PresetMagician: Generate NKS Presets from VST plugins

Sounds good, look forward to it. Dumb question, are there any plans to be able to (bulk update) existing nksf files? For example if I want to update the mapping template of existing nksf presets there's no way to do this that I know of other than editing one by one. This would be a great feature

 

Not yet, but I'm always open for new features. If you wait until the next release you can then post feature requests directly from PresetMagician without the need to sign up to the bug tracker

 

Great! , prepare to be bombarded

 

I just bought a plugin called minibit from audio thing to try preset magician, but it does not work; in the list of plugins it is supported, and your program recognizes it, but the list of presets does not appear anywhere. I want to buy the magician preset, but first I have to be sure that it works correctly for me. I put here a couple of captures because nothing appears in the list of presets. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, I do not know ...

 

Now it works!!!

 

I also have a free audiothing plugin supported by your program, but it does not work for me in maschine or in Komplete kontrol, It does´n appear. I wanted to ask you if it is due to the limitation of exporting only 50 presets ...
And another thing I wanted to ask is if I can copy the .dll and the user content files to my laptop without having to do all the operations with the preset magician on the laptop ... just pass the files from my desktop to my laptop Thanks and best regards

 

What exactly doesn't appear? The presets? Or the plugin itself? Please also read the getting started guide.

No, why would it? You can only export 50 presets at once, but PresetMagician doesn't prevent you from adding another 50 presets to the export list and doing it again. Just check if the NKS files are in your user content directory.

Yes, that's possible. Why would you need to do the operations again?

 

In trial version you only can export 50 presets...but I´m going to buy the full version right now. Its a fair price and I´m very interested in the development of this program.I think there are ways to map entire kontakt thir party libraries with custom images,
but in the future if preset magician could do it would be great, since we would have an all-in-one program, both for vst and for third party libraries of kontakt. Thanks for the reply and you already have a new buyer, waiting for future updates

 

I think It's time for a development update

Bad news first: My health did play tricks on me again, rendering me incapable of doing any major work in the past week. But rest assured, I'm in regular consultation with doctors (or: changing doctors).

Now for the good news:
- I did manage to rework the PresetMagician site a bit to make it more clear what PresetMagician is about
- I finished work on the new bug reporting/feature request/crash report feature, with which I hope users will use frequently for feedback/bugs/crashes. I always have quite some trouble reproducing issues without logs, and that new feature allows you to submit data including relevant logs
- I already did some work on the new preset editor, which allows you to edit types, modes, preset banks etc. However, that work is currently stalled because I'm not satisfied with the general workflow. It is confusing when to do a quick analysis and when to do a full analysis.

My goal is to get rid of the term "analysis" at all. "Full Analysis" should become something like "Add/Update Presets from Plugin(s)" and "Quick Analysis" should be completely gone, because PresetMagician should load all previously added presets directly from the database at startup, so that it's always clear what the current state is. This requires quite some work behind the scenes. Because I believe that PresetMagician should be super fast, or at least as fast as possible, I started doing performance research on the underlying database framework PresetMagician uses. For those who are curious, here are the results.

Personally, my goal is to increase startup time of PresetMagician (which is around 20 seconds for my development version - no worries, released versions are always 2-3 times faster). Also, after PresetMagician displays the main screen, loading all required data from the database should take no longer than 10 seconds for 40.000 presets. The loading time of about 5 seconds for 3.500 Hive presets always gives me the creeps

Also, a bit of preset editing is already working - I implemented presets drag'n'drop into preset bank folders for quick sorting, which is actually already super fast, putting 3.000 presets into a new bank = instant).I also implemented renaming and re-ordering of preset banks. But - it's still a long way to complete that feature. Renaming presets, adding/removing tags and modes, etc.

I also did investigate preset parser support for a few new plugins, namely a plugin named Omnisphere I only had a rough look at the data structure, but my first impression is that it's not too complex. Spectrasonics did decline my request for a demo or a development license, and speaking of vendors, I haven't heard from AIR Music Technology since I sent a mail in late december. But well...everything which doesn't result in immediate profit is uninteresting for the big players. Small development companies are often way more helpful, for example, thanks to Dmitry Sches, I was able to implement support for Thorn pretty quickly. Other plugins from him will follow as soon as he has updated them to the same preset format Thorn already uses.

Regarding Omnisphere: I also have someone locally where I can test the implementation, but...it'll still take some development time and I'm not sure if the next release will include any new supported plugins.

