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PluginDoctor is a plugin tester. Not itself a plugin, it’s a standalone application that loads/tests plugins. It’s mostly for nerds – but don’t we all have a little nerd in us?
Vst Plugin Doctor Youtube
by Dave Townsend, May 2018
What is PluginDoctor? Longtime audio plugin enthusiasts will immediately understand what it is and does as soon as I say “it’s like a next-gen version of Christian Budde’s VST Analyzer”. However, for most folks that analogy won’t ring any bells, so what follows is a longer, geekier explanation. Non-geeks: please be patient, as this is for you, too.
Software engineers and programmers spend a lot of time verifying that their creations actually do what they were programmed to do. In fact, there’s a whole science dedicated to software testing. Most of it is predicated on the notion that any algorithm, given a specific set of inputs, will consistently produce the same output. If I type in “100 + 100” into my calculator, it should always produce 200 as the sum. If it does this 1,000 times in a row, then I can be fairly confident it’ll do the same thing the 1,001st time, too. Repeatability is the foundation of software testing.
But suppose that rather than typing in “100”, I instead threw random numbers at the calculator. How would I know if the algorithm was working properly? Well, this is very much a real-life challenge for software testers: how to validate processes when the input data is unpredictable.
Few things are more unpredictable than digital audio data. In fact, if any two sequential digital audio samples repeat, it’s usually because something has gone awry. It normally never happens. Now imagine that the audio processor we’ve written not only has to manage highly variable data, but also has to self-adapt its algorithm based on watching that input over time. This is vastly more complex than, say, an accounting program.
Consider, for example, a compressor. It’s essentially a calculator, insofar as its sole job is to perform a multiplication against the current input value. But the multiplier isn’t fixed. Rather, the multiplier changes moment-to-moment based on how the input values have changed over the past few seconds or fractions of seconds. It’s a software tester’s nightmare.
Developers often create tools to make their software testing easier, but most keep those tools to themselves. They’re usually not polished enough to be made public, plus they are a proprietary competitive advantage. Christian Budde was the first to make his plugin tester available to anyone, releasing VST Plugin Analyzer as a freebie. Thankful though we were for his generosity, Christian never took it further because a) it already did what he needed it to do, and b) he could not realistically provide end-user support for a product that made no money. Consequently, although useful there was never a 64-bit version, no official user manual, and no Mac version. Even some 32-bit plugins were incompatible with it.
PluginDoctor from DDMF was therefore a most welcome offering for us VST Plugin Analyzer fans wishing for a fully-supported, multi-platform 64-bit plugin tester. Although PluginDoctor doesn’t yet do quite everything Plugin Analyzer did, it covers the most important tests, and it does a couple things that Plugin Analyzer never got around to, such as supporting Waves products.
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At this point, you may still be wondering what it actually does. We’ll get to that next, and it’s pretty straightforward. But even if you already kind of know what it does, you’re likely still wondering if PluginDoctor will be of any use to you. That’s a tougher question, but I’ll do my best. Or at least, share a few things that I’ve learned thanks to PluginDoctor.
What it Is
PluginDoctor is a VST host that can load pretty much any VST2 or VST3 plugin, one at a time, and perform tests on it. On a Mac, it can also load AU plugins. Tests consist of supplying a signal to the plugin’s input and then analyzing the output so you can see what the plugin is doing to that signal.
We can, for example, see if an equalizer’s output matches the curve we specified in the EQ’s UI. Or detect frequency nonlinearities in a processor that we’d assumed was flat, and in some cases expose fraudulent claims about what a plugin does. It can even perform the particularly challenging test of peeking inside a compressor to see exactly how it responds under different conditions and settings.
When you first start up PluginDoctor, you’ll get a pretty sparse greeting, with one simple instruction: “Please load a plugin”.
Load a plugin via the File -> Load Plugin menu (there’s no drag ‘n drop support yet). The plugin’s UI will appear in a separate window.
Without doing anything else, you’re already performing a basic test on the loaded plugin: a linear analysis based on a full-spectrum input. In the screenshot below, we’re looking at a popular freebie distortion plugin called Boogex from Voxengo. Don’t worry if the graphics mean nothing to you; we’ll go deeper into what you’re looking at later.
This graphic is showing the frequency spectrum of the output Boogex is producing. If you had any doubt, this clearly shows that Boogex is definitely not a linear processor! And that’s a good thing, because nonlinearity is actually its reason for existence.
