Star ratings

A library of two thousand plugins has perhaps thirty you really use. Ratings are how you mark them, in the list itself, without building a favourites board first.

Setting a rating

The Rating column carries five dots on every row.

• Click a dot to rate that plugin from 1 to 5.
• Click the dot that is already the rating to clear it back to none.
• Drag across the dots to set a rating as you sweep, which is quicker when you are rating a run of plugins.

The rating is saved the moment you let go, and the status line says Rating saved. There is no dialog and nothing to confirm.

The dots take a colour from the plugin’s category — EQs blue, dynamics orange, reverbs purple, instruments pink, and so on — so a rated list reads as two things at once.

If you cannot see the column

Rating is one of the three optional columns. Turn it on by right-clicking the plugin list’s header, or in View → Columns, or in Settings → Browser → Columns — all three read one list, so switching it on in any of them switches it on everywhere. See sorting the list.

Sorting by rating

Click the Rating column header, or pick Rating in the Sort setting, and the library sorts best first — five-star plugins at the top. Click again to reverse it. Plugins with the same rating stay in name order underneath, so the list never shuffles randomly within a band.

Sorting by Rating is offered only while the Rating column is shown; hiding the column takes it out of the sort options, and the list sorts by name again.

There is no rating filter. Ratings order your library, they do not narrow it — to narrow it, use the category and type filters or the search box.

Ratings stay put

A rating is filed against the plugin itself, so it survives a rescan, an unlist, and an update — installing over an existing version never removes favorites, banks, thumbnails, notes, ratings or categories. Ratings are stored with the rest of your plugin metadata in your Virtue/ data folder (see file locations) and are inside what a backup copies.