How to make "forbidden" plugins work with an M1 Mac

Hey everybody!

Hope everybody had a great week...how did it go? Let me hear of ya'll!
I had quite a sick one, literally, as some flu-type thing kicked me for 3 days, and, being a freelancer with tons of work, I barely took some time off to heal (I juggle a ton of work for my biz on my own), so now, at the end of the week, I'm OK, but drained.

I'm working on new content – btw, new video stuff SOON 🎥 [e.g., been getting lots of Qs about Renoise, there's some cool Ableton stuff to show etc etc] as well as a list of come cool plugins up next…and man let me tell you the list of content to come is LONG! – and in a way relating to that, I was struggling to make some plugins work with my M1 MacBook Pro, which has been a struggle since I got it.
Every now and then I've been getting

I've found some info on how to make the plugins work, but it didn't work, until I found out how it's actually supposed to be done.

I found this text string:
xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine
…and all advice said to enter that into Terminal, drop a plugin (.vst or .component) into it and hit enter, and that should do it.

Well, didn't work for me.
I was downloading lots of plugs, did that, and they never worked…
…until I realised that the fault is if you drop a plugin into Terminal after it's been downloaded and it's still in Downloads folder.
So it HAS to be in the relevant plugins folder when you do that – whatever the reason for that is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, TLDR, to make a plugin that you DAW on an M1 Mac nags about work with your DAW:
• download a plugin
• place it into a relevant plugin folder
• paste this into Terminal: xattr -rd com.apple.quarantine
• drop the plugin after that text string
• hit Enter
…that should be it!
AFAIK, if the plugin has already been deemed forbidden or whatever by your DAW, I believe you have to download it again and replace it and do the above procedure again.

This won't be magic to everyone, I guess, but it took me a lot of frustration and "why tf isn't it working?!" with many plugins, even new ones, until I figured it out.
At one point I had already given up on some good plugs, until I thought I'll give it one more try in hopes of still being use some good ones (more about those good ones soon).

Anyways, hope everyone's weekend is going soon…what's everyone cooking?
Let me know...and enjoy your weekend.

New content soon!