But do these pretty graphs provide any actionable information? Actually, yes. If we fiddle with Boogex’s controls, we can see exactly what affect they have on the output. Turn up the “Drive” knob and watch the amplitude and number of harmonics increase. Turn on the cabinet simulator and see how it affects the frequency distribution. Now drop in a different distortion plugin and compare it to Boogex.
Sure, it’s all purely visual information, and we are talking about audio after all. But if you’ve previously used the tested plugins, you’ll already have an idea of what different settings sound like. With practice, you’ll be able to correlate these images to sounds, and eventually have a pretty good idea about what a specific plugin is going to do to your guitar solo just by examining PluginDoctor’s graphics. You’ll start to look at these pictures and realize why a particularly good-sounding amp sim sounds so good, or why a crappy-sounding distortion plugin sounds thin and nasty.
The Tests
At the time of this writing, there are five tests that PluginDoctor can perform: linear analysis, harmonic analysis, oscilloscope, dynamics and performance. In the previous picture, we were looking at the results of the Linear Analysis test. It should already look somewhat familiar, as it is similar to the frequency-response graphs you’ve seen many times before on equalizers and spectrum analyzers (such as the indispensable SPAN from Voxengo).
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Speaking of SPAN and other spectrum analyzers, you’ll want to be careful when comparing any two analyzer graphs because they may look different solely due to scaling differences. Analyzers may also apply “smoothing” (averaging and/or reducing granularity), or sacrifice accuracy for efficiency. Consequently, displays from different analyzers will often look quite different despite showing exactly the same information. Most can be customized, however, so that their graphs look the same. Just don’t fall into the trap of doubting one analyzer’s accuracy because it doesn’t match another one.
Linear Analysis
This test shows how the plugin under test affects frequency response, by applying a pulsed white noise test signal and measuring the output with a spectrum analyzer.
There are three quality settings which you can use to increase the FFT buffer size for more accuracy but at the cost of higher CPU usage. Most of the time, the default normal setting will do just fine.
There are two scenarios where you’d want to use this test: verifying that plugins you expect to be linear really are, and checking plugins you know are non-linear to make sure they do what you expect them to do. Sometimes, the results are disappointing. Other times, they reassure you that your investment in high-end plugins was justified.
For example, have a look at the first image at the very top of this article. It shows a parametric equalizer (FabFilter Pro-Q2) under test, with the output spectrum displayed in PluginDoctor on the right. Note that the measured curve mirrors that which was set up in the EQ, although it’s not quite an exact visual match. This illustrates the significance of graphical scaling – the images are actually displaying the same data, but they appear different because the scaling is different. Under closer inspection, we can see that PluginDoctor is in fact confirming that the Pro-Q filters are delivering exactly what they were configured to do. (No big surprise, of course. We already know that FabFilter doesn’t make junk!)
Sometimes, plugins are revealed to be much less linear than you expect. Here’s a graph of a “tube distortion” plugin (Redopter from D16 Group). We don’t expect the output to be linear for a distortion plugin, but this one’s surprising because even though all of its filter bands are set to unity gain, the output spectrum is surprisingly narrow.
It would seem that there are steep low- and high-pass filters built into this plugin that are invisible to the user and for which the user has no control. Not that this is a bad thing. It’s just part of what gives Redopter its distinctive sound. But we might not have known about those filters without the test.
The linear analysis test goes a bit beyond your average spectrum analyzer, as you have a choice of two input signals (“delta” and “random”) and two methods for analyzing the output (“magnitude” and “phase”).
“Delta” mode (the default) uses a special test signal called a Dirac Pulse, an interesting “tone” consisting of a single full-scale sample followed by silence. The math is a little dense, but the bottom line is that it contains all frequencies at constant amplitude and all of them perfectly in phase with one another. That makes it possible to measure even small amounts of frequency or phase distortion.
Phase Mode
In Phase mode, the linear analysis test lets us see any phase shifts that occur within the plugin.
Best free vst mac 2015. This can sometimes be important. For example, so-called “linear phase” EQs aren’t supposed to have any phase shifts, even at extreme settings. Here is a comparison of the “natural phase” and “linear phase” modes for a single equalizer (FabFilter Pro-Q2). Their filter settings are identical.
Well, that’s reassuring. Minimum phase mode causes phase shifts, while linear phase mode doesn’t. Just like it promises on the tin. Now, want to see something kind of scary? Check out the wild left and right phase differences in another plugin.
