I guess I’m not alone when I say that I have projects that are so old that current versions of plugins can’t or won’t correctly recall the patch information anymore, either because their ID is changed because they became 64bit, or there’s a vst3 version that is not compatible with the older one…
For years I’m looking on internet for a tool that shows you every patch contained for a certain vsti, but I usually end up having to scavenge the .CPR file in a hex editor to find it. Needless to say that’s sometimes a daunting task.
Nowadays we use instrument tracks which allow you to swap in vsti’s without affecting the channel’s fx and mixer settings. The only thing that is missing is the ability to inspect what the patchname for a certain instrument was in a human readable form.
So I wonder, does steinberg have the ability to make or provide a framework in cubase that shows you the bespoke patch for a certain instrument that failed to load ? Just like you would see the “X plugin is missing” and you see its name surrounded by 3 !'s. It would be nice to be able to see what the name of the patch is.
It would make it easy for me to know which patch to load in a new instance of the plugin that WILL load.
I don’t think that Steinberg can do that, as most VSTi have their own internal preset management that Cubase doesn’t know about. Only if a plugin uses the DAWs preset management you could read the patch name.
What I sometimes was wondering about is how to extract the plugin state that is saved with the project. If you could save that e.g. as an fxp file , it might be useful, say in the case you have an old project with a VST2 plugin that has an VST3 equivalent (but a different plugin id, which sadly some developers do) , you could try to load the fxp in the new plugin. Of course, there is no guarantee that that will work.
so for the future it’s maybe great to save the state of an entire channel and the plugin preset into fxp’s ?
And yes i’ve seen that omnisphere save datat is embedde in html format. But with virus ti and nexus there’s always a readable name, it’s just not always sure where it’s stored unless you know some of the patch names. Virus patches always have the initials of the creators, so you could know where to look for. But I was also wonderinf if it had any hex code which preceeds a patch name. Still it’s very tough to find out with out browsing through all the readable text.