1. Zen is a universal presets manager.
It loads in any host as a vsti, and acts as a loader for other vstis. So with Zen, you can search for "Rhodes piano" and get a list of all matching presets - regardless of the final vsti (Rhino, Zebra, Absynth... whatever). When you select one of the presets in Zen, the corresponding vsti is automatically loaded to play the requested preset. The search and classification system is very simple to use, and is not constricting - you can tag a preset both as a "lead" and a "bass", if you like.
Most popular vstis are supported, and I can add new ones usually in a matter of minutes.
2. Zen is online.
Zen constantly synchronizes his own local database of presets with a master online database hosted at www.bigtickaudio.com - users get new presets daily, delivered right into their sequencer, already categorized.
Of course, many users don't like to have their DAW online (even though I really believe this is changing fast). Zen supports several modes, allowing to:
- work completely offline (in this case, only the presets that have been loaded so far are available)
- work offline with the database on a shared drive. The database can be updated by a daemon process running on another computer.
3. Zen is free
Yes. I am giving it for free.
4. Limitations
At the moment Zen can only support presets that don't require additional external files. This rules out synths with external samples (including many Rhino third-party presets).
I have plans to support these presets too, but it is going to require cooperation between the plugin and Zen - basically the plugin needs to tell which external "assets" are linked to a preset. So I will need to define a set of "Zen extensions" to the vst standard, and publish these so that plugin developers can support them.
It is not hard to implement, but I want to gather usage statistics before doing this, also because it will definitely consume a considerable bandwidth if, as I hope, adoption is high.
And finally, here is the mandatory screenshot from the beta:
