I should know this by now but I don’t. If I’m doing a Scaler 3 arrangement in my DAW (Studio One) and I’ve got a couple of tracks on Scaler’s Arrange page with 3rd-party plugins, how do I save and close the file in a way that preserves the plugins and their state?
I’m pretty sure in Sc3 standalone, I can save the whole thing by going into the options dropdown on the top left and saving it. But in the VST3, the plugins need to be re-plugged-in if I close and reopen my DAW, and any work I’ve done in them (such as patches I’ve chosen or keyswitches I’ve toggled) needs to be remembered and recreated.
No you haven’t missed anything. This should be working in VST3 Studio One. Is it not? @Tristan We have a patch specifically for Studio One 7 Windows users coming Friday so maybe that will help? Saving