suges.
sugesIt seems a worrying growing number of high-quality plug-ins have their own built-in patch selectors and don’t announce the names of their patches to the host, some examples I checked out:
– Spectrasonics: Trilogy
– USB: Ultra Focus
(…based on these two and the the other Spectrasonics plugins Malcolm mentioned, it seems that any plugins using the UVI Engine (widely considered to be the best-sounding engine) don’t announce their settings)
– Arturia: Arp 2600, CS-80V, Minimoog, Moog Modular
(…so none of the Arturia ones either)
– Way Out Ware: TimewARP
– Native Instruments: Kontakt 2, Elektrik Piano, Battery 2
– Synthogy: Ivory
(…this one announces 32 programs for some reason (even though it has more), but none of them have names
– FXpansion: BFD
(…same kind of thing here, it announces only 2 programs, both unnamed, even though it has many more)
– Hollow Sun: Nostalgia
(…publishes no names, and is one of the many instruments that use the Intakt Player engine, so I’d bet the rest are the same)
– Wizoo: Latigo, Darbuka
I’m sure there’s many more. Only a few of the plug-ins I tested actually DO announce their program names, so that seems to be a part of the VST spec that’s widely ignored. It makes sense for some of them too, drum machines and effects processors are typically plug-ins that you whip up your own settings on the fly for one project and one project only, then never use that particular patch setting again. So maybe that invisible preset thing is more serious than any of us thought.
malcolmj@Zynewave wrote:
I do intend to support ‘invisible’ presets. If you do not assign a preset object to the track, the plugin settings could be stored as a hidden property of the track. That way you can ignore library presets if you don’t want to reuse presets between tracks.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘invisible’ presets, but it would be fine by me if the plugin settings were stored as a hidden property of the track, as long as they were remembered as part of the Project. I don’t need to see the name of the patch to know that it sounds right.
The way I like to work I load up Stylus RMX, find a patch that I like, copy the midi file/s to the host, then start working. I’ll rarely need to view the Stylus browser again during that Project, but it’s vital that I can be confident that the host recalls the correct patch next time I load it up.
When do you expect to have this feature enabled?
Cheers,
Malcolm.
BTW, I LOVE the way editing works in Podium. Awesome stuff! 🙂
ZynewaveIt seems a worrying growing number of high-quality plug-ins have their own built-in patch selectors and don’t announce the names of their patches to the host
And it’s mostly instruments using huge sample-sets. One reason could be that the instrument doesn’t know the number of programs and their names before they are loaded from disk. The VST spec requires that the plugin announces the exact number of programs it supports during initialization.
When do you expect to have this feature enabled?
Hopefully within a couple of months.
suges@Zynewave wrote:
And it’s mostly instruments using huge sample-sets. One reason could be that the instrument doesn’t know the number of programs and their names before they are loaded from disk.
That’s probably the exact reason…since some NI instruments DO announce (like B4 II, only has a few presets) and some don’t (like Kontakt). More and more VSTi’s these days are huge libraries I guess so they’re harder to pirate (since they’re so big they would take too long to download) and it’s the only way they can compete with hardware synths (i.e. Roland Fantom piano is awesome…right up until you hear Ivory, with 10-velocity layers and no looping samples).
@Zynewave wrote:
When do you expect to have this feature enabled?
Hopefully within a couple of months.
Soon as you get that done I’ll start uploading device definitions for all the plugins we have at the studio and a few more hardware devices. It’ll look good on the list.