I wanted to see if anyone has found a solution for programmatically creating Groove Agent kits? Ableton having a format for drum kits makes it easy for someone to externally create kits from their samples. I’d love to have something similar for GA. Manually creating kits in the UI is fine if you have a couple, but hundreds is pretty daunting.
I have a ton of samples that I would love to turn into Groove Agent kits. These include kits from Maschine that were exported by Kit Maker. As far as I’m aware, there is not a programmatic way to create files that will be discovered as kits by Groove Agent, other than using the MPC import.
I can create the MPC files from my samples, but that is still not ideal because I have to import each of those kits, if I generate them, one by one. I think that GAKs files are probably similar. I don’t have one of those hanging around to try that with.
MPC1000 format is the only way if you want to ‘import’ a whole kit in order to preserve all the settings as much as possible, but it is not ideal as there are limitations such as key range limits.
The Groove Agent format itself has it’s own way of handling velocity ranges which is not really compatible with other formats patches, coarse tune limited to 12 semi’s…
On top of that I also realized the method I had been using to create MPC1000 kits is also bugged and the tuning is all wrong (but some things are right)… Hopefully that gets fixed soon.
In general the format is a ‘closed’ one and not available to decipher or to generate settings for.
In the end, the best and simplest way is to simply drag raw samples from MediaBay or Explorer right to Groove Agent pads. If your samples have been exported from another program, and if they are sequentially numbered they will all go in the correct order when using drag n’ drop.
That said, I will say that IMHO the benefits of the built in Pattern Track makes designing kits much more worthwhile because of how it can auto-generate Pattern Lanes based on what samples are on the Pads.
Thanks for chiming in! Yeah, that is the route I’m going to take, will just be more selective with the kits I import.
I am able to create the empty vstpreset files with basic metadata programmatically, so that at least saves time typing in names and adding fields.
This would be a nice feature addition to GA. It would be awesome if sample kit makers could provide kits that people could easily import or if developers like me could write tools to do it. With all the changes that Steinberg has been making to Cubase/Nuendo, I could see that aligning well with the users that features like drum machine and modulators are trying to bring over.