Woah! The left and right channels are horribly out of phase, nearly mirror images of one another. Relax, this isn’t an EQ. It’s one of a class of plugins generically known as “stereo enhancers”. This image illustrates why you’re so often cautioned against using them: although they might indeed enhance stereo, they absolutely murder mono compatibility!
Harmonic Analysis
For this test, PluginDoctor applies a sine wave test tone and displays the frequency distribution. A sine wave is normally used for such tests because it has no harmonics. A pure sine wave should therefore show only a single spike in the display, representing its frequency. Any other frequencies appearing in the display are the result of nonlinearities in the plugin.
So what’s up with all the “grass” along the bottom? Those are not distortion products, they represent noise. Before you question whether FabFilter really is the “good stuff”, note the amplitude of the noise: it’s all below -175 dB. Again, scaling. -175 dB is way below the noise floor for 24-bit audio, and completely inaudible. Ignore such information. It is “noise” in every sense of the word.
Now let’s look at a plugin that’s supposed to generate harmonic distortion. Here’s Voxengo Boogex again, with moderately intense settings.
The first spike is the fundamental frequency of the sine wave test tone, at 50 Hz. The next significant spike is its second harmonic, at 100 Hz, the third is the third harmonic at 150 Hz, and so on. There are also some inharmonic components way down below -175 dB, which again are irrelevant.
We know from this graph that Boogex produces both even and odd harmonics. It does indeed sound different from, say, a triode emulator that produces only odd harmonics.
Now that we have an idea of what we’re looking at, here’s a comparison of four different distortion models (but just one distortion plugin: FabFilter Saturn, all at the same moderate 33% drive).
Each algorithm differs in which harmonics are present, their relative amplitudes, and how quickly they drop off at the high end. If you’re a Saturn user, these settings are (left-to-right) “Screaming Amp”, “Warm Tape”, “Clean Tube”, and “Destroy”. You don’t have to have a lot of experience looking at such graphs to know that the one on the right is one nasty-sounding mangled waveform.
That’s one way the harmonic analysis test can be used, to simply satisfy your curiosity about what a plugin is doing under various settings. But sometimes it can yield unexpected information, such as plugins that you didn’t expect to introduce harmonic distortion but do.
The following is the TL-64 Tube Leveler from Cakewalk, a proprietary compressor licensed from Studio Devil. I’ve set the “Drive” and “Clipping” controls to their minimum settings (0 db and 0.00, respectively).
As you can see, this plugin injects significant odd-order harmonic distortion as soon as you insert it onto a track, regardless of settings. You can increase the amount of distortion, but you cannot decrease it from this resting state.
Though a surprise, this probably accounts for reports that the TL-64 always adds “a little something” that many users like.
And who doesn’t like a little odd-order harmonic distortion? My problem is that I want to know exactly what “little something” a plugin’s adding, before choosing it for a mix. Even though I happen to like the TL-64, it’s nice to be able to break through the marketing and see what’s really happening.
Here are two pictures from a popular harmonic exciter plugin, one showing its “Exciter Drive” knob at 0% and the other at 100%. Can you guess which is which?
Counter-intuitively, the one on the right is 100%, the one on the left is 0% (trust me, I did not make a mistake!).
One would expect that if the “exciter drive” is turned “off” there would be no harmonic distortion. But PluginDoctor reveals that a) you can never turn off the harmonic distortion in this plugin, and b) that the number and amplitude of harmonics actually goes down as you turn the exciter “up”. I can’t imagine that a recording engineer would not want to know this.
So what does PluginDoctor’s harmonic analysis show you that you couldn’t get from any good spectrum analyzer such as SPAN? At least one thing: the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) figure in the little box in the upper-right corner.
THD
Total harmonic distortion (THD) is a well-defined measurement. Follow the Wikipedia link to learn more, but in a nutshell it’s the ratio of all the harmonics to the fundamental frequency. The second number, THD+N is the same thing but with noise included in the calculation. Unless the plugin is unusually noisy (e.g. a tape sim that injects noise), the THD and THD+N values will be very close to one another.
Interpreting THD requires some context. PluginDoctor is very sensitive, and can detect distortion and noise that are way below the threshold of audibility.
