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Will renaming the .component file for 3rd-party plug-ins cause any issues?


Jonathan Levine

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Given that you only see the component file names when you are looking at the files in the folder, why would this matter?

Any program you actually *use* the plugins in will display the plugin name, not the file name.

In any case, it should only take 30 seconds to rename one and try, but I don't see the need to do this, personally, and while you might be fine some of the time, or with some plugins, it might cause unpredictable effects, so I'd advise against it without a really good reason...

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The only reason I want to do this is because I use an app called MacUpdater that keeps track of available app updates from apps/plug-ins that have been downloaded outside of the App Store, and when looking through the list of apps and plug-ins that may have available updates, a lot of the component files have really weird names that make it hard to identify what plug-in I’m actually looking at so I can go and update it. For example, some of iZotope’s plug-in component file names are things like “iZHookAUDeReverbRX” and I’d rather rename that to something I can easily identify when looking through my list of plug-ins and apps in MacUpdater. Didn’t really feel like explaining all that but I figured people would ask why I would want to do this and so they did. 

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That name is pretty descriptive - it's the AU plugin hook for iZotope's RX DeReverb plugin. I'm not sure what's weird about it, but if it's bothering you, try renaming it and see if it continues to work.

From reading around, codesigning generally enforces the app file name to be the same as the executable name unless you override this with a setting per each app, which seems a world of pain, as well as causing problems when you update as you can easily end up with multiple different versions of the same plugin with different names but the same plugin IDs... I wouldn't do this, personally.

Edited by des99
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25 minutes ago, JonathanLevine said:

The only reason I want to do this is because I use an app called MacUpdater that keeps track of available app updates from apps/plug-ins that have been downloaded outside of the App Store, and when looking through the list of apps and plug-ins that may have available updates, a lot of the component files have really weird names that make it hard to identify what plug-in I’m actually looking at so I can go and update it. For example, some of iZotope’s plug-in component file names are things like “iZHookAUDeReverbRX” and I’d rather rename that to something I can easily identify when looking through my list of plug-ins and apps in MacUpdater. Didn’t really feel like explaining all that but I figured people would ask why I would want to do this and so they did. 

i use macupdater, and it works with everything... it recognizes the file, because it's named correctly by the developer. renaming any app will not help you with macupdater, and may 'break' it's connection to that app.

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On 5/10/2022 at 4:31 PM, fisherking said:

.... it recognizes the file, because it's named correctly by the developer. renaming any app will not help you with macupdater, and may 'break' it's connection to that app.

I agree.  If you rename installed files then subsequent installers for upgrades etc. may see the installation as corrupted and stop or fail.   Even if what you rename on the system continues to work, an upgrade may install a new copy of the file you renamed. Then you will have 2 uniquely named copies of a file trying to do the same thing.  By renaming the file, you may prevent an upgrade from deleting or overwriting it and then your old renamed version could be incompatible with new libraries or something else the upgrade updated.   If the upgrade does not work, then you will probably have to do a re-install everything from scratch.

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