Reply To: FRITS, WE NEED YOUR INPUT!

I’ve done it, too — forgot I’d used some plugin long ago, never had a chance to finish the project, etc.

Plugins all have a unique identifier (e.g., j7X1), except for a freakish few, a perfect example is the Arturia minimoog V original, that one they were giving away free in honor of Bob Moog the day their server also caught on fire from too many requests. (I grabbed mine at 4 a.m. because that is the best virtual software clone of the Minimoog ever made, and I saw that the demand was going to be overwhelming. You should have read the whining, threats and cussing over at KVR forums from the spoiled Entitlement Generation who weren’t able to get theirs immediately that day. Utterly disgraceful.)

Now, some makers give major updates a new ID and some don’t. DAWs read these IDs to know one VST from another. Also, Podium does not always load two or more of the same ID’ed dll without going in and using the renaming trick on any copies, although occasionally it will. I run both V1 and V2 of TyrellN6 — the V1 has no FX and uses some other preset banks, but both versions have the same ID. I added ‘V1’ to the older dll because it wouldn’t load alongside V2 otherwise.

Remember that Podium is one of those hosts that normally uses ‘relative’ plugin paths unless you tell it otherwise. And it can still find a plug if moved to one folder away usually, as long as the item is still inside the parent VSTPlugins folder. A very helpful feature for those of us who reshuffle or house clean once a year!

I basically like the whole construct, except for one big problem. If you have 20-30 ongoing projects as I do, If you update your PluginDatabase, maybe because a new and awesome VST or VSTi has just been released, you then have to click ‘Load PluginDatabase’ and click Save on every one of the unfinished projects, if you want the new plug available for use in those 20-30. This, mates, is totally nuts. I like the setup otherwise, as I said, but there really needs to be a global loading option, New instruments and numerous updates that Podium will not necassarily recognise are released every couple of days lately. After I had collected a good half-dozen new and needed to update my database, I then had to spend a maddening hour-plus updating each project from the updated database. It’s a complete pain and time waster.