Acoustica User Forums

Hello to all !
Since my last message I am a very happy owner of mixcraft pro studio 9 for the first time (after a few days with the demo). Coming mainly from pro tools (and other DAWs), I fell in love with this great DAW and can't understand why it is not famous at all...
I don't miss a lot of things from protools or other DAWs, except maybe a few. I want to ask you about one of them :

Is there a way to automatically manage plugins in Mixcraft ?

It doesnt seem possible but i can't even understand why this is not a feature today... Protools arranges automatically your plug-ins by manufacturer, types (com, eq etc.) or both, studio one does the same and even shows little images of the plugins, all the other DAWs do it.... i've never seen a DAW not doing any automatic listing and I have to admit I'm very disappointed. I have the mega bundle by plugin alliance (110+ plugins), I have a lot of waves plugins, fabfilters... And when i click the +fx i can't believe that I just have an alphabetical order of hundreds of plugins....
Of course you can search, but not all EQ's have "EQ" in the name, not all comps etc... and I can't imagine storing by hand, ONE BY ONE, all these plugins into home-made collections...

Sorry if I sound disappointed (which I am), I love the program and I will keep using it, but could anyone tell me if this feature exists, or if it is in development ?

Thank you all

Maybe this video will help?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spwq-M-Iv9g

Hi trevlyns,
thank you for your replay but i already the video you posted, and it's exactly what i'm saying in my post : all the sorting of plugins has to be manual, the only sorting provided is alphabetical. Again, when you open protools, even if you have 500k plugins, when you wanna add one to a channel, they are all automatically ordered in lists by plugin type and manufacturer, same with studio one, reason, cubase, cakewalk, logic...

I'm starting to understand that the developers didn't think about this and it's too bad :'(

Its a feature request that has been previously logged.

well i'm keeping my fingers crossed then...

Wow, 500k plug-ins is really a lot of plug-ins... Out of curiosity, do you just collect plug-ins or do you actually use all of them?

Hi,

Does the Pro Tools feature do a good job of it? I mean, I'm not sure how it would work, because the brand and function of each plugin wouldn't be immediately clear to an algorithm. Not every plugin would have a metadata file that spelled everything out. Does it maybe just get the big ones that everybody uses? Do they have somebody painstakingly cataloging every plugin? Even then, I'd have to imagine a lot of plugins would slip through the cracks.


Greg

@Greg,

Actually, like the OP, I have used (or been "exposed to" ) multiple other DAW's with this feature and was amazed at how well it worked.
I cant say what trickery is involved, but the accuracy at organizing my collection was actually very impressive!

But at the same time, while I have amassed a bit of a collection....
Manually organizing the relatively small portion I actually regularly use, isnt that big of an issue for me. Many of the titles I have installed are there at the ready for shared projects, collabs, etc and I dont really need to find them- they are just available to automatically load when used in other peoples projects.

I agree with the OP. Plugin management is extremely tedious if you try to organize a large collection manually. There are so many plugins out there and many are free that pluginitis is a real pandemic. Not everyone keeps a tight rein on their plugins or have the discipline to do so. MC 9.1?

Acoustica Greg wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 4:43 pm Does the Pro Tools feature do a good job of it?

Hi Greg,

My secondary DAW does a pretty decent job with it, but the self-organizing features are pretty simple and basic. It:

1. Is somehow able to identify plugin directories by itself.
2. Color codes plugins by whether they are 32, 64, VST3, etc...
3. Hides duplicates, and displays only the 'best' version of each unless you want to see them all.

That said, when I had a whole bunch of DAWs on my machine last year, the Cakewalk plugin organizer for instance was hit-or-miss. Maybe it provides a starting point but definitely far from perfect.

