VST FX RACK - ulimited vst-fx on an audio/midi track

[baconjockey]

DISCLAIMER: please do bare with me, I've been working on this all night and I'm barely awake only running on a combi of goodwill and coffee.

In my workflow as a producer, I've come across the ever annoying fact that a lot of DAWs only offer xx vst slots per track. Whilst some are limited to only two others offer hundreds, but I'd be effin happy as a stupid unicorn just returning from a sucessfull triple lobotomi session if I could have the previledge to load an unlimited amount of vst fx into one track in my daw.
Below is the mockup I've been working on tonight, pretty aint it? #LolGottaGetSumSleep



All specs and info, on how the vst works is in this document:
http://thefrederik.com/vstfxrack/idea.pdf

Basically the idea is to have a "vst-rack-unit" that loads as a vst effect (.dll/.au) and only takes up one fx-slot on your track, but allows unlimited vst-fx to be loaded with-in.

"Inertia" is the name of the motion graphics and "stuff developing" duo im part of, for more info on us, have a click here: http://inertia-is-op.tumblr.com

All feedback, thoughts and ideas are very welcome! Just please make sure that you've read the PDF to understand the project fully

Sincerely
Baconjockey

[Caco]

Sounds like Chainer but with prettier graphics

[liquidsonics]

Looks like a nice concept if you're able to save in a presets file all of the individual hosted plugin presets' states then it would be easy to make effects chains that are cross-host compatible.

[baconjockey]

Yo checked out the chainer. Looks a bit confusing on first hand, but i seems like its all about the same basic idea. However I think we'll stick to the project, since it could be cool to have something with a more simple interface.

@Matt:
Im not quite sure Im gettin' you right here. Are you refering to the ability to save the current state of a rack (order of loaded vst's and their current states), so that you can load it into other tracks or arrangement, and share it with other people?
If so we'll totally look into this, I posted the idea on twitter and got a request for the same thing there

[rifftrax]

Damn, this would be way cool. Do you know how awesome a drag and drop fx order would be vs. FL Studio's crap-ass way of right-clicking every effect and then being able to only move it a single slot up or down? This would also make it super easy to move entire fx states from one channel to another.

I've got a couple ideas.

- Allow multiple plugs to be highlighted and moved/deleted (for instance as you're using a double-click to open plugins, enable a simple click + available ctrl/shift commands to highlight) - viz. this would allow clicking on a plugin to highlight, holding shift and pressing the arrow keys on the keyboard to highlight multiple plugs in a row. After doing this the shift key could be released, and holding ctrl would allow selection of another plugin in a completely different part of the fx chain with the mouse. The extremely useful part about this would be programming an available hotkey set that could allow you to enable/disable any selected plugs by hitting say "M" once your fx chain plug is the active window. Deselect all could be by clicking in a blank spot in the fx chain or pressing ESC. Plugin deletion could just be the "Delete" key of course but pull open a pop-up window to allow confirmation of the delete action with the "NO" button default highlighted so people don't accidentally lose a plugin state when willy-nilly clicking delete + enter.

- I would vote to allow resizing horizontally as well to enable the user to control how much he sees of the names of the plugs... that would be very helpful.

- Put a per vst CPU usage counter if possible (as well as global). That would be enormously helpful. Maybe something that could be hidden/unhidden by horizontal resizing

- Definitely a wet/dry knob per effect if possible. Also would be cool if the actual wet percentage could be shown numerically by enlarging horizontal windows size even further as another disambiguation tool

The gui looks perfect and the concept is ace. I want it.

[baconjockey]

Hey rifftrax
Thanks alot for the feedback! And tbh all your ideas are great. We also talked about putting in a CPU meter, but at the time I made the GUI mock-up I simply was to tired to do it fully.

Allowing to move/delete etc mutiple plug-ins it baws. Will deffo look into that.

Thanks alot man!
Btw was is the max amount of vst effects you can load into a track in FL studio?

All the best

[rifftrax]

Hey thanks

The potential for this to be a game changer plugin for workflow (at least for people like me that use hundreds of fx plugins per project) is huge, so I'm certainly interested. I can't tell you how much time I've pissed away piddling with FL Studio's unintuitive handling of plugins, having to constantly buss to separate tracks and such.

FL Studio only offers fx 8 slots per channel.

[baconjockey]

Cool man, I just showed the idea to my man Steve, who actually told me it's called a "sub-host". And that there is allready a bit on the market (Bidule, EnergyXT, Chainer, StudioUnits, NI Kore).

[rifftrax]

Cool man, I just showed the idea to my man Steve, who actually told me it's called a "sub-host". And that there is allready a bit on the market (Bidule, EnergyXT, Chainer, StudioUnits, NI Kore).

Yeah, there are a number of sub-hosts out there already. I've got qualms with all of them though as they really don't fit the kind of perfect niche your mock-up would handle. Chainer is fugly as all get-out, Bidule/energyxt/studio-units are way too open-ended and modular, NI Kore is discontinued, etc.