The dawn of VST tools

The first 20 years of working with Steinberg's Virtual Studio Technology was, for me, disappointing. Hordes of developers produced plugins and DAWs, with all the focus seemingly placed on "endless sonic possibilities", but far too little attention being paid to workflow and integration between the plugins and their hosts.

Some notable exceptions like Reason and FLStudio improved workflow through homogeneity - "stay inside our ecosystem of plugins, and the workflow will be better". Arguably this was a significant step up from the likes of Cubase, Sonar, Reaper, etc. but fell flat for any producers wanting to use best-of-breed plugins, rather than staying inside the confines of whatever shipped with the DAW.

The best all-round-best-of-breed setup I've found to date is Bitwig Studio hosting Omnisphere 2 and Synthmaster. The Bitwig preset browser offers a fully unified, searchable, meta-data rich, plugin-agnostic way of managing and finding your sounds. Omnisphere and Synthmaster are two plugins I particularly admire because of their meta-data-rich presets over-and-above having excellent sonic abilities. In my opinion, Synthmaster also offers the best midi-implementation for controller based preset browsing that I've ever seen in a plugin. 

Bitwig's preset browsing, however, is king. Its flexible midi-controller integration using javascript allows preset browsing to be entirely controller based, and uniform across all plugins. The challenge, then, is how to get preset meta-data for these excellent plugins and into Bitwig studio, and that is what this blog is all about...  because today, VstTools was published to the PowerShell Gallery. 

VstTools provides a tool-set for managing metadata in Omnipshere and Bitwig presets and, more importantly, allows new Bitwig presets to be created from Omnisphere patches & multis! 

In the coming weeks, I will be blogging about how to use these PowerShell cmdlets, as well as adding new features to this powershell module. Currently, the development roadmap for VstTools is:

• Add a Synthmaster preset to Bitwig preset converter.
• Add Synthmaster library to Bitwig conversion
  (if I can figure out the Synthmaster library format)
• Create a Windows service for automatically synchronizing Bitwig presets with any changes made to underlying Omnipshere / Synthmaster presets.
• Add XferRecords Serum to Bitwig conversion.

In the meantime, head over to the PowerShell gallery and have a go at converting your first patch.