 

Best wishes!!! There's nothing more important than health, so take your time to care for yourself!

 

Health comes first always...get better!

A bit off-topic, but maybe a feature request/consideration, kind of?
It's not possible to create these presets and previews for Reaktor ensembles so that the display in the browser like the official NI one's?

 

I have to admit that I never used Reaktor, so I can't really answer that question. But judging from that each NI product I have looked so far uses a non-NKS format (yet very similar to each other), I guess it's the same with Reaktor.

*sigh* I really wish that software vendors would be forced by law to document their file formats

 

Oh, I actually forgot a sentence ^^

Well, at some point I'll probably dig deeper into the NI file formats and add support for saving them as NKS (or in a format the preset browser can read), but huh - I have much to do just by developing preset parsers for importing third party VST presets, I'm actually pretty glad that I don't need to write another exporter right now

 

So I finally sat down and gave this a proper go ...it's definitely a cool plugin. I was a bit ignorant in that I thought it would populate the plugin presets in the factory content. Slight buzzkill but by no means a deal breaker.

But for whatever reason, I cannot seem to find the images. They show in the presetmagician application...but not in Maschine

 

Thanks again for this . Question :
How I convert massive and fm8 presets ?

 

KK supports those natively, no need to convert

 

KK/Maschine already imports Reaktor presets fine, the problem is just one of creating previews for them. In this case probably the best method is the approach some NKS makers are using already which is to automate/script recording previews from Komplete Kontrol itself into an audio editor.

 

WAs looking around and wondered...but...where is that thread gone ?

 

Yes it's a bit silent at the moment Implementing the preset editor is way more work than I anticipated

Or: I thought that the libraries I use provide more features than they actually do. Let's turn this into some progress update answer

When editing something, no matter if it's presets in PresetMagician or options in, let's say, Word, there must be a way to confirm or cancel the modifications. It's part of the established, unwritten rules in software development which define if a software's usability is intuitive or not.

When editing a Word document, it's pretty straightforward: You either save your document or not. You are aware of the consequences. But all you edit is a single document, where you save either all or nothing.

With presets, it's a different story: You don't edit all presets in PresetMagician at once. You edit only the presets for one plugin (otherwise it would be really confusing). So PresetMagician must be able to undo all changes done to all presets for one plugin only. And that's where the trouble started: The libraries I use are not able to do this in an easy way, especially in conjunction with the database layer I use. So I ended up with extending the existing libraries to support that, which is hugely complicated.

Of course, I could decide to "hack" it in, no matter what, but I prefer to implement it in a clean way, so that eventual bugs are minimized or prevented at all.

Also, I'd love to have an "undo" feature, because typically you'd not only edit individual presets, but mass-edit presets. For example, you could move 100s of presets into a new preset bank. Having an undo feature to revert accidental changes to 100s of presets would really be useful.

Now, even you edit the presets for one plugin only, there's still data which affects presets for other plugins as well. A good example are modes and types (or with Maschine 2.8 "Characteristics"): I want to have a "consolidate modes/types" feature at one point, but this also affects presets for other plugins which might not have been loaded from the database yet. So this also needs to be taken into consideration.

Also I'm having quite some performance issues. As you might notice in the current PresetMagician version, loading 1000 presets from the database takes a second or two. Now, if PresetMagician would need to load presets for all plugins prior being able to edit presets for a single plugin, that would be really user unfriendly. In my development setup, I already have 30k presets in the database, which would result in a wait time of about 45 seconds prior being able to do anything with PresetMagician. And this would really piss me off, since as a developer, I have to start PresetMagician after every source code change, and having to wait 45 seconds to test if the source code change has the desired effect...yeah. I'm an impatient person.

So a huge part of the work is to first figure out how to implement things that they're quick, easy to maintain and work as expected. Many developers would throw away 3rd party libraries at this point, and develop their own solution. I usually don't do that, because from experience I know that "throw away and doing it yourself" might give some immediate results, but the long term gains are minimal, especially because you usually can't anticipate all problems. The reason why 3rd party libraries exist: "The problem has already been solved by others".

In my case, if I'd implement the editing stuff myself, I'd lose field validation for example. In terms of a preset, that would mean there's a validation which checks "is the preset name empty? if yes, show a message and prevent saving".

And yet again I realized that software development is still in the stone age. It's getting better from year to year, but well...

stay tuned I

 

So I guess there's no way to use this for 3rd party Kontakt libraries?