Waves - get .xps files into preset menu as folders?

[CableChannel]

I downloaded a bunch of xps files with presets for Waves plugins. Now I don't want open these files each time I want to load a presets, I would like them to show up in the preset menu. But apparently the only way to this is "Put into preset menu as..."? I would have to save each single preset manually. This can't be true. How do I get a whole xps file (holding several presets) to show up, preferably as a folder, in the preset menu?

Help is much appreciated! I googled with no success. Waves support seems to be down. Would be very glad if someone can help!

THX!

[lfm]

If I remember correct I did this when I downloaded presets for IRs from Waves site.

It was a folder with a specific name.

That made a full menu out of presets from disk stuff.

It might be the same on any plugin - but have not tried this.

So check out manual for IR1 if not in others. It was explained there as I remember.

I'll check next time I'm on my daw and come back...

[CableChannel]

I have IR-L and that is the only plugin where it works. You just need to put the IRs in a folder and they are neatly displayed in the same folder structure in the menu. Very nice.

But for the other plugs it seems to be a different procedure.

[lfm]

Did you check the Plug-Ins folder below Waves where it's installed.

There might be specific names there where the manually saved ones reside as well.

For impules it's the Acoustics.net Impules folder.

So any other may refere to plugins xps presets from others as well.

[CableChannel]

In the plugins folder there is a plug-in settings subfolder which is supposed to hold user settings. However placing any xps files there does not make them show up in the respective plugins.

[lfm]

I'm on Windows 7 - and here they are.

c:\users\Public\Waves Audio\Plug-in Settings

There are all I created.

You can figure out base name on each plugin looking at these.

[CableChannel]

Yeah same here, but how do I get user xps files to show up in the plugin? Currently there is only one file per plugin holding my user presets, and no folder structure whatsoever.

[lfm]

I would forward this to Waves support.
There might be undocumented stuff.

To get IR things in place - they informed about holding Ctrl and select from load menu you could delete presets. Works on all plugins.

I would not be surprised if you can get a browse dialog to add from disk as well.


As I looked at it you can rename files to xml extension and use a text editor and copy/paste from one to the other.

But I would be really careful - and make backups, and not fiddle with version info or anything, just append you own stuff as <Preset> nodes.

If your presets are from the same version I suppose it works.
If from v8 or something, you never know.

[CableChannel]

Got an answer from the Waves support.

It is not possible to organize user presets in folders.

It is not possible to add all presets within an xps file to the preset list as a bunch. You have to add them preset by preset.

Quite lame for 2013 I reckon.

[mrgrizzly89]

So I found a rather frustrating but successful way to do this:

- When you are ready to save your preset, select "Save preset as new file.."
- It will open up your Finder/Explorer window to select your save location. Select where you want your presets to go. As far as I can tell, this can be anywhere on a readable disk.
- Name the "Preset Bank". For Instance, If you are using CLA Drums or something and you want to make a bin of custom Kick Drum sounds, name it "CLA Drums - My Kicks.xps" or whatever. *** YOU MUST INCLUDE .XPS ON YOUR FILE NAME OR IT WON'T WORK. Found this out the hard way ***
- Once you save that, a second dialogue window will pop up asking you to name this particular. So, "My Kick 1".
- Now, when you go to Load in the plugin toolbar, you will see a new section of loading options.

This is where it gets stupid.

- To add multiple presets to the bank, you will have to overwrite the bank.
- Set up another preset and select "Save preset as new file..." again.
- In the Save As window, select the existing .xps file. Your system will advise you about overwriting, say "Yes/Okay" and move on.
- Name your second preset in the following window ("My Kick 2")
- Go back to your FIRST preset, and click on the Save menu.
- There will be 2 new options: one to "Save CLA Drums - My Kicks.xps 'My Kick 1' ", the other to "Save CLA Drums As..."
- Select the first option, then go back to the Load menu and you will now see both of your presets in the same new User preset section. Essentially, you need to have each instance of this open every time you want to add a new preset to the bank.

Troublesome, Frustrating, and beyond Time-Consuming, but it works.

[earhax]

You can do this by editing the xml of your preset files. On macOS, they're the xps files in Users/Shared/Waves/Plug-In Settings. Open the file, and wherever you see the following xml code:

Code: Select all

<PresetHeader>
    (various header data, like PluginName, 
     PluginVersionn, ReadOnly flag)
<PresetHeader>

Simply add the name of the folder you want your presets to be contained in using the <group> tag on the line after the other xml contained in the PresetHeader tag. For example:

Code: Select all

<PresetHeader>
    (various header data, like PluginName, 
     PluginVersionn, ReadOnly flag)
    <Group>My User Presets</Group>
<PresetHeader>

The next time you launch your DAW and load an instance of the plugin, you'll see the folder with the name you chose containing your presets within it.

As always when doing hacky stuff like this, be sure to save a backup copy of the file before you modify it!

Also, don't use any special characters in the group/folder names - just a-z, A-Z, and 0-9 to be safe.

Lastly, be sure that all of the presets you want in a specific folder are listed in order in the xml. I'm not sure what would happen if you went switching the group name back and forth for every other preset.

If you're familiar with Sublime Text 3 and RegEx (regular expressions), it's pretty simple to edit a large number of presets like this all at once, as well as being able to sort them alphabetically using the "permute selections > sort" menu option. You just need to select from the beginning of the line with the "<Preset" tag, all the way until after the newline character after the "</Preset>" closing tag (so the cursor shows up at the start of the following line) using the split cursor so you have multiple selections (each selection containing all the xml per preset).

And if you really want to take things to the next level and make your life of managing plugin presets a lot easier, just get Blue Cat's PatchWork, use it to host all of your plugins/chains in whichever DAW you're using (will even let you load VSTs in Pro Tools), and save all of your presets using PatchWork. It not only saves every preset as a file, but you can use folders, have symlinks to your preset files, and now it even has a built in preset search feature.

Hope this info proves helpful to some of you.

[earhax]

Also, if you want to go a step further, you can even move the factory default presets into your user preset file so that your user presets will be the first ones you navigate through by pressing the right arrow button on the UI for various plugins.



(I had to blur out the preset names due to confidentiality agreements for some of my projects.)