g.
mklink /J "C:\Users\Carly\AppData\Roaming\Propellerhead Software\RackExtensions" "D:\Mklink\RackExtensions"
mklink /J "W:\SoundsOther\Refill\Refill" "D:\Refill"
mklink /J "C:\VstPlugins" "D:\VstPlugins.Sounds"
mklink /J "D:\Native" "D:\VstPlugins.Sounds\Native"
mklink /J "C:\ProgramData\Arturia" "D:\Mklink\ProgramData\Arturia"
mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink" "D:\Mklink\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink"
mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Corel" "D:\Mklink\Program Files (x86)\Corel"
mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games" "D:\Mklink\Program Files (x86)\Epic Games"
mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Syntorial" "D:\Mklink\Program Files (x86)\Syntorial"

So what happens if you don't know about Mklink (symbolic link), from Explorer you still see the original location, you still can install to it, you can add,delete and edit from it etc. however you can also do that from the source (new location). It's a bit like a shortcut however it is at a lot lower level in the OS so programs believe it's really there.

I tend to put stuff I move into a sub-directory called MKlink as then I know that has been linked as you can't tell just by looking at it in explorer.


The PoohBear...

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