Plugin Universe

An open database of DAW plugins. Under Construction - Read Me First

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Documentation

Everything this site publishes, in the order worth reading it. Each entry says what the page answers, so you can tell in one line whether it is the one you need.

If you are new, read how it works first. It explains where the data comes from, which is the question every other page answers differently.

Understanding the catalogue

  • How it works — where a fact about a plugin comes from, what happens to it, how search works, and what this catalogue will not claim to do.
  • Plugin formats — the eight plugin formats here: what each is, which hosts load it, and an introduction to Jig, the web plugin format you fetch rather than install.
  • Measurements — what the profiler measures, what each verdict means, and why a reading is about one binary on one machine.
  • Plugin profiles — what a plugin profile is, and why it is worth an author filling one in.

Reading the catalogue

  • Search — the front page, and the whole catalogue.
  • All plugins — everything, a page at a time, filterable by format, category, role, vendor, platform, price and licence.
  • Services — every way to read the data: web pages, a JSON API, RDF, a package registry view, an agent endpoint. Start here if you want the data rather than the site.
  • The SPARQL endpoint — a read-only public endpoint for asking a question the pages do not answer.
  • The MCP endpoint — the same catalogue as tools an AI agent can call.
  • Datasets — the whole catalogue as files, rebuilt nightly, split by licence so you always know what you are taking.
  • Vocabularies — the RDF terms every published description uses, as documents that resolve.

About this project

  • Glossary — the words this site uses, defined. Start here when a word in another page stops you.
  • About — what Plugin Universe is, who it is for, and the licence of the data.
  • Read me first — how far along this is, and what is still being built. Read this before judging what is missing.
  • Contributor terms — what you agree to when you contribute: CC0 for facts, CC BY-SA for prose.
  • Promoted listings — what a paid placement buys, exactly how much it changes ranking, and what it cannot do.
  • About the crawler — what the harvester does, how it behaves, and how to make it stop.
  • Contact — how to reach the person behind this.

Elsewhere

  • Resources — other people's forums, news, frameworks, specifications and DSP references, for producers and for plugin authors.
  • JigDAW — the specification and browser host for Jig, the web plugin format. Includes a gallery of every Jig, and a plugin gallery of this catalogue's formats drawn as the panels a host draws them.