Soundwide ( NI + Izotope + PA)

[marcL]

9 hours ago, Doug Rintoul said:

It is a lot less complicated than downloading individual installers and running them one by one. There is no way I would want to do that with the number of PA plugins I install and use. Really, the PA Installation Manager addresses almost all your concerns, except the last. And Installation Manager's update process makes the last concern pretty painless.

YMMV !

Although I own a lot of PA plugins I prefer to download each individual installer. Most of the time I don't have to run more than one at a time as there are not so many updates. Also, like this it is less difficult to organize a backup of the installers by versions.

There are times I don't want to install the newest version of a certain plugin (e.g. it is slower) and there are some plugins that I like as VST3 and some that I like as VST2 (e.g. because of the PA preset problem in CbB).

But talking about the PA individual installers: I like them, because they meet almost all of my requirements:aversion

• They don't clutter my drives with unnecessary stuff like most others do (Windows installation entries and uninstallers, homepage links, menu entries, avid stuff, ...)
• With PA's autorisation file for all of your PA plugins it is easy to install on an offline DAW. Just run the individual installers on that machine and do offline authorization for one plugin and voila, all your plugins are authorized.
• Still there is some manual work to do, because you cannot specify a subfolder for the VST3 location and the location of the manual.

[telecode 101]

16 hours ago, Walter Cruz said:

Honestly... from all companies involved, PA/BX is the only that feels 'alive' to me (I use only software, so I really don't know nothing about NI Hardware, by example).

NI hasn't done anything enticing in the last.... 8-10 years? Besides Massive X, now they mostly do Kontakt Libraries, right? Kinda meh.

And iZotope is not that different... All the latest updates of Ozone and RX seems to add very little upon previous versions...

I was kinda skeptic about the NI-iZotope partnership, but adding PA to the mix makes it interesting again.

And the way I see the companies is kinda reflected on the freebies.

I use their MK3 and Jam controllers. Solid hardware. I haven't got a keyboard controller from them but I hear they are good.

[abacab]

9 hours ago, Marc Cormier said:

In S1 I have to go to the "Load Preset" option in the plugin window; once you select it, it opens up the PA preset folder.  Select all and click Load or whatever the prompt is and it tells me "X# of presets were uploaded."  Not at my DAW machine at the moment - sorry for the lack of detail; not sure what DAW you're using.

Thanks! That worked in S1. Except only the "import preset" option took me to the correct folder path. The "load preset" took me back to the songs folder for some reason. No biggie.

So I ended up selecting all presets using the "import preset" and all presets were imported from "C:\Users\[username}\Documents\VST3 Presets\Plugin Alliance\Black Box Analog Design HG-2".

I figured out that the presets for this plugin are only available via the host DAW, as there is no internal preset management. But in Ableton and Reaper no importing was required, as they were already available from the host plugin window.

Been a while since I used a plugin without on-board preset management, LOL. Not a regular bx user, but this is a good un! 

[telecode 101]

16 hours ago, paulo said:

Not sure what all this joining of forces means for the future, mostly concerning me is whose idea of support for the combined businesses wins out (Please don't let NI be in charge of that...!!) but Ethereal Earth is a very nice freebie though, so I'll take that and hope that there won't be a price to pay down the line.

8 hours ago, Anxiousmofo said:

Blackbox and Oberhausen are rocking my socks as freebies. I had most of the rest. 
 

Nervous and suspicious about this flocking of birds, but they drop nice feathers. 

Yes, its a little worrying. It makes me question what really is the true value of these plugins on the market? i mean, the reality is, a lot of the perceived value is directed by the social media marketing depts of thee companies. One week the price is $99 the next week is $49 and on BF is $29 .. and the cycle goes on and on. For all you know, you are paying good money for what  essentially should be freeware. Imaging in Notepad++ was priced at $49? Would anyone buy it for that price and would that strategy fly for Notepad++? I doubt it ***** there is no glamour and glitz associated to that program compared to something that "can make you a music producer!".

It's great PA BX and giving this stuff away and i will take it. But it sheds some light on the true real value of these software products/plugins. I see lots of lurkers on other sites who occasionally mention that everything you need to make tracks can be done with the free stuff that was given away. The more I dabble in this, the more I am suspecting it is true.

