Separate add-on downloads for Padshop 2 and Grooove Agent 5 in Download Assistant??

Nickeldome · December 3, 2020, 8:51am

Yesterday I noticed that for all or almost all add-ons and instrument sets for Padshop 2 and GA 5 separate downloads are available next to the old Padshop Pro/GA4 versions.

Does anyone know the added value of these compared to the already installed Padshop Pro/GA4 versions? As far as I can tell my old Padshop Pro installations seem to work fine with Padshop 2? But maybe I’m missing something? Is it advisable to remove the old version and install the new ones? Or install them on top of the existing?

There’s no information whatsoever on this in Download Assistant. Nor is there on the shop or the download page? Would be nice to know before downloading 20+ gigabytes of data?

David_W · December 3, 2020, 8:52am

Padshop 2 and Groove Agent 5 use Steinberg Library Manager, unlike the older versions of Padshop and Groove Agent. Retrologue 2 also uses Steinberg Library Manager from 2.2.20 onwards.

If you already have additional content installed and working I can’t think there is any need to reinstall it. However, if you need to reinstall the content, I expect you will need the newer installers to get things correctly set up with Steinberg Library Manager.

Nickeldome · December 3, 2020, 8:52am

I downloaded a few small ones and discovered the *.vstsound files are identical to those installed with the PP4/GA4 installation. The only difference is that the P2/GA5 versions have no installer, only the vstsound files. So you need to set these up using the Library Manager instead of using the installer.

CB10 and I think even earlier versions already used the Library Manager to be able to install and configure content so this creates confusion! Especially for people that have no idea what *.vstsound files are. The difference between these downloads have absolutely noting to do with P2&GA5 itself!They shouldn’t mark these downloads as ‘only for P2&GA5’ but rather as ‘only for versions CBXX and above’? Especially without any documentation it creates a lot of unnecessary confusion. Because it implies that you need to reinstall these if you upgraded to P2 and/or GA5. Hope they’ll fix this soon or at least add some documentation explaining things.