Let’s say we’re testing a plugin that we don’t expect to produce any distortion, such as a clean high-end equalizer. Of course, “zero distortion, zero noise” is an unrealistic expectation, but we can reasonably assume that the measured THD will be extremely low in high-quality plugins. FabFilter Pro-Q2, for example, shows a THD value of -168 dB. That’s effectively no distortion, because it is inaudible. Worry only if the THD is above -60 dB or so. Unless, of course, the plugin is intended to create distortion.
PluginDoctor has been criticized for deviating from the standard practice of performing THD calculations not on the more common 1 KHz signal but instead opting for a 50 Hz test tone. This is a valid, though nit-picky, criticism. There is no official test frequency for measuring THD, which will indeed measure higher with lower-frequency test tones, simply because the number of significant (audible) harmonics is greater. But as long as we’re using the same test signal for all plugins, comparisons between them will be valid. In any case, the test frequency is user-configurable so you can set it to 1 KHz if it makes you happy.
IMD
PluginDoctor also measures intermodulation distortion (IMD). As with harmonic distortion, IMD adds new frequencies into the mix. However, IMD is much more significant than harmonic distortion, because the latter generates frequencies that are related to the musical material and therefore blend well, resulting in a thicker but pleasant sound. IMD, on the other hand, generates inharmonic frequencies that stand out like a sore thumb, even at very low levels.
Many say plugins that generate harmonic distortion, notably amp sims, ideally shouldn’t create a whole lot of IMD because it can be so unpleasant. Others disagree, arguing that because physical speakers contribute IMD, it should therefore be part of any software modelling. Both views are valid, depending on the context. However, even if you like a little IMD for authenticity, it is to sound what bitters are to beer: a little goes a long way.
PluginDoctor provides a single number, a percentage, to represent IMD. 0% means there is no IMD, 100% means the IMD is equal in amplitude to the main signal itself.
In my experiments, this value ranged from a low of zero to a high of 4,409 (!). The 4,409% value was from a well-known distortion plugin. I won’t name it because I really dislike it and don’t want to encourage anyone to buy it. It’s got that annoying “digital fizz” that so many complain about with distortion plugins and amplifier simulators. And no wonder – those inharmonic components are 32 dB stronger than the signal going in!
Detecting Aliasing
Nonlinear processors such as limiters and amp sims generate harmonic distortion. Harmonic distortion generates harmonic frequencies that are multiples of the fundamental frequency.
For example, the fifth harmonic of 10 KHz is 50 KHz, or five times the fundamental. Send a 10 KHz signal through a distortion plugin and you’ll get 50 KHz or more at the output. But wait a minute, I’m working at a 44.1 KHz sample rate, which I know has an upper limit of about 22.05 KHz. It is not physically capable of handling 50 KHz!
What happens when you inject a higher frequency than the sample rate can deal with? Aliasing is what happens. When the signal is higher than half the sample rate, those too-high frequencies are misinterpreted by the D/A converter. The result is bogus frequencies that are usually not harmonically related to the fundamental, and therefore sound bad. Sometimes, really bad. Aliasing = Bad.
Well-designed plugins prevent or mitigate aliased frequencies via oversampling and/or low-pass filtering. Poorly-designed plugins don’t adequately address aliasing and can sound ugly because of that (and you often can’t put your finger on why it sounds bad). PluginDoctor can reveal poorly-designed plugins. It can also show you whether oversampling is working or is even warranted.
Let’s see what aliasing looks like. Here’s some extreme harmonic distortion. The test signal is 1 KHz. We see large spikes representing each harmonic of the 1 KHz test tone, as expected. But we also see spikes that are clearly not any multiple of 1 KHz. That’s not harmonic distortion, but rather an unwanted byproduct of harmonic distortion: aliasing.
Yikes, what a mess! This is what happens when a plugin creates harmonic distortion beyond the legal range of frequencies for the project sample rate. Fortunately, in this particular case that nastiness is mostly inaudible, being 75 decibels below the test tone’s amplitude. Still, I’d get rid of it if I could.
The plugin under test happens to offer an oversampling option, which doubles the sample rate within the plugin. That, in turn, doubles the maximum frequency that can be handled within the plugin. An internal low-pass filter can then get rid of the too-high harmonics and thus reduce the number of aliased frequencies.
I say “reduce” rather than “eliminate” because some aliasing will still occur, because there are still going to be harmonics beyond what even the faster sample rate can process. But as the harmonic analysis shows, 2x oversampling reduces both the amplitude and density of aliased frequencies.
