FEATURE REQUEST: WaveLab Pro Portable

Philippe, how difficult would it be to produce WaveLab Pro Portable?

What do you mean with this term?

@PG1, thank you for your swift reply.

For this request, “portable” means a self-contained application in the manner of widely-used “portable apps.” The portable installation would include all settings, user files, etc. in a single directory (instead of writing to the system registry, OS user and system folders, etc.). An example use case would be WaveLab installed on an external USB drive, which could be attached to any number of computers and run successfully without requiring any changes to the computers’ OS or user files.

The fact of portability would be separate from licensing considerations. (Obviously, the portable app would not run without proper license authorization.)

The benefit? With a portable version, a user could maintain a single installation exactly as the user wants, with all settings, plugins, etc. configured precisely as the user likes, and use that single setup on various systems.

For those who frequently work on different computers, replicating that setup via the traditional install process is time-consuming and often needlessly laborious, especially if the OS environments are substantially different between machines. Even with settings import/export and manually copying of files, often something doesn’t go right. With a portable app, the user simply moves the application folder to the next computer and everything works.

Even for those who don’t frequently work on different computers, a portable WaveLab would make it much easier (at least on Windows) to migrate when you acquire a new machine. There would be no installation, re-making/importing settings, reconfiguring plugins, etc. You would simply move your existing setup to the new machine.

Additional notes:

If system-level drivers and/or the licensing scheme need to be installed, those could be separate from the portable install itself. When run on a system missing any required drivers, WaveLab could prompt the user to install them (and perhaps auto-launch the installation upon the user’s approval).

Portable apps are more popularly known by platform-based examples such as those found here and here and here and here, although it seems highly likely that a portable WaveLab Pro would be built and released directly by you rather than released via one of these platforms. Examples of self-authored releases of commercial portable software are numerous; here are just a few quick examples: GoodSync ($300 version); Sublime Text, Beyond Compare (which offers a traditional and a portable install in one installer), etc. MusicBee isn’t commercial but is an example of a portable audio application that utilizes ASIO drivers and multiple plugins.

It is already almost possible, thanks to this option:

The limits are: no CD operations if you run as such, as the target machine might not have the driver installed.

Note: the option I mention was not tested for ages.

@PG1, thanks again for the quick answer!

Fantastic!

That setting had been noticed, but wasn’t sure if it would achieve full portability. A few questions:

  1. Obviously, this setting is made after the user has already performed a “traditional” installation. During installation, the user can choose where to install the application, so obviously an external drive could be selected. Are there any items written to system registry or system folders during installation? If so, do they get re-written once the “Application Folder (Portable Installation)” setting is made? In other words, does making this setting literally put everything WaveLab into the application directory?

  2. Depending on the answers above, this may be relevant: Would it be possible to place the setting you mentioned in the installer process itself, so that from the very beginning, WaveLab is installed as a portable application, rather than having to change it once installed?

  3. If the user is able to install the correct driver, could CD operations then be run in portable WaveLab? Or have you hard-coded a restriction? (There are several portable apps which offer CD/DVD authoring, so not sure if this is a hardware-related issue or something you needed to mandate for a particular reason.)

  1. WaveLab does not write in the registry
  2. No. But once the installation is done somewhere, you can simply copy the program folder. Which is a raw form of installation.
  3. Yes (Gear driver is downloadable as a separate installer).

Try to experiment, now :wink: