They are categorized by some random dude at Native Instruments and not by you. Your opinion on what preset should be in what category will many times be different than what native-instruments-preset-organizer-guy thinks.
You can’t listen and compare a mono distorted bass synth preset from Massive next to a mono distorted bass synth preset from FM8 next to a mono distorted bass synth preset from Sylenth like you can in Mediabay.
You can’t tag presets in Native Instrument synths using their native presets with your own custom searchable keywords/tags like you can in Mediabay.
etc…
Cubase “can’t handle it” because Native Instruments (and Spectrasonic, Fab Filter, etc…) use their own type of presets. It would be nice if every single plugin used the exact same presets but unfortunately thats not reality…
Again, I know its a LOT of work but like I said, once your presets are all categorized, and tagged with your own unique custom searchable tags and you experience the night n day difference/improvement to your workflow you will wonder how you ever lived without it!
But “VST” really has nothing to do with how 3rd party plugins developers set up their preset systems.
completly agree with the post above from “Stealth” ! yes it’s a hard/long work but when it’s done the mediabay is so powerfull more than you can imagine !
I realize everyone works differently. The concept of going through every single preset and doing it yourself isn’t attractive. But, after working with synths since the late 70’s and being swept up in newer VSTI marketing/technologies I would like to suggest that batch import might not be necessary…and it might even be beneficial if you actually tag each preset.
In the late 90s I spent literally hundreds of hours tagging synth patches one-by-one for MOTU Unisyn. I built up a very large library and everything was good until MOTU decided one day to discontinue Unisyn. So, today I still have a Windows 98 pc in my studio running Unisyn for the sole purpose of editing and categorizing synth patches for my many outboard rack synthesizers. Without Unisyn, many of those synths would be close to worthless due to the lousy user interfaces of the 90’s. Examples would be products from Emu or even an Oberheim Matrix 1000.
With VSTI’s the concept of hundreds…even a thousand presets in one synth isn’t uncommon. But is that necessary to get the job done, or just a distraction? Native Instruments answer for this was Kore, then Kore2 which is no longer supported. Kore also allowed any 3rd party non-NI VSTI to be batch imported and then tagged. Kore was much more than a librarian and editor and so powerful and flexible I think NI had a difficult time marketing it. So with Kore I have 32,500 patches, about 6,000 of them tagged by NI and maybe 100 tagged by myself. I believe there is a 70,000 patch limit. But how does that really help make music?
Most people I’m around seem to have 100-300 “bread n butter” patches that they are very familiar with and know how to implement in their production. If not, they take one of those patches and edit it a bit. This seems to be very different than the NI Kore concept of searching through thousands of NI created and tagged patches.
I realize Steinbergs Media bay is much more than just synth patches. I use it all the time for loops. But one has to stop and ask how much time do you want to invest maintaining/creating a media bay system vs. writing/producing? Especially when Media bay has the limitations and issues it has? Every system for me has ultimately been ineffective if I spend too much time with it. Motu dumped Unisyn due to VSTI’s becoming more popular than hardware synths. Soundquest/midiquest is expensive and has many bugs. NI dumped Kore because they knew they would have to devote “too many resources to it” when they could simply use 10% of the Kore concepts and put them in Maschine to make a fast buck and satisfy a much larger demand.
So how much time do you really want to spend with Media Bay, a system that isn’t really designed for 3rd party developers? And how long will Media Bay be around before it’s morphed or completely abandoned for something better?
For me I sort of split the difference and scroll through sounds making a “best of” list tagged. There are many sounds in a library that don’t appeal to me, so it is worth narrowing it down to the best for me, rating them in tiers, 3, 4, or 5 stars, which become searchable, and by instrument, category, genre, etc,. Yes it is still time consuming, but you become familiar with your library in the process and in the end it is time spent that can pay off. 2 cents
Hi, I’ve been searching for a way to convert my NI Komplete presets to VSTpresets in Cubase Pro 8.
I’ve found this download link to Lanter Audio (Thank you!) with quite a few vstpresets for various VST plugins: http://projects.lanteraudio.nl/downloads/cubase/
Would you mind sharing your method and/or vstpresets?
Thanx in advance.
Cheers!
What am I missing here? No need for a page referring back to presets with Cubase 4.
Why not open each plug-in and go to the area where you save/load presets but are also given the option to do a batch convert? (with the exception of fxb fxp presets)
Thanks for providing this link. I tried saving the massive VSTPresets to a folder but media bay doesn’t seem to recognise them. I’m new to this and was wondering whether I’ve missed an obvious stage?
I was also wondering what the difference is between the VSTPreset extension and the VST3 extension.
Apologies if this is basic bits but my mind is a bit frazzled after reading a bunch of stuff on the web on how I might get massive presets recognised in the media bay…
But how does that really help make music?