Oscilloscope
This mode simply draws the output waveform. Unless you’re accustomed to looking at oscilloscope displays, you might assume there isn’t much to be gleaned from this. But there can be.
The aforementioned TL-64 Tube Leveler has a waveform display of its own. With the Drive knob cranked to the max, it shows what you see to the right.
Which would lead you to believe the output waveform is being squared off. However, PluginDoctor reveals that the internal processing is a bit more sophisticated than the image to the right. This tells me that the TL-64 is not a simple clipper as its own graphic suggests, but instead is reducing peaks gradually (soft clip), resulting in a less-harsh tone with less possibility of aliasing.
Dynamics
So far we’ve been looking at static test tones. Music and speech, of course, are not static. They are dynamic, meaning “changing”. That’s why dynamics processors such as compressors, gates, expanders and limiters are so ubiquitous in mixing.
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Because this class of processor modifies its behavior over time, reacting to changing input levels, we need a changing test signal to see what they’re doing under the hood.
Many of a dynamics processor’s characteristics can be illustrated using a type of graph that plots input level on the Y axis versus output level on the X axis. Here’s an example.
The dashed line is represents a linear response. The little dot shows the current input level during testing. This particular compressor is an LA-2A clone, and exhibits the classic LA-2A soft-knee response.
An LA-2A is an “opto” compressor (look it up if you don’t know what that means, but it’s only tangentially relevant here). Many compressors that aren’t specifically LA-2A emulations still offer an “opto” mode, but may not sound quite like an LA-2A. PluginDoctor can show us why.
Here’s an example, the “Opto” mode of FabFilter Pro-C.
While it does have the expected gentle knee of the LA-2A, the actual response is clearly different. One might assume that Pro-C’s “Opto” mode is the same as using an LA-2A clone, but it surely isn’t.
The Dynamics test mode offers two types of inputs, called “Ramp” (the default) and “Attack/Release”.
Ramp mode is the technique most often used to test compressors because it can accurately test thresholds. It sends a sine wave that linearly increases from -100 dB to 0 dB and then abruptly drops back to -100 dB. The image above was made using this method. It works great when we’re mostly interested in the processor’s reaction to level changes. What it doesn’t tell us is the rate of change, the attack and release envelope shapes. These are the characteristics that most often define a compressor’s “sound”.
In Attack/Release mode, the plugin under test is sent a sequence of three sine waves at different levels. The first pulse is intended to be below the compressor’s threshold (-20 dB, for 1 second), the second is above it (0 dB, for 2 seconds), and the third is below the threshold. These are default settings; all three levels and durations are user-configurable.
This test tone sequence lets us see how the compressor reacts to crossing the threshold and then how it releases after the input falls below the threshold. Here’s a comparison of slow attack and release times versus fast attack and release times.
For grins, I tested Audio Damage’s Rough Rider, known for its extremely fast attack and release times, and cranked it up to its fastest settings and a high compression ratio. This is what happened.
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Yikes! Now that’s what you call extreme compression.
More reasonable A/R times yielded an interesting observation: Rough Rider’s threshold changes with its Attack settings. Specifically, slower attacks have a lower threshold.
I don’t know if this behavior is part of its FET-compressor emulation strategy, but it may explain why I always struggle to dial in this particular compressor.
Rough Rider is a free download and can be very useful under the right conditions. I recommend adding it to your toolkit, but it’s a powerful weapon so use with caution.
Performance
The Performance display graphs the time spent processing data versus the sample buffer size. Uh, say again?
OK, put another way, this test attempts to give an idea of a plugin’s efficiency. The absolute numbers on this graph may not tell you much in isolation. The idea is to compare one plugin to another plugin that does the same thing, and see which one performs better. It’s similar to the CPU meter that your DAW probably provides, but for a single plugin rather than the entire DAW project.
Take a look at these two Performance graphs, for two different linear-phase equalizers.
OK, so what can we see here? Just looks like squiggly lines at first glance. But if you take a look at the scaling (the numbers on the left, a little hard to see in these images), you’ll see that the right-hand EQ can process many more samples per second than the one on the left. You’d therefore be able to insert the right-hand one into more tracks before stressing your CPU. In fact, the left-hand EQ can take up to 30,000 times longer to process samples in a given buffer cycle!