 

 

13 hours ago, Craig N said:

As much as I might like PA's installation manager to automatically update plugins, I have a folder structure based on categories rather than companies so all the installers that want everything installed to a single folder don't work well for me - I have to move the plugins to their true homes which takes a bit of doing. That includes Arturia, NI, Melda, but XLN is the worst - they refuse to work if you move the plugins to a different folder. Ugh. 

Softube's allows you to override automatic installation to download installers and run them manually so that works well enough. But PA's just works. 

I always just let the installers do what they do natively. The only thing I do is tell them use a different drive than C:\. I find the more you mess around with it. the easier it breaks.  I really don't like the companies with installers that make it very hard to roll back versions of software if you need to. You paid for the software and its your own computer setup -- you should be able to easily and freely roll back if you need to.

 

 

[abacab]

9 hours ago, scook said:

All PA VST3 presets are in your "Documents\VST3 Presets\Plugin Alliance" or "%appdata%\VST3 Presets\Plugin Alliance" folders.

I believe they are all supposed to be in Documents, but I found a few in appdata so I moved the appdata folders into Documents and created a directory junction in appdata.

Thanks! I have located the folder, but now the Cakewalk plugin window only allows me to load the presets one at a time, directly from the folder. It doesn't seem to remember any presets that I have already loaded.  The preset pull-down in the plugin window just says "no preset". A current preset can be loaded from the folder, but then it's completely replaced by the next preset that I load, and so on.

By comparison, Studio One keeps track of the presets loaded from the host side, in fact you can import them all at once, so then no need to dig back into the folder every time that you want to load a preset. Am I missing something here in Cakewalk?

[abacab]

7 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Aargh, once I discovered the preset situation with PA, and the fact that they were in the canonical locations (and format), I posted a feature request asking if Cakewalk could get this feature. I didn't know that S1 already had it because all I have is Artist 4, which of course does not allow 3rd-party VST's, with certain exceptions.

I think nobody else knew WTH I was talking about, so my feature request sank like a stone. Now I sit and watch TV and bash PA presets into the Cakewalk system the hard way, one at a time. Go to Load Preset, copy preset name from file dialog, paste into Cakewalk's preset list, save, repeat 15-30 times.

This ^^^

How did you access/hack Cakewalk's preset list?

[antler]

1 hour ago, telecode 101 said:

Imaging in Notepad++ was priced at $49? Would anyone buy it for that price and would that strategy fly for Notepad++?

I don't see why not - Sublime Text goes for $99:

https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text

Apparently, people will also buy four wheels for their Mac Pro for £699.00 too; I'm guessing this is the case, or these wouldn't be on sale for this price: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-wheels-kit

[Nick Blanc]

6 minutes ago, antler said:

I don't see why not - Sublime Text goes for $99:

https://www.sublimehq.com/store/text

Apparently, people will also buy four wheels for their Mac Pro for £699.00 too; I'm guessing this is the case, or these wouldn't be on sale for this price: https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pro-wheels-kit

Oh come on, this HAS to be a joke. Some april fools thing.

[Starship Krupa]

56 minutes ago, abacab said:

How did you access/hack Cakewalk's preset list?

You know, the field up at the upper left that says No Preset until you double click on it and type a name for the preset you want to save and then click on the little floppy disc button to save it.

Like this:

Cakewalk actually stores these in <username>\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\Shared Presets. Each plugin seems to have its own folder labeled with a GUID-dy string.

Inside these folders are the user's presets. I'm still working on how to propagate them across my various computers. I'm sure the GUIDish folder names are unique to each plug-in, but I don't know yet if the folder names will be the same across multiple computers. In any case, once you figure out which plug-in goes with which folder, you can probably copy them across.

The challenge is to reverse-engineer the Cakewalk user preset files themselves, which have no extension, and see if it's possible to write a translator program. The best thing would be if Cakewalk is storing them in the VST3 spec's .vstpreset format. Then you could just drop them in and strip the .vstpreset extension off.

Or you could do what I do, throw The Mandalorian on one screen and bang VST presets into the dialog on the other.

Quote

Am I missing something here in Cakewalk?

Oh wait, wow. I just saw your reply to Steve. Did you not know that you can save your own presets in Cakewalk? If not, then I have now repaid you for the Shift-D key combo you bestowed on me. That was life-changing. I use it about every 5 minutes.

