I’ve been trawling through the forum reading peoples experiences with vst and audiounit plugin’s inside their standalones
Peter Castine and Dan Negrin have indicated that they have had some success with this.

I have been cludging my way through the process – looking for a more elegant solution

A couple of questions:

Is there a way to include (free) 3rd party vst and audiounit plugins INSIDE the standalone, when you are building it?
OR do these plug ins have to be manually installed by the person installing the standalone on their computer?

Strangeness with file pref/search path:
I succesfully built a standalone that could locate required vst/AU plugins – one one MacMini, but not another

Both machines had the 3rd party plugings copied to the same folders inside Library/Audio/Plug-Ins:

“mda DX10″ – inside Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST

and

“MNSpectralDroneMaker” inside Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components

The standalone worked perfectly on the MiniMac that I built it on, but the other MiniMac couldn’t locate “MNSpectralDroneMaker” (but it did find “mda DX10″.

I double checked the file prefs in the patch that I built it from and it did include both folders.

I got around the problem by just copying the “MNSpectralDroneMaker” AudioUnit plugin to the VST folder – then when I launched the standalone – it was all there. Weird

This was all done with fresh installs of Max6.0.4 on MacMini mid 2011.