We can also see that the relationship between buffer size and efficiency is less variable for the left-hand EQ, meaning its performance will be more consistent regardless of buffer size. But in both plugins, there are clearly certain buffer sizes that they especially like and don’t like. Generally speaking, the peakier the graph, the more sensitive a plugin is to buffer settings. But the most important piece of information is that number in the upper-left corner, the time taken to process a 16 kB buffer’s worth of data.
Don’t be surprised if you get different readings for the same plugin from day to day. Keep in mind that, as with your DAW, performance is affected by everything else that’s going on in your computer.
Note that, unlike all the other test modes, the Performance display is self-scaling and cannot be zoomed.
Case Study: a “Harmonic Maximizer” Analyzed
You’d likely assume that a plugin called a “harmonic maximizer” would be a processor that produces harmonic distortion, perhaps with some dynamics processing thrown in. But this particular product, which I will not name, seems to have pulled that description out of … er … the blue.
Analysis shows that it does nothing at all with harmonics and that it is in fact nothing more than a pair of filters that put an extreme “disco smile” on your EQ.
If it was actually a harmonic exciter, we’d expect the harmonic analysis to display some harmonics. But aside from some low-level noise, all we see is the fundamental of the test tone. Linearity is further confirmed by the oscilloscope display showing an undistorted sine wave.
The dynamics test confirmed that the plugin does nothing in that regard, either. So far, no pixie dust found.
Ddfm
So what does it do then, if it’s not a harmonic exciter? Linear analysis reveals the truth.
Yes, that’s a +10 dB boost at 80 Hz and a 6.5 dB boost above 2,000 Hz. The plugin lets you adjust those two frequencies and the amount of boost.
This image was taken with all controls at 12:00. So moderate settings.
Another thing it does is mess with the phase. A lot.
Can you say “mono incompatibility”?
Would I recommend this plugin to a friend? Maybe. But only after making clear that it does not do what its name implies, and that he could save $249 by just going nuts with his favorite equalizer.
The same company makes several other plugins that are similarly misleading. For example, it also offers a bass booster whose name is suspiciously similar to Waves’ (legit) MaxxBass algorithm. PluginDoctor’s frequency analyzer shows what it really is: a plain old bell filter that your DAW’s stock EQ can easily emulate.
Playing detective with PluginDoctor can be fun. You’re going to want to test all your plugin demos with it before buying. If it saves you from just one bad purchase, it’ll have paid for itself – probably many times over.
Limitations
PluginDoctor can load most VST2, VST3 and AU plugins (AU on Macs only). It cannot host AAX or DX. Not surprisingly, it cannot load proprietary plugins that are locked to a specific DAW.
PluginDoctor is missing a few tests and features that VST Analyzer had. There is reportedly no support for GUI-less plugins (I did not test this). Although you can conveniently save full-screen screenshots as .PNG files, there is no facility for loading previous graphs for comparison. Scaling graphs is awkward and you can only zoom in, not out. Labels are sometimes hard to read because they are often light gray text on a dark gray background, and in a very small font. Colors are not customizable.
I suspect that refinements and additional functionality will come along over time. After all, it’s still a new product, having been released just this past February. After its initial release, problems arose with certain plugins but the developer has been knocking those down with each subsequent fix release (at the time of this writing, less than four months after its introduction, it’s already at version 1.0.5). If you’re familiar with DDMF’s previous products, you’re already aware that it’s an outfit that doesn’t settle for good-enough.
Who Needs It, and Where to Get It
Of course, if you are a plugin developer yourself, whether hobbyist or professional, you’ll definitely want this in your kit.
Beyond that, I’ll admit that this product is mostly for nerds. But don’t we all have a little nerd in us?
Maybe you’re one of the many “if it sounds good, it is good” types who don’t really care about what’s going on under the hood. If you are one of those, just consider it an inexpensive educational toy. But one that can also help you become a smarter consumer, and potentially a better mixer.
Vst Plugin Doctor App
PluginDoctor is shipped with both 32- and 64-bit versions. 32-bit plugins can be loaded into the 64-bit version, but test results are sometimes skewed due to the bridging, so if you have 32-bit plugins to test you’ll want to install both versions.
Vst Plugin Discord
PluginDoctor is available via download from DDMFdirectly. It’s just $19 USD (€16 EUR), and existing DDMF customers can get a 50%-off discount code. Authorization is via a simple license file, so no online authentication nor dongle is required.