It is strongly recommended, when installing third-party plug-ins, that you thoroughly test the plug-in on non-critical project data before using it in production use on a live project. Many such plug-ins are known to fail or crash Audacity, see this Wiki page. |
The folders that you need may be 'hidden'. To access them in Finder use Go > Go To Folder > ~/Library ... or Go > Go To Folder > /Library ... The Go is in the menu bar at the top of the desktop when Finder is active. |
Please note that not all of the Audio Unit effects that Apple supplies can be enabled in Audacity. They will show listed as available in the New section of the Plug-in Manager but if you try to enable them you will get an error message telling you that they failed to register. This is an Apple issue and not an Audacity bug. This only affects a few of the Audio Unit plug-ins: AUScheduledSoundPlayer, AUMultiSplitter, AUMultiChannelMixer, AUMixer3D, AUMIxer, AUMatrixMixer, AUAudioFilePlayer and AUSpeechSynthesis. |
Some Nyquist plug-ins could crash while processing very long audio selections (typically an hour or more). This is due to the plug-in using a large amount of memory and is a known issue in Audacity's current Nyquist implementation. Try using the plug-in on shorter selections instead. |
The list of effects in the dialog will include any detected VST instrument (VSTi) plug-ins (such as synths) and any real-time VST effects that are capable of changing audio data while it's being written to disk. Neither of these are yet supported and they will not load even if you enable or re-enable them in the dialog. |
On Mac, Audacity is a 64-bit application so will not see 32-bit versions of VST plug-ins. |