Hi all,

Sorry for the very basic question but I've spend days and days trying to figure this out without success.
I'm using S-Gear VST with Ableton Live 10.1, and I wanted to switch to VST3 since now both programs support it.

I've heard that VST3 is supposed to expose the presets directly to the DAW, but I can't figure out where they are in Ableton (so I am forced to open the GUI and select them there). In addition, MIDI is not directly routed anymore to the plug-in, so finding these exposed presets is essential in order to use my MIDI controller (and automation).

I can access these exposed presets with Reaper without any problem, but my workflow and live setup is with Ableton so I'd really like to find a solution to this.

Any input or suggestion is appreciated!
Orfeo

Hello Orfeo,

Unfortunately there is no way to directly share DAW settings between the S-Gear VST2 and VST3 because the DAW sees them as two different plug-ins. You need to use the S-Gear preset system to share presets between a VST2 and VST3 instance.

Regarding MIDI support in the plug-in, the VST3 specification did not originally include any support for MIDI, hence lack of MIDI capability in the plug-in. The intention with VST3 is that the plug-in is controlled via automation and the DAW does any mapping of MIDI messages to Plug-in Parameters. That said, there is now some support in VST3 for MIDI Controller messages but we have not implemented this.

Mike

Hi mike,

Thank you for your reply and most of all for this amazing piece of software! I did ask my question in a confusing way, apologies. I'm not trying to move DAW settings between VST2 and VST3, but I'm simply trying to access the S-Gear factory presets (and the few I created myself in S-Gear itself) from Ableton.

I thought said presets were supposed to be exposed to the DAW, but I can't find them anywhere in the DAW interface itself. I need to open the VST3 GUI and manually select the preset I want, but in this way the presets are not accessible from the Ableton Live automation machinery.

I hope my question is a little bit clearer and I apologize if I'm either misunderstanding your reply, or if I'm asking something so basic I should feel embarrassed

Orfeo

I don't use Live often, but I tried a number of VST3 plugins and none of them had the preset drop-down appear, while their VST2 versions did. Although a few had the inbuilt presets show up by expanding the plugin in the plugin list (.vstpreset files). Have you seen any VST3 show the presets n Live?

Good point kierank, I checked the only other VST3 plug-in I have (Analog Lab) and I can't find the factory presets there either!

Must be some Live thing then. For now I'm just loading all the presets in different instances of S-Gear inside an Audio Rack, but I wonder how much I can push this without everything becoming unstable.

Hi Orfeo,

S-Gear VST3 exposes a Program List to the DAW which is simply the current S-Gear bank. It's really just a way to allow the DAW to select presets from the currently loaded bank. I did ponder over whether S-Gear should always expose the 'Factory' presets, or whether it is more useful to expose the current bank, I decided on the latter since in S-Gear v2.9 the Factory Preset/Bank are essentially no different to any other Preset/Bank, except they can be restored if you wish.

With regard to how you access Program Lists in Ableton, I'm not sure if Ableton implements this feature of VST3. I recall that some DAW's do not.

-Mike

Hi mike,

Indeed it seems Ableton has not implemented that feature. I just didn't know that was a possibility, since it seems like a basic thing to have

There is not much in the way of VST3 documentation in the manual, but I did find something regarding AU presets in this article https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209775145-AU-preset-handling-in-Live-9 , which is very suggestive to the way the guys at Ableton want you to interact with plug-in presets.

The suggested solution seems to be to access the presets first in the plug-in UI and then save them as a Ableton presets. This works for VST3---the saved presets are named *.vstpreset and can be handled/automated in the usual way.

It is a bit cumbersome of course, because one has to save presets twice (in S-Gear and in Ableton) to keep things synchronized, but it works.

Thanks for the help to you and kierank both!

Orfeo

Hi All,

So as part of my solution to this problem, I manually saved instances of each of the S-Gear stock presets as vstpreset files.

By saving these in my Ableton User Library, I'm able to recall each of the presets by browsing and hotswapping through my Push 2. This solves the problem for my particular use case. It may also open up other possibilities that I hadn't considered yet.

I'll attach a link to my Onedrive folder with the saved presets in case anyone else wanted to avoid going through the tedious manual process themselves for each of the 123 presets.

If someone else gets some use out of it I'll at least feel like my time was slightly less wasted!

1drv.ms/u/s!Ak0jT4PqnqwH3SpSqUhu_Gw2IHGc?e=wGQMZl

Updated the above link on 01/08/22 to include a folder with the new DriveThru Presets for version 3.0.