Edited April 13, 2022 by Starship Krupa

[antler]

14 minutes ago, Nick Blanc said:

Oh come on, this HAS to be a joke. Some april fools thing.

If you scroll down, you'll also find that customers have also bought:

[Starship Krupa]

Hmm. I just opened the same .vstpreset file and the corresponding Cakewalk user preset I put in in bx_rockrack.

In Notepad, no pluses. They look very similar for about the first 1700 characters.

Then the Cakewalk one seems to repeat the format. It looks pretty plain text-ish, not sure what delimiter they are using, kinda out of my depth there.

[abacab]

19 minutes ago, Starship Krupa said:

Oh wait, wow. I just saw your reply to Steve. Did you not know that you can save your own presets in Cakewalk? If not, then I have now repaid you for the Shift-D key combo you bestowed on me. That was life-changing. I use it about every 5 minutes.

You are welcome!

[Zo]

For those that alreay have those , you 'll get more authorisations , always sweet , i have 10 on some products !!

[paulo]

6 hours ago, telecode 101 said:

I see lots of lurkers on other sites who occasionally mention that everything you need to make tracks can be done with the free stuff that was given away. The more I dabble in this, the more I am suspecting it is true.

I guess it depends what you're into...if you need convincing guitar vst's the free ones that I've seen are all a bit crap or quite limited, but other than that I think it's more than possible to make something that would sound reasonable to the everyday listener. It's only us lunatics that spend hours/days/weeks/months obsessing over the minute details of the sound that nobody else will ever notice even assuming that they will shut up for long enough to actually listen to the whole track.

[Starship Krupa]

Now we need to get one of the Cakeverse's reverse engineered add-on wizards to do a translating program. @scook or @azslow3 or @sjoens or someone like that.

[jesse g]

 

On 4/12/2022 at 11:01 AM, paulo said:

Is there any way to install the PA stuff without installing their  "Installation Manager" ?

NOPE,  it must be used after you get it from the plugin Alliance website.

[Fwrend]

39 minutes ago, jesse g said:

NOPE,  it must be used after you get it from the plugin Alliance website.

Maybe I'm missing the intent, but I rarely use the "Installation Manager."  I have before but only when there is a mass update.  All I do is go to my products and download the plugin installer for the plug I need/want, unzip it and run the executable.  I usually open up Reaper (because it's the quickest DAW to open), instantiate the new plug, it requests activation, I click Online ('cause I'm still online at that point), it activates and works from there on out.

AFAIK, the manager is not required.

[sjoens]

2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

Now we need to get one of the Cakeverse's reverse engineered add-on wizards to do a translating program. @scook or @azslow3 or @sjoens or someone like that.

I'm still trying to reverse engineer the logic behind this:

 

[jesse g]

36 minutes ago, Fwrend said:

Maybe I'm missing the intent, but I rarely use the "Installation Manager."  I have before but only when there is a mass update.  All I do is go to my products and download the plugin installer for the plug I need/want, unzip it and run the executable.  I usually open up Reaper (because it's the quickest DAW to open), instantiate the new plug, it requests activation, I click Online ('cause I'm still online at that point), it activates and works from there on out.

AFAIK, the manager is not required.

Fwrend,  

I stand corrected.  I checked and you can download your plugins straight from the Account section of the PA website and install the plugins successfully onto your DAW.  ?

[sjoens]

12 hours ago, abacab said:

Thanks! I have located the folder, but now the Cakewalk plugin window only allows me to load the presets one at a time, directly from the folder. It doesn't seem to remember any presets that I have already loaded.  The preset pull-down in the plugin window just says "no preset". A current preset can be loaded from the folder, but then it's completely replaced by the next preset that I load, and so on.

By comparison, Studio One keeps track of the presets loaded from the host side, in fact you can import them all at once, so then no need to dig back into the folder every time that you want to load a preset. Am I missing something here in Cakewalk?

For some reason, when 1st launching, Cakewalk always loads their VSTi's with the default "No Preset" name standard equipment everyday of the week even if I have a saved preset already loaded. However, 'only the names have been changed' to confuse the user.

My name is Confused so I hardly notice. ?