KVR Audio

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 2:26 pm

As there is only windows, where do you live? Drachenkatze sounds German. If you happen to live in Berlin I could help out with a Mac...

Drachenkatze · Post by **Drachenkatze** » Wed Dec 05, 2018 6:02 pm

Tj Shredder wrote: ↑Wed Dec 05, 2018 2:26 pm As there is only windows, where do you live? Drachenkatze sounds German. If you happen to live in Berlin I could help out with a Mac...

I think you heavily underestimate the development effort

Basically I would've to throw away any code written so far and start from scratch, doing parallel development on Windows+Mac. The reason that PresetMagician development goes so quickly is that the .NET framework which I use takes away lots of work (or let's say: The Windows Presentation Foundationpart of it, which is Windows only, and is used to build all GUI-related stuff)

Here are detailed reasons:

https://www.native-instruments.com/foru ... st-1713733

However, maybe there's hope. Microsoft released the source code of WPF yesterday, so maybe developers will port it to other platforms like OSX, and then porting PresetMagician to OSX would be easy. But right now, it's not

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Thu Dec 06, 2018 7:59 am

Most music developers use Juce, wrong assumption, sorry...

Drachenkatze · Post by **Drachenkatze** » Thu Dec 06, 2018 1:32 pm

Tj Shredder wrote: ↑Thu Dec 06, 2018 7:59 am Most music developers use Juce, wrong assumption, sorry...

I actually looked at Juce when I was evaluating the easiest way to access VST plugins, but decided against it. I was looking for something easy to work with, as this was a personal project to solve a problem I had 2 months ago.

I got some C++ experience from 20 years ago, and while it is extremely fast at runtime, the development overhead is very high if performance isn't a concern. .NET, on the other hand, allows me to pretty quickly develop stuff, and not care about memory handling at all. This very much helps when writing support for 3rd party VST preset support, and as I don't need to do anything realtime, .NET and C# allows me to put in functionality in no time. Also, JUCE is either GPL or commercial, which in turn means that I'd either had to open source PresetMagician or buy a license, which I can't afford.

As I'm very new to desktop development (being a PHP/Web developer for 15+ years), my choice was something which could get me started quickly. Only after I had a working prototype running I decided that maybe others could make use of the work I did, and decided to go with commercial this time.

There might be OSX options in the future, but this heavily depends on how well the software is accepted (by Windows users), the amount of licenses I sell to justify development costs for OSX, and as well as how the .NET ecosystem evolves in the future. As I mentioned in the other thread, I don't expect to sell more than 100 licenses, but I could be wrong. Basically the 3rd party VST preset functionality is portable, as it doesn't rely on any GUI stuff, but the application is also GUI heavy, which actually takes most of my time currently.

But...first step is to get it out of alpha and implement support for many 3rd party vendors. Then let's see what happens

Drachenkatze · Post by **Drachenkatze** » Thu Dec 27, 2018 11:59 am

I just released PresetMagician 0.5.0, see the KVR product page

Dewdman42 · Post by **Dewdman42** » Sun Dec 30, 2018 7:02 pm

it might be possible to make this run on a mac with wine. I will spend a few minutes this morning to see if I can.

Dewdman42 · Post by **Dewdman42** » Sun Dec 30, 2018 7:19 pm

However it just occurred to me that even if this works on wine, which I will tell you momentarily....or if it can be used on a virtual machine, you'd basically have to install all your VST plugins into the virtual machine or wine environment, just to do what it needs to do. That is probably overkill for most people, including myself, so its a bit of a moot point.

If you need to learn or spend time with .NET for other professional reasons, that is understandable, and frankly your software will never work on a mac that way. Otherwise, in addition to JUCE, you could check out QT and wx, the latter of which is totally unrestricted, but a bit more dated and no built in support for VST hosting like JUCE has.

BTW, with free JUCE personal, you are allowed to sell your software for up to $50k a year under that license. You'd only have to pay for an indie license or higher if you started making more money than that...which is pretty reasonable if you ask me.

Drachenkatze · Post by **Drachenkatze** » Mon Dec 31, 2018 2:05 am

I've made my point regarding the "why" clear. It's an effort question, and I see no point in spending maybe 10 times or even more effort to support a platform that it closed, not available to me, and will most likely not turn any profit.

Remember, I started this to solve a problem I personally have, on a platform I personally use. I simply do not have the resources available to develop using C++, which is considerably more effort than using .NET.

I already invested more than 500 hours into that project to get it to this point. To compensate for that, I'd need to sell 1000+ licenses. I did sell one so far.

maax555 · Post by **maax555** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 2:20 pm

Hi, So I have the Korg Legacy Vst instruments, Omnisphere 2.5, lots of Steinberg instruments and Virus Snow which also works as a VST plug in. Will this work for all of these, if not please advise which it will work with. thanks

maax555 · Post by **maax555** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 2:26 pm

Hi, I have just found a list of supported plugins, unfortunately only the Korg stuff is mentioned.
Can i ask does this convert and make available all of the additional banks and cards used in the M1 plugin?

Drachenkatze · Post by **Drachenkatze** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 2:31 pm

It depends on the plugin. Best you download the trial and Check for yourself. Please wait a few days until the next version is out since there's a bug in the current release which prevents pm from starting on new installations.

Drachenkatze · Post by **Drachenkatze** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 3:00 pm

Workaround for the current version to get it running: https://www.native-instruments.com/foru ... st-1739015

VST plugins which support the VST programs standard are always supported, including additional FXB/FXP banks. Information about the VST programs standard: https://presetmagician.gitbook.io/help/ ... s-standard

Omnisphere 2.5 is hard to support as they most likely using their own preset management system and there's no demo available, so it's unlikely that I can implement support for it soon

Steinberg plugins are on the list, but it really depends on if they use their own preset browser or if they support the VST programs standard.

aMUSEd · Post by **aMUSEd** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 4:01 pm

Steinberg plugins tend to use .vstpreset format which is more part of the VST3 standard (even for their VST2 plugins, which only exist on Windows, and AUs for Mac). Not sure how compatible that would be with FXP but probably not.

wetdentist · Post by **wetdentist** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 4:16 pm

i will be excited to use this when there is a version of the software that i can get to work. so far, i haven't been able to do that. but i'm sure eventually, once this is out of alpha/beta, it will be super for me

maax555 · Post by **maax555** » Tue Jan 29, 2019 7:17 pm

I think the software looks great, very well set out and presented. However without ability to convert my other two main vendors instrument in Steinberg and Spectrasonics I won't be purchasing this.

PresetMagician: Generate NKS Presets from VST plugins