Just found a killer feature in Live that I wish other hosts could do. Tried it in eXT and it didn't work but maybe some can already - the rest should follow suit because its amazingly useful.
Instead of setting Live to scan one central VST folder as you do in most hosts Live has the capability to read shortcuts. Initially I thought this would be just folder shortcuts but after some experimentation I've found it can read shortcuts directly to a plugin dll. So I've made a VST folder inside Live's resources folder and pointed it to that and then cherry picked the VST/i's that work best with Live and put in shortcuts to each of them.
This way not only does Live load a lot faster because its not having to scan folder after folder of crap (as even with the best will in the world VST folders tend to be full of other files such as presets, wavs or even other dlls) - it's also potentially more stable for the same reason (less crap to scan). And because they are shortcuts to dll's rather than the dll's themselves there's none of the problems you'd get if you just moved them all into a seperate folder for Live - they can still find any dependencies they have in their own folders.
For comparison at the moment eXT takes ages to scan if I add something like a new Wusik bank or bunch more presets because it's not just scanning for plugin dll's - its scanning whole folders and sorting between all the presets and other stuff to find the plugin dll's it can use. This would be a great feature for any host to have - you could just set up one central VST folder for everything but then have Custom folders with shortcuts in for particular apps - excluding the clashy ones and dross and cherry picking the best toolkit for a particular host.
Any other hosts that can do this?
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- KVRAF
- 37505 posts since 14 Sep, 2002 from In teh net
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- The Teach
- 8273 posts since 23 Jul, 2002 from flatness
eXT - no
T2 - no
tunafish - yes (but pointless since you load individual .dll into tunafish anyway ... it doesnt store / scan a folder)
audiomulch - no
bidule - no
slainte
rob
T2 - no
tunafish - yes (but pointless since you load individual .dll into tunafish anyway ... it doesnt store / scan a folder)
audiomulch - no
bidule - no
slainte
rob-
- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 37505 posts since 14 Sep, 2002 from In teh net
Yeah I just tried T2 and Podium.
Tried it a while back in Logic but didn't work (thought of it ages ago because you can do it with Graphics plugins in Painter but Live is the first host I've come across that implements it)
Tried it a while back in Logic but didn't work (thought of it ages ago because you can do it with Graphics plugins in Painter but Live is the first host I've come across that implements it)
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 37505 posts since 14 Sep, 2002 from In teh net
Any Live users here should give this a go - it's like Adrenalin for the startup sequence! I've categorised all my plugins now to use in Live but despite having a fair few it's opening very quickly using this method - much faster than even when I just had it pointing to my one NI komplete folder. And it seems to stay fast even after reboot.
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 37505 posts since 14 Sep, 2002 from In teh net
Wow it's over 10 years since I started this and I've just realised from a discussion in another thread that this is still not a very well known feature and really needs to be as it's extremely useful. Since moving to Mac a few years ago I changed from using classic shortcuts (which are called aliases on Mac) to Symbolic links which all hosts I've tried so far seem able to recognise (I think they are on a 'lower level' in the OS that most apps are able to follow - in fact some developers like NI actually use symlinks to create variations on a plugin that all link to one central plugin - eg the Reaktor fx version is an example of this, it's not actually a plugin, just a link to one with code to make it appear as an effect). So this works with all hosts, whearas the shortcut/alias version still only works with Live and a couple of others (mainly Synapse Orion, and more recently the Bluecat subhosts)
Symbolic links can be made using command line or various apps (I use Pathfinder on Mac)
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/co ... -or-linux/
https://gigaom.com/2011/04/27/how-to-cr ... -on-a-mac/
So what can you do with this?
1) Create custom plugin folders made up of symlinks organised by subfolder however you want (the symlinks can either be to individual plugins or to a subfolder of plugins if you want them all - eg I made one just to my Soundtoys folder). What I found long ago is that most hosts respect the sub folder organisation completely. This way you can completely reorganise the structure of how plugin folders appear in hosts without touching or moving a single plugin (which can break dependencies for some plugins plus makes updating complicated). So you can have sub folders for reverbs or granular synths for example, or separate out 64 and 32 bit plugins. This also means you can have one consistent organisation system for plugins no matter what the host.
2) If your host only has the ability to scan one folder path and you have several you can agregate them all into one folder using symlinks to each and just point your host to that.
3) If you have a host that is finicky with certain plugins or you want different plugin toolkits for different hosts then you can setup dedicated folders for each with just the plugins you want. eg I use Wavelab for mastering so only have a select group of mastering plugins for that. This also means you have much faster startups as hosts don't have to scan every single plugin.
Only things to remember if you use symlinks are a) to remove any extra filename that sometimes gets added by some apps - eg a symlink to 'plugin.vst' might get given the name 'plugin.vst symlink' - you need to delete the symlink bit and any space for this to work for most hosts. and b) this doesn't work with any plugins that are not real plugins (as with Reaktor fx) - but since they are symlinks already it doesn't matter, you can copy them wherever you want and treat them the same way, as long as the original plugin is not moved the host will find it from the copied link.
Symbolic links can be made using command line or various apps (I use Pathfinder on Mac)
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16226/co ... -or-linux/
https://gigaom.com/2011/04/27/how-to-cr ... -on-a-mac/
So what can you do with this?
1) Create custom plugin folders made up of symlinks organised by subfolder however you want (the symlinks can either be to individual plugins or to a subfolder of plugins if you want them all - eg I made one just to my Soundtoys folder). What I found long ago is that most hosts respect the sub folder organisation completely. This way you can completely reorganise the structure of how plugin folders appear in hosts without touching or moving a single plugin (which can break dependencies for some plugins plus makes updating complicated). So you can have sub folders for reverbs or granular synths for example, or separate out 64 and 32 bit plugins. This also means you can have one consistent organisation system for plugins no matter what the host.
2) If your host only has the ability to scan one folder path and you have several you can agregate them all into one folder using symlinks to each and just point your host to that.
3) If you have a host that is finicky with certain plugins or you want different plugin toolkits for different hosts then you can setup dedicated folders for each with just the plugins you want. eg I use Wavelab for mastering so only have a select group of mastering plugins for that. This also means you have much faster startups as hosts don't have to scan every single plugin.
Only things to remember if you use symlinks are a) to remove any extra filename that sometimes gets added by some apps - eg a symlink to 'plugin.vst' might get given the name 'plugin.vst symlink' - you need to delete the symlink bit and any space for this to work for most hosts. and b) this doesn't work with any plugins that are not real plugins (as with Reaktor fx) - but since they are symlinks already it doesn't matter, you can copy them wherever you want and treat them the same way, as long as the original plugin is not moved the host will find it from the copied link.
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- KVRist
- 154 posts since 24 Aug, 2012
Radium doesn't scan any plugin during startup (it can, but it doesn't). Instead it initially just uses the file names and expands the menus automatically when trying to open a shell plugin.
Radium Music Editor, a tracker-like DAW: https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radium/
Radium Compressor: https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radiu ... plugin.php
Radium Compressor: https://users.notam02.no/~kjetism/radiu ... plugin.php
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- KVRAF
- 7413 posts since 8 Feb, 2003 from London, UK
MuLab lets you drag/drop VSTs onto it to add them (or manually scan your chosen folder).
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- Banned
- 3889 posts since 3 Feb, 2010
FL Studio can do this
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- KVRAF
- Topic Starter
- 37505 posts since 14 Sep, 2002 from In teh net
What from shortcuts or symlinks? Most hosts handle symlinks now (except the new Reason implementation)