PresetMagician: Generate NKS Presets from VST plugins

[Drachenkatze]

PresetMagician is an application to automatically create NKS Presets from your non-NKS compatible VST plugins. You can then use Maschine and Komplete Kontrol hardware to browse and load presets - including audio previews for synths!

Notable features:

• Supports additional metadata from VST plugins like bank information, types, modes, author and comments and exports that metadata into the NKS files
• Allows an NKS controller mapping template to be defined per plugin
• Supports editing of the NKS Resources, including plugin preview images. Also can auto-generate the images automatically
• As of 2019-02-07, over 300 plugins are supported. For an up-to-date list see https://presetmagician.com/supported-plugins/

Download from presetmagician.com (Windows, 64 bit)

Information regarding Mac OS X

[aMUSEd]

This would be interesting to me were it not for the fact that it looks like you are developing on Windows and I'm on Mac. Also there are so few plugins these days that still use the proper VST2 conventions for banks (mainly I guess because cross host/platform support is so inconsistent most devs go for creating their own preset management). V-Station is already converted and publically available.

[Drachenkatze]

This would be interesting to me were it not for the fact that it looks like you are developing on Windows and I'm on Mac.

That's correct and is unfortunately not going to change, as I do not own a mac for development. A workaround would be to use a virtual machine, but yes, I understand, that's quite a hassle. In order to develop for Mac, one needs to buy a Mac

Also there are so few plugins these days that still use the proper VST2 conventions for banks (mainly I guess because cross host/platform support is so inconsistent most devs go for creating their own preset management).

Actually the main reason for developers not using VST presets is because VST2 doesn't support tags, grouping etc. That's why I'm working on parsing support for these manufacturers - I already did research how D16 group does it, so (hopefully) only one effort per manufacturer. However, my main goal is to get an alpha out as soon as possible to gain feedback on the general application logic.

V-Station is already converted and publically available.

That's correct, and that's one reason why I started the project. Only the V-Station factory presets are available and not those I have personally created. I wanted an automated approach, where I can simply say: "Presets, here, convert!" with a few clicks.

[Drachenkatze]

It's finally here! After about one week with very long hours of development, debugging, testing, the first alpha is here \o/

I could have released it earlier, but I wanted to polish the UI a bit (the first screenshots looked very ugly) and I wanted to get compatibility with Maschine and preset-based plugins right (see above regarding GetChunk())

Download it here: https://presetmagician.drachenkatze.org/

Will update the initial post later when I got a good nap

[dune_rave]

Hm, interesting...
Nowadays just thought to create some nks manually with Dexed vsti, but i think i would try your solution first

[Drachenkatze]

PresetMagician 0.0.2 Alpha is now released!

Changelog here

Notable changes:

• D16 Punchbox and almost all synths from u-he supported
• Added crash handler to avoid VST plugins crashing PresetMagician
• Added a "Submit unsupported plugin" feature to submit the unsupported plugins to a central database, in order to prioritize plugin support

[dune_rave]

Now tried this on Zebra.
1) First there was an exception because my zebra data folder is a shortcut,
and when I copied there the concrete files, presetmagician was OK
2) Found presets, but only in the first subfolder (It was also written in its documentation - I know)
but this is a show stopper for me. Almost all u-he preset bank for zebra contains 2 level deep subfolders

[aMUSEd]

Is this able to organize collections of presets into banks?

[Drachenkatze]

Now tried this on Zebra.
1) First there was an exception because my zebra data folder is a shortcut,
and when I copied there the concrete files, presetmagician was OK

I thought I had fixed that, but it seems that it's not completely fixed On my machine it works, but without logging, it's hard to tell what's going on. Next version should have logging

2) Found presets, but only in the first subfolder (It was also written in its documentation - I know)
but this is a show stopper for me. Almost all u-he preset bank for zebra contains 2 level deep subfolders

That's already fixed in my code, it allows any subfolder depth and correctly creates the bank chain.

Is this able to organize collections of presets into banks?

Yes and no - can you clarify what exactly you mean? What exactly is a "collection of presets"?

[aMUSEd]

Komplete Kontrol is able to load banks of presets via a dropdown menu, this means you are not presented with a gazillion presets on one long list but they can be organised according to where they came from (ie presets are usually in banks to start with, this retains that structure)

[Drachenkatze]

Komplete Kontrol is able to load banks of presets via a dropdown menu, this means you are not presented with a gazillion presets on one long list but they can be organised according to where they came from (ie presets are usually in banks to start with, this retains that structure)

I'm still not sure if I understood you. Which dropdown menu do you mean? The one for instruments as shown below, where you can then select available banks?

But let's try it the other way around. First of all, PresetMagician creates NKS files in the appropriate structure, correctly tagged with the vendor and plugin name. That's given for every VSTi plugin.

Untitled2.png

For generic VST plugins which support VST standard programs, all presets are stored in the "Factory Bank". I plan on supporting loading of FXPs, so the user could assign a custom bank name to each FXP.

For plugins which use their own preset manager (as most do), I have to write a parser to read in the presets from the plugin. This has been done for all u-he plugins, and this specific parser supports banks and sub banks. Here's an example from TyrellN6 (I got the image and

Untitled.png

It is also planned to convert the tags from VST presets if available, but at this point it's only on the wishlist. Also some kind of keyword-to-tag matching could be possible (for example, if the preset contains the word "Bass", it will get tagged with the "Bass" tag).

Keep in mind that the current releases are very early alpha versions. My personal wishlist is huge and I'm currently putting everything down in an issue tracker to keep track of stuff.

[aMUSEd]

Yes that's what I meant

[trusampler]

Does this program allow users to add our graphics for the plugin somehow?

[Drachenkatze]

Does this program allow users to add our graphics for the plugin somehow?

It's already on the wishlist, but I don't know when that feature will be finished.

https://support.drachenkatze.org/preset ... n/issues/2

[mutantdog]

This seems like a really interesting project. I'll try to check it out when i get some time and offer my feedback.