Hello,
I’ve been using mediaBay for some time now and I find it extremely helpful when it comes to browsing through audio files, since we get instant previews.
Now, when it comes to browsing instrument presets, though previews do work, there are reasonable delays, since Cubase obviously needs to first load the VST and then alter its states based on the selected preset.
My first suggestion (an easy one I think) is that Cubase remembers the VST of the last selected preset, so that if we browse to another preset of the same VST, it won’t have to load it again, but just change its states to the new preset. This would minimize the loading time, thus our preview would be almost instant.
My second suggestion (partially connected to the first one) is to add the functionality of automatically saving the preview just created “somewhere” (I would prefer it to be in a sub directory of the one where the chosen preset is, with a default name. For example NKS has the .previews sub directory, so something like that would do). This preview file could be of a compressed format (mp3, ogg etc), so it won’t take up much space.
This way, when we browse through presets and Cubase finds an already generated preview, and if of course we have previously chosen (using an option in the media preferences), to use these previous previews, we will get an instant preview, without the need for Cubase to load the VST at all!
The reason why this second suggestion is connected to the first is that if these two get implemented, we can perform presets’ rating much much quicker, making mediaBay even more useful than it currently is. Because now, if we’re in a VST having thousands of presets, and we’re trying to audition them in order to set proper rating, it takes minimum 5-10 second each (especially with “heavier” VSTs), making the whole process very time consuming. Implementing the above suggestions, it would take even 1 sec.