How to transfer Presets from Crashed Computer?

[Thomas Happ]

I'm trying to get instrument presets back from a machine that crashed onto a new machine.  Since it's gone, I can't go to the plugin manager and export presets, but I still have the hard drive, and I can see they exist in Drive:Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Shared Presets\{C13C56A3-72CE-416F-9FB2-811AD0C38FC1}.  Unfortunately they are not in .spp format for whatever reason so they can't be imported.

Copying this directory over to the new machine doesn't make them appear in Cakewalk.

NEW presets do appear, however, and I found that I can manually add in my old presets by editing the registry entry Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Cakewalk Music Software\ActiveMovie\Presets\{C13C56A3-72CE-416F-9FB2-811AD0C38FC1}).  The entries are just file paths back to the Shared Presets folder.  But I have a ton of them.

Is there a way to get Cakewalk to read the Shared Presets folder without having to make registry entries for each preset?  Or a way to convert the presets in this folder to .spp format so I can import them in the plugin manager?

 

Edit:  The instrument I was looking at was Z3TA+2, which apparently is the only one to store a path in the registry back to the file.  So I guess no matter what I need to copy the registry files from the old computer?

Edited June 16, 2023 by Thomas Happ

[scook]

Depends on the preset manager used.

The preset manager integrated into the plug-in defaults to

C:\Cakewalk Content\Z3TA+ 2\Programs

 

[Thomas Happ]

On 6/16/2023 at 6:27 PM, scook said:

Depends on the preset manager used.

The preset manager integrated into the plug-in defaults to

C:\Cakewalk Content\Z3TA+ 2\Programs

 

Unfortunately I never use the presets built into the plugins because I don't want to learn all the different locations and files and such, so I just use the Cakewalk/Sonar presets.

For anyone with the same issue, this is how I solved it:

1. Copy C:\Users\<old username>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Shared Presets  of the old hard drive to  C:\Users\<new username>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Shared Presets of the new hard drive
2. Download Eric Zimmerman's RegistryExplorer from here:  https://ericzimmerman.github.io/#!index.md (probably any registry tool other than regedit will work)
3. Copy the C:\Users\<username>\NTUSER.DAT from the old hard drive to a temp file and open it up in the Registry Explorer.
4. Navigate to [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Cakewalk Music Software\ActiveMovie\Presets] and export the whole directory as a ".reg" file.
5. Open the .reg file in a text editor (it's a text file) and change any paths in there to match the new computer (my username changed so that was all I had to modify)
6. Double click on the .reg file and run it

At least for Z3ta+2, this was all I needed to do.

Of course, I feel I must say, it would overall be MUCH EASIER if instead of using the registry the presets were just in a file or folder of files that one could drag/drop without having to export/import, and I hope BandLab will take that route with Cakewalk Next or Sonar Next (or whatever else is coming).

 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2023 by Thomas Happ
Forgot to add a step