Official Arturia VCollection5 thread

[Stackelberg]

Authorization systems are a punishment on actual customers for the indiscretions of thieves. I suppose you could say they're like locks, sometimes you lock yourself out.

Agreed.

Glad I found this post... if nothing else, to commiserate I'm suffering from the exact same problem at the moment. Hard drive failed, had to do a complete wipe, no restore image, reinstalled Ableton and my Arturia VCollection3... and now every preset stored via the host DAW format (adg files) is now inaccessible except for the synths that Arturia has built the preset decoder app for. This has basically massacred all the music I've made over the past 3-4 years. But I'm a small bedroom producer so likelihood of Arturia helping me out seems low

My IT guy at work mentioned that perhaps there was someone in the community still running v3 with the elicenser who could open the files for me. Or if I could even just get a glimpse at the knob positions, I could recreate the presets.

Maybe we can find someone with the VCollection 3 still licensed via eLicenser. I found a forum post for another piece of software where a user indicated Arturia was able to send them an authorization code—the post is only 1 year old, so it seems like it must be possible.

[fmr]

Authorization systems are a punishment on actual customers for the indiscretions of thieves. I suppose you could say they're like locks, sometimes you lock yourself out.

Agreed.

Glad I found this post... if nothing else, to commiserate I'm suffering from the exact same problem at the moment. Hard drive failed, had to do a complete wipe, no restore image, reinstalled Ableton and my Arturia VCollection3... and now every preset stored via the host DAW format (adg files) is now inaccessible except for the synths that Arturia has built the preset decoder app for. This has basically massacred all the music I've made over the past 3-4 years. But I'm a small bedroom producer so likelihood of Arturia helping me out seems low

My IT guy at work mentioned that perhaps there was someone in the community still running v3 with the elicenser who could open the files for me. Or if I could even just get a glimpse at the knob positions, I could recreate the presets.

Maybe we can find someone with the VCollection 3 still licensed via eLicenser. I found a forum post for another piece of software where a user indicated Arturia was able to send them an authorization code—the post is only 1 year old, so it seems like it must be possible.

I'm not sure, but I don't remember Arturia having change preset format from v3 to v4. Only in v5 did they change them, AFAIK.

I still have v4 installed. Send one preset file to me, and I'll check if I can open it.

[electro]

V5 started the new preset system. There is a converter for getting presets from V4 and older.

[machinesworking]

Just a shout out to Arturia for Matrix 12. Besides being somewhat fiddly with passing plug in evaluation, it's surprisingly dead on. I have an Oberheim Xpander and comparing factory presets it's really quite close, maybe if you're an expert you can tell it was the only thing playing, but in a mix I doubt anyone would be able to tell. To be honest I can't say this about all Arturia emulations, but the Matrix 12 is close enough to fool most people.

Now if they added SysEx support to the plug in I could upload my sounds etc.

Do you happen to have a spare 20 min to knock out some audio file comparisons of the two? I'm mostly curious to hear the difference between just raw saw waves, square waves, etc.

As you can see from my screen name, I am a huge Xpander fan. I've just never had balls to pull the trigger on one (especially at today's prices!)

Yeah I bought mine almost ten years ago now for I think $2200? They sell now for at least $3K, currently one without a ROM chip is sitting at $2900 on ebay!

I'll see what I can do. You've got me curious as to what they sound like in recording. Of course they won't be exact, there are two revisions of Xpanders, and slight differences in all analogs. FYI if it's really close I'm deleting my posts about it so my ebay price doesn't go down!

[ke2041]

There is still the bug (and confirmed by other users in the Arturia forum) that closing the GUI of some Arturia plugins freezes Cubase. Seems to be a GUI problem because the audio engine is still running but the Cubase GUI is frozen after the Arturia plugin editor is closed. The system needs a reboot because the Cubase task cannot be killed. Maybe in combination with some hardware (i7 + on-board GPU?).
Afaik this occurs with the older plugins like the Jupiter 8 (cannot remember to have such freezes with the SEM).

Anyway, it's an annoying bug and not fixed yet.

Hi,
did you contact our tech support about it or can you point me the Arturia forum thread related to this issue?

Kevin

[ke2041]

Glad I found this post... if nothing else, to commiserate I'm suffering from the exact same problem at the moment. Hard drive failed, had to do a complete wipe, no restore image, reinstalled Ableton and my Arturia VCollection3... and now every preset stored via the host DAW format (adg files) is now inaccessible except for the synths that Arturia has built the preset decoder app for. This has basically massacred all the music I've made over the past 3-4 years. But I'm a small bedroom producer so likelihood of Arturia helping me out seems low

What version of the plugin did you install? If you install the version from the VCollection 4 you should not have any issue.
As FMR said we changed the format in VCollection 5.

Kevin

[4damind]

There is still the bug (and confirmed by other users in the Arturia forum) that closing the GUI of some Arturia plugins freezes Cubase. Seems to be a GUI problem because the audio engine is still running but the Cubase GUI is frozen after the Arturia plugin editor is closed. The system needs a reboot because the Cubase task cannot be killed. Maybe in combination with some hardware (i7 + on-board GPU?).
Afaik this occurs with the older plugins like the Jupiter 8 (cannot remember to have such freezes with the SEM).

Anyway, it's an annoying bug and not fixed yet.

Hi,
did you contact our tech support about it or can you point me the Arturia forum thread related to this issue?

