Subject:Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Posted by: inverseroom

Date:10/19/2006 4:41:32 AM

I've got a few complaints and suggestions about how Acid organizes VST's--I'm hoping these things can be addressed in the next update.

One frustration is that, when Acid refreshes the VST list, it goes by the internal name, type, and developer settings, NOT the filename of the .dll. The problem with this is that there is no consistent way these labels are applied by developers--some use obscure abbreviations, or even leave them blank, so that the title of the plug is listed as, say, "Container - SynthEdit." I keep my VST's very carefully organized, renaming the .dll so that the name contains both the developer name and VST...for isntance, "Audio Damage Reverence.dll."

This would be OK, I suppose, if the "rename" function worked, but it doesn't. I spent about half an hour meticulously renaming my VST's in the track FX tab window, and when I opened it again later, all my work had been erased! I figured I had done it wrong, and did the work all over again, and it disappeared again.

As it stands, I am now forced to memorize the fact that the Mutine effects unit is called "SynthEdit Container," and other such tricks, and it's really annoying. Could you please allow an option to have effects and synths named after the filename?

Thanks a lot
JRL

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: inverseroom

Date:10/19/2006 4:43:53 AM

One other thing. I often use energyXT for sequencing and MIDI routing, and have become accustomed to being able to just open up my VST folders and drag .dll's onto the GUI. In eXT, you can drag anything anywhere. Could this be incorporated into Acid? It would be extremely easy to get to drag softsynths into the mixer window to make a bus, or drag effects into tracks.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: inverseroom

Date:10/19/2006 4:57:06 AM

Sorry, one more thing I forgot. Sometimes, VST's are unpacked so that the .dll is sitting in the main folder, but the other stuff--.fxb or .dat files, or GUI elements--are packed away in a sub-folder, and the .dll is programmed to find those things in the sub-folder.

Acid sometimes has trouble figuring out where these other files are. I get a lot of "missing .dat file" stuff...and Nusofting's DK+ drum sampler suddenly couldn't find its GUI anymore. I ended up having to put the .dll into the sub-folder. The frustrating thing here is that, with other hosts (like eXT), this involves an extra click to access. I'm glad Acid searches the whole folder for .dll's, but it should be more flexible when searching for the other files.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: RJ Fielder

Date:10/19/2006 1:10:24 PM

Yeah, I have no less than three VSTis named "Container". It's amazing because when I load a track with Kore and use Kore's browser, I find stuff I forgot I even had because of the way Acid names them (or doesn't name them). That's definitely something I'd like to see addressed in a future version of Acid.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: miquel

Date:10/20/2006 2:24:33 AM

Indeed, Acid has the worst Plugin Manager ever seen.

I hope it will change it in next release.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: Spectralis

Date:10/20/2006 5:31:04 PM

It would be good to have the option of renaming vst's in the VST page. I'd like to organise my fx and synths according to type so sub folders would be useful. One other improvement would help and that is faster loading times for vst/vsti. Drag and drop in Live and eXT really lends itself to live performance.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: inverseroom

Date:10/21/2006 6:45:22 PM

I bought Acid because eXT 1.4 wasn't good enough at streaming audio. Now I'm longing for it because of this! C'mon, sony--if one dude alone in his house in Norway can make it work in beta, your crack programming team can too!

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: miquel

Date:10/23/2006 12:01:18 AM

How many people are developing/supporting Acid? Anybody knows?

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: pwppch

Date:10/23/2006 7:10:57 AM

We are looking at this issue.

Have you complained to the plugin vendors to fix their plugins?

Just curious:
Don't you think that plugin vendors should be a bit more accurate and actually use the VST API as described and provide accurate names for their plugins?

What these vendors are doing is being lazy. They leave the "default" name. This forces hosts to fix the problem of the plugin and use a dll name (cryptic in many cases).

Sure a Rename mechanism would be really cool, but if the plug in vendor just did the right things, this would be much less of a point.

I am only asking that you complain to your plugin vendors as much as you complain to us.

Peter

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: inverseroom

Date:10/23/2006 8:48:41 AM

Peter, I don't mean to be ungrateful, but that's just silly. Of course all VST developers should follow the rules, and of course they're being lazy. But it is never, ever, ever, ever going to happen no matter how much people complain. Meanwhile, all other hosts and sequencers I have ever used handle this problem with aplomb.

Acid has certain advantages that make it my main choice for creating music, and I'm glad it has them, and enjoy using the program. But I think you'd be well served to address the world as it is, not as you wish it was. Adding a little box in the preferences to "name VST's after filename" is not a major request, I'd think...it would be big of you guys to just accept the imperfection of the plugin world and offer this to the user.

And it's not like I'm asking that you create a Rename mechanism...there already is one, and it doesn't work! .dll's, meanwhile, can easily and successfully be renamed, making the former option more workable, for now.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: pwppch

Date:10/23/2006 11:35:19 AM

I don't buy anything you are saying and it is not silly.

Why cheapen the standard by not holding the developers of plugins to be accountable. .