In the case of MC, there are a couple things that would improve the plugin experience:

1. Create an 'Uncategorized' category in the manager so you can figure out which ones you still need to categorize.
2. Ability to select/drag/drop multiple plugins into categories instead of one at a time.
3. Figure out why the internal MC preset system is so spotty at recognizing/displaying presets. I've found the cheaper and nastier the plugin, the more likely it is that MC recognizes the presets. It's a huge advantage when MC incorporates the presets automatically in the top of the plugin window/instrument picker.
4. Figure out why the new (green) MIDI CC controller doesn't record to track. This feature is absolutely useless if it doesn't record to the track. I can only guess it has to do with splitting up the MIDI stream, which is something that's been requested a lot anyway for these chord generating plugins and what not.

Best,

Nathan

I agree with this feature request. I had major problems with Samplitude's vst handling, my main gripe was having a fixed size container where the plugins or developers names were listed and many of my mine went outside the box and I' couldn't scroll to find them. As someone new to Mixcraft, the majority of excellent "things" outways the "windows 95" way of handling vst's. I often use Mulab to start things quickly and I just love the ability to drag and drop synths and effects from my vst drive open on one of the monitors into any track/slot as I want. I might count how many effects I have when I start to go crazy from being "locked down" but at the moment I've 20 years worth gear acquisition syndrome on my vst drive and the effects take along time to scroll down in the short list thing in the Mixcraft's mixer. I know there is a "recently used" thing, but its very limited and the one here seems to have intermittent amnesia .

Hi,

Well, thanks for the feature request! I'll pass it along.


Greg

jlouvar wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 3:50 pm Wow, 500k plug-ins is really a lot of plug-ins... Out of curiosity, do you just collect plug-ins or do you actually use all of them?

I hope this was ironic because the 500k certainly was... i don't have that many plugins, but i bought the mega bundle of plugin alliance (110+ plugins), i had a deal a few years back for the waves collection, and i have a few little plug-ins that i collected here and there. Of course i don't use half of them on a regular basis, but i like to use very different plugins from time to time, it makes the work seem a bit varied.

Acoustica Greg wrote: ↑Wed Mar 25, 2020 4:43 pm Hi,

Does the Pro Tools feature do a good job of it? I mean, I'm not sure how it would work, because the brand and function of each plugin wouldn't be immediately clear to an algorithm. Not every plugin would have a metadata file that spelled everything out. Does it maybe just get the big ones that everybody uses? Do they have somebody painstakingly cataloging every plugin? Even then, I'd have to imagine a lot of plugins would slip through the cracks.


Greg

Hi Greg, as said by others Protools does a fantastic job at not only extracting (and being always correct) the plugins manufacturer and type, but also automatically displaying mono plugins for mono tracks and stereo ones for stereo tracks... You might think that is because of their proprietary AAX format, but other DAWs that use VSTs like studio one, cubase etc. do exactly the same thing.

heks wrote: ↑Thu Mar 26, 2020 4:38 am I agree with this feature request. I had major problems with Samplitude's vst handling, my main gripe was having a fixed size container where the plugins or developers names were listed and many of my mine went outside the box and I' couldn't scroll to find them. As someone new to Mixcraft, the majority of excellent "things" outways the "windows 95" way of handling vst's. I often use Mulab to start things quickly and I just love the ability to drag and drop synths and effects from my vst drive open on one of the monitors into any track/slot as I want. I might count how many effects I have when I start to go crazy from being "locked down" but at the moment I've 20 years worth gear acquisition syndrome on my vst drive and the effects take along time to scroll down in the short list thing in the Mixcraft's mixer. I know there is a "recently used" thing, but its very limited and the one here seems to have intermittent amnesia .

I agree, i still find way more things that i like about Mixcraft, and I'm a very happy new user; i just wanna point out a few things i've found that, if corrected could make this software even greater.

Hi,

Thanks again for the suggestion.

Greg

An option to have plug-ins be only in a sub folder, like move, or have them be in the main plug-in list and the sub folder, like copy. Now you can put your plug-ins in a folder but it keeps them in the main list as well.

M