Migrating Cakewalk & VST presets to new DAW

[Traveler]

Hello all,

Last night I finished building a new DAW for Cakewalk and installed Win 11 Pro. Over the next week I plan to migrate all my templates and VST presets over to the new DAW (some are native Cakewalk and the rest are 3rd party).

I know where all my Cakewalk templates are stored but is there a common folder for VST user presets? Or will this be a hunt & seek for all my user presets in Waves, Slate, SoundToys, Universal Audio, FabFilter, Arturia, etc?

Many thanks!!

Reggie

New DAW specs:

• Motherboard – ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero
• Processor – 3.2GHz (5.2 Turbo) sixteen-core 12th-generation Intel Core i9-12900K
• CPU Cooler – Noctua NH-D15
• RAM – DDR5 5600MHz, Kingston Fury Beast 64GB (2 x 32GB)
• M.2_1 – Samsung 980 PRO SSD 1TB PCIe NVMe Gen 4 M.2 SSD (2280)
• M.2_2 – Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen 3 M.2 SSD (2280)
• M.2_3 – Samsung 980 PRO SSD 2TB PCIe NVMe Gen 4 M.2 SSD (2280)
• SATA – Western Digital Black 2TB 7200 RPM 3.5” HDD
• Graphics Card – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
• Enclosure – be quiet! Silent Base 802
• Power Supply – Corsair RM1000x
• Software – Windows 11 Pro
• Peripheral Hardware – UA Apollo Duo with Thunderbolt 3 Option Card

[Scott MacBride]

Most of them are stored under various sub-folders in your Documents directory.  Usually under the name of the plug-in manufacturer.  So yes, probably a hunt & seek excercise...

[Traveler]

Thanks Scott, I'll start searching today.

Cheers,

Reggie

[Traveler]

I wanted to report back that I transferred all my presets to the new DAW. It was truly a hunt & seek process that took a few days.

First, I used Cakewalk's Plug-in Manager to export my user presets for each plug-in as a .spp file. This took a while because I had to remember each plug-in that I created user presets for. But all was not bliss because some of the .spp preset files wouldn't import into the new Cakewalk Plug-in Manager. So for those bad ones, I exported the presets directly from each plug-in as a .fxp preset file. The .fxp presets uploaded with no trouble.

Second, several of the plug-ins stored user presets in different location like: Documents, Program Files, ProgramData, Users locations... just everywhere. But I got them all!

Last, some of the plug-ins were discontinued and I had to be creative to transfer them to the new DAW. I searched for all their root directories in the old DAW and copied them to a thumb drive, then pasted them to the same directories in the new DAW. Cakewalk saw them and accepted them! Some of those plug-ins required me to re-register them and fortunately I keep all my registration data, so all was good (I even have my Cakewalk Pro Audio 6 CD from the 90's).

I hope this helps anyone who's migrating to a new computer.

And the new computer is amazing! Opened a project with 84 stereo tracks, 20+ auxs and tons of plug-ins and the CPU meter hovers between 5-10% and memory usage at 16GB (this project brought my old DAW to its knees). I followed Sweetwater's Windows 11 optimization guide and the performance is rock solid.

Cheers!