The reason the plug in vendors are lazy is because you hold the host accountable and not the plugin vendor.

If we never hold third party plugin vendors accountable, then they will never ever improve their testing and development practices.

It is not how we wish it to be it is how users wish it to be.

Peter

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: inverseroom

Date:10/23/2006 12:00:20 PM

I'm not holding you responsible for their mistakes! I'm just holding you responsible for not making your host a little more flexible. Most hosts build in more wiggle room than Sony does.

And I DO complain to those developers. And often they respond. Aleksey at Voxengo and the people at M-Audio involved with Wizooverb got right on it when I asked for help. But what they didn't do is tell me to go blame you guys. Ideally, they would fix their plugs, AND you would fix your host--that's how users wish it would be!

Again, I don't mean to antagonize you, peter--Acid is a great product. I just want Sony to be more open and enthusiastic about addressing its weaknesses.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: pwppch

Date:10/23/2006 12:44:59 PM

I understand what you want. And I am not saying we wont do something to address this in the future.

We bend over backwards to deal with third party plugins and driver vendors. The number of special cases we have to deal with specific to third party vendors would astound you. There is no reason for the plugin vendors to fix their problem be cause we work around their problems on our side. Most don't even know they have problems because of all the "wiggle room" host vendors give them.

I expect us to be held accountable for our problems and to provide the most flexible approach to deal with third party vendors. However, the more "wiggle room" we give the plugin vendors, the less likely they will ever commit to paying attention to the details.

The problem needs to be addressed on both sides. We do the best we can, but IMHO, the third party vendors do not. Most merely point the finger back at us and say "it works with Cubase" and are done with it. They want the benifits of being in business, but take little of the responsability.

Why should any host vendor pay the price for poor developement on the part of a third party? And there is real cost involved.

We end up having to tranfer the cost to our user by either charging more or spending internal resources on workarounds and testing against plugins that could just do the right things. The more time we spend fixing the problems of third parties the less time we have to advance the feature set of our products.

We should not have to provide a renaming mechanism if the third party vendors did their jobs right. While a renaming feature sounds trival, it has to be designed, tested, and documents. All of these things cost money. Mulitply that by the number of "wiggles" we do already because of third party problems and the task can become full time.

This said, we always try to keep the best interest of our users in mind. For this specific issue, many of the plugin vendors we have this problem with were completely unware that they have to provide a name or even that there was a way to tell the host the name of the plugin.

Personally, I would not want to purchase a product from a vendor that was not fluent with the API they are supporting. What else could they have missed or where else were they being lazy?

Peter

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: inverseroom

Date:10/23/2006 12:53:48 PM

Thanks for explaining that in detail--I do sympathize. And I really do appreciate the work you're doing to address this problem. I didn't mean to come off like a serial complainer, certainly.

I don't know if it's laziness exactly that makes these products so unstable...so much as chronic disorganization. Sometimes a chaotic mind comes up with something really innovative...and you want to be able to use it in spite of its flaws. I know it's a lot to ask for you guys to make up for this. Just know that if you do manage to, a lot of people will be really happy.

Thanks again
John

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: CineGobs

Date:10/23/2006 3:53:34 PM

I have to agree a bit with Peter here. Acid shouldn't make workarounds just cause some synthedit-plugin author is too lazy to name his plugins.

Acid is IMHO getting better and better at supporting VST plugins. It even works with some plugins that doesn't work properly in f.inst. energyXT.

As Acid users we should report plugin problems to the plugin-authors also. Most plugin-authors are very eager to fix the problems. I've done it several times with success.

Bo

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: pwppch

Date:10/23/2006 7:14:01 PM

One last comment.

Please, when ever you encounter a problem with a plug in vendor and they want to work things out, feel free to have them contact me. I am always willing to work with any third party to make the best possible experiance for the end user.

Peter

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: Spectralis

Date:10/24/2006 6:02:42 PM

I understand that it must be difficult to manage the numerous imperfections in VST implimentation by plugin devs. But when I have contacted devs about problems I'm having using their plugins in ACID on more than one occassion they have pointed out that they have implimented the VST protocol correctly and have adjusted their plugins to fit ACID rather than the other way round.

I'm thinking here of CamelAudio and Urs whose plugins kept changing presets everytime I started play in ACID 5. This has now been resloved but I think there have been problems with the VST implimentaion in ACID and it's not exclusively the fault of plugin developers.

This indicates that having a little wriggle room is helpful to both ACID and VST plugin developers.

Subject:RE: Trouble Organizing VST effects and synths

Reply by: pwppch

Date:10/24/2006 7:57:40 PM

If they would have contacted us - and if they did, they did not contact me - we would have worked with them. We have an open door policy to any plugin vendor - period. All they have to do is tell us.

We are not so arrogant as to believe we are 100% right. We are more than open to being shown what we are doing wrong.

With out knowing the details of these vendors issues, I wont say whether they are wrong or right.

"Wiggle room" still results in general incompatability - I don't care how you spin it.

Peter