Kevin

Yes, they told me to delete all default settings without much success.
See also http://forum.arturia.com/index.php?topic=89585.0

[Stackelberg]

Glad I found this post... if nothing else, to commiserate I'm suffering from the exact same problem at the moment. Hard drive failed, had to do a complete wipe, no restore image, reinstalled Ableton and my Arturia VCollection3... and now every preset stored via the host DAW format (adg files) is now inaccessible except for the synths that Arturia has built the preset decoder app for. This has basically massacred all the music I've made over the past 3-4 years. But I'm a small bedroom producer so likelihood of Arturia helping me out seems low

What version of the plugin did you install? If you install the version from the VCollection 4 you should not have any issue.
As FMR said we changed the format in VCollection 5.

Kevin

The issue is that the presets weren't saved within the plugin. They were saved as part of the host DAW's racks. So when I load a rack, the DAW (Ableton) tells the plugin "turn this knob here, that knob there." But now, when I do this, the Arturia plugin spits out an error requesting that I elicense the plugin—even once I've updated all the plugins via the Arturia Software Center.

The real solution is a new activation code, but Arturia tech support said that's not available since elicenser isn't used anymore. If you have any other suggestions, I'm very open to hearing them. At this point I'm willing to pay money to solve this problem.

Thanks!

[ke2041]

Glad I found this post... if nothing else, to commiserate I'm suffering from the exact same problem at the moment. Hard drive failed, had to do a complete wipe, no restore image, reinstalled Ableton and my Arturia VCollection3... and now every preset stored via the host DAW format (adg files) is now inaccessible except for the synths that Arturia has built the preset decoder app for. This has basically massacred all the music I've made over the past 3-4 years. But I'm a small bedroom producer so likelihood of Arturia helping me out seems low

What version of the plugin did you install? If you install the version from the VCollection 4 you should not have any issue.
As FMR said we changed the format in VCollection 5.

Kevin

The issue is that the presets weren't saved within the plugin. They were saved as part of the host DAW's racks. So when I load a rack, the DAW (Ableton) tells the plugin "turn this knob here, that knob there." But now, when I do this, the Arturia plugin spits out an error requesting that I elicense the plugin—even once I've updated all the plugins via the Arturia Software Center.

The real solution is a new activation code, but Arturia tech support said that's not available since elicenser isn't used anymore. If you have any other suggestions, I'm very open to hearing them. At this point I'm willing to pay money to solve this problem.

Thanks!

I will PM you to try to find a solution.

[XpanderDude]

Hey, anything you can provide would be super helpful. I'm a sucker for the M6/M12/Xpander sound!

Just a shout out to Arturia for Matrix 12. Besides being somewhat fiddly with passing plug in evaluation, it's surprisingly dead on. I have an Oberheim Xpander and comparing factory presets it's really quite close, maybe if you're an expert you can tell it was the only thing playing, but in a mix I doubt anyone would be able to tell. To be honest I can't say this about all Arturia emulations, but the Matrix 12 is close enough to fool most people.

Now if they added SysEx support to the plug in I could upload my sounds etc.

Do you happen to have a spare 20 min to knock out some audio file comparisons of the two? I'm mostly curious to hear the difference between just raw saw waves, square waves, etc.

As you can see from my screen name, I am a huge Xpander fan. I've just never had balls to pull the trigger on one (especially at today's prices!)

Yeah I bought mine almost ten years ago now for I think $2200? They sell now for at least $3K, currently one without a ROM chip is sitting at $2900 on ebay!

I'll see what I can do. You've got me curious as to what they sound like in recording. Of course they won't be exact, there are two revisions of Xpanders, and slight differences in all analogs. FYI if it's really close I'm deleting my posts about it so my ebay price doesn't go down!

[felis]

Have you seen this comparison?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfi-nZBDOsY

[4damind]

Have you seen this comparison?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfi-nZBDOsY

Yes, but you can hear also clearly that Arturia doesn't sound the same if he compared some single sounds. Arturia sounds more dull and lifeless compared to the original. He tries to compensate this with one sound if modifying the cutoff/resonance of the filter.

[felis]

Maybe I'm not quite as picky as most here, but I really the Matrix 12V.
I can get lost for hours with it.

Yes - they don't sound exactly the same, but it's plenty close enough for my uses.
I think I also noticed some volume differences that can color perception in that video.

There's a few things I would have liked to see added, but there are workarounds for some of them.
It's one of my favorites from the bunch.

[martin_l]

I mainly hope that they manage soon to sort out a couple of remaining bugs for the Matrix 12V, such as the problem with MULTI patches and the lack of polyphonic aftertouch (although stated as bug fix in the latest release notes).

[machinesworking]

Hey, anything you can provide would be super helpful. I'm a sucker for the M6/M12/Xpander sound!

[/quote]
I hate proving myself wrong, but I did a bunch of comparisons, no recording as of yet, but the first thing that pops out is the couple factory presets I have on the Xpander sound pretty close to the Matrix 12, but not because they did a dead on emulation, but because they tweaked parameters to get close. The setting are not the same between the two, which is in itself evidence they couldn't get it 99%, more like 80%, not anything magical.

The filters and oscillators in the Arturia Matrix 12 are still pretty digital sounding when undressed. The Xpander has a dry factory preset called Oberheim you can call up at any time, adjusting all settings on the Arturia M12 to match and the bare oscillators are synced without the sync being on, i.e. they sound like one oscillator because they don't float around as much as the real Xpanders do, which even tuned have a slight chorused sound to them, unless you sync them. The basic 4 pole filter on the Arturia is simply more digital sounding. I'm not writing off the Matrix 12, it's a great approximation, and $2,800 cheaper these days, but I'm not selling the Xpander.

Arturia could do a bit better and be dead on, but I don't know if they see the money in that? and the Matrix 12 would be significantly more of a CPU hog!