When I open my Media Bay, Cubase doesn’t seem to find anything related to Arturia instruments. It seems like the factory presets within each instrument that is included in the Arturia V Collection is separate from the Media Bay, entirely.
Can someone please clarify and explain this?
I’m not sure what the best workflow would be for browsing presets in third party VSTs like the ones from Arturia.
So far, I have been browsing through some factory presets in Steinberg’s own instruments like Padshop and Retrologue. And I have been rating different factory presets by giving them different amount of stars.
But Arturia has a different rating system, where you “like” by clicking the heart icon, and that is fine. But the question is: Can I somehow import all Arturia presets into Media Bay and rate them from there?
Or is it too much of a hassle?
My greatest concern is this. If I spent a lot of time browsing through Arturia’s presets and “liking” them individually, and then I have to switch computers or upgrade to the newest version of Cubase (or Arturia) - I am worried that I could lose my “liked” presets.
If it’s not possible to import Arturia presets into the Media Bay, then I just have to “like” them within the Arturia’s own ecosystem and back them up manually once and while.
But if it’s possible to somehow get them into the Media Bay, and is it even wise to do it like that?
I’m still trying to understand, whether the Media Bay is primarily designed for
Steinberg’s own VSTs and their factory presets, or if it’s normal to get third party VST presets working there, as well?
Sure. Arturia and many other plugin vendors out there don’t provide the necessary vstPreset files for their plugin presets. I think this is simply because they do have their own integrated browsers (Arturia has the great in my opinion Analog Lab). But then again, they do provide NKS preset files, but I don’t wish to discuss this one, at least not in this thread.
Anyway, MediaBay cannot directly handle plugin presets if they’re not exposed this way to it. Same goes for all other DAWs out there.
To me, when dealing with plugins, there are two ways:
Learn a plugin in and out, and use the presets/controls to its extremes and/or
Have a mechanism to browse through presets of similar categories/types for all the plugins we have, especially when we’re not into sound design that much, and feel happy with presets. (I tend to belong to this group, though I do get into design in some special cases). This way, we can more easily “compare” presets on the fly, i.e. searching for a pad, and having a whole universe of them from different plugin vendors to choose from immediately. This, in the production stage is invaluable in my opinion.
Yes. I do have a program for that. Wish I could share it straight away, but I can’t, again for reasons not worth to mention here. But please note that it’s totally doable.
A video demonstrating the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eaUkRzK8-c
Maybe yes again Most modern VSTs nowadays have excellent browsers.
The “Liked” property of the presets is stored in a database. Whenever you have the need to move to another PC you can always copy this one to your new PC, don’t worry about it.
No, it’s not about their own VSTs though currently you’re right to suppose so. It can host third party plugins as well. Here’s a small video of my current MediaBay structure, containing not just Steinberg’s VSTs:
BUT, I need to give some insights here, since I do feel you on this subject. I did get into vstPresets conversions for my plugins ONLY when I needed to create a way for a Novation SL MK3 to browse through them, while having previews at the same time, taking advantage of the mediaBay mechanism and NKS previews files at the same time. And I did it using an external app with the MIDI Remote API together. If I didn’t have to do this, I’m not sure if I would go for such conversion tools. I still use it, and I still use the NKS approach too when I have a KK MK2 connected. AND I still use the Keylab’s own browsing mechanism, again when connected. They’re all great to have and enjoy comparisons and final selections
What an awesome reply. Thank you so much for the detailed explanation. I don’t have the time to watch the videos right now, but I will do it later. In the meantime could you please tell me if there are any disadvantages in converting Arturia presets into vstpreset files? Would there be a situation, where it’s best to just use the Analog Lab, instead of the Media Bay. I’m just worried to lose progress when marking some good presets for later.
Yes. For example in AL we can have two instrument slots and occupy them with totally different presets making a nice blend, and then saving this as another preset. And at the same time we have the internal sound effects of AL. There’s been a time that I only used AL for everything
Don’t. If you have the Arturia’s database in place, even if things go nasty, I can help you recover them. My advice on this one, since you’re worrying about it? Always keep a backup of this database. In Windows, if you haven’t chosen a custom directory, it’s C:\ProgramData\Arturia\Presets\db.db3 .
Awesome! So that is the file. I have asked ChatGPT yesterday about it, and it didn’t mention that file, so I got confused. But it makes sense now.
I just verified it by liking a preset and the “date modified” time stamp just got updated. I tried both with Analog Lab and with Pigments. Same *.db3 is updating which is just great. It gives a lot of peace of mind knowing exactly which file to back up manually.
And what you said about AL and its advantages. That’s pretty cool, actually. I’m still new to all that, so I’m looking forward to learning more.
But I’m wondering - if using AL has those special advantages, then which advantages would you say using Media Bay has, other than the obvious ones which is the star rating system and maybe adding some tags to some presets?
I can imagine maybe using AL to pick out a handful of good presets using its own rating system, and then later maybe converting those liked Arturia presets into something that MB can read for further curation? Do you think that would be a viable workflow in the long run?
In fact, when we’re in the stage of building our “base” presets list, this is always a good way to do it. I have friends who do exactly this, have a collections of 100-1000 presets made up this exact way, by then properly tagging these presets for even faster recall.
This is because it’s an idiot. I’ve mentioned it to it several times already, but I guess it needs some time to update
This is a massive topic to me. It’s true that many instruments have great browsers… but would it be better if all presets were centralized? Mostly yes, right?
I can imagine at least a few benefits to this. I wish backing up all presets+favorites were easier. And having a system-wide taggable preset database for all synths+plugins would kind of be amazing. But you know that old xkcd comic about standards.
I still fail to understand why vendors don’t get into supplying their vst plugin presets to the vstPreset format as well. One reason that comes to mind is that since a vstPreset file contains all the necessary info (states) of the preset, then one could easily and illegally share the presets of paid libs to the public. But even without the vstPresets, one can always share the initial lib in whichever format it has. Furthermore, if this was the case, there wouldn’t be any NKSf shared by many vendors out there. This is puzzling to me, because when you have NSKf ready, it’s a matter of 1-2 minutes to convert them to vstPreset files and vice versa. I really don’t know what’s happening, perhaps there’s no big interest in users for centralised workflows as we both seem to like…
Most modern VSTs nowadays have excellent browsers.
