I’ve had instances where I’ve upgraded plug-ins and I get a “The following plugins could not be found or failed to open:” alert. It would be nice if, when this happens, you could select a new plug-in for each of the affected plug-ins.
That way, when Renoise fails to find, say, ‘VST: Arturia: Jupiter-8V2’, you can fix it right there in the alert so that it’s now using ‘Jupiter-8 V2’ (notice they added a space).
There are undoubtedly times when the new plug-in won’t be compatible, but at least for all my Arturia plug-ins, other than the slight name changes, the plug-ins absolutely are compatible (well, except for Analog Laboratory > Analog Lab, apparently).
In the meantime, the only way to fix this is to manually edit the Song.xml file to use the correct plug-in name, and while it does work, it’s kind of a pain.
Would indeed be great to have a tool that could help to remap missing VSTs with the option to preserve or clear settings. Maybe even something that could do it automatically (list of old and new plug-ins, defined by the user). I think any LUA-expert could pull this off easily.
Or lets say at least a possibility to load a vst manually while preserving the instrument slot’s preset data. Would be quite useful for cross platform problems, a bunch a vendors still do not care for exact identical plugin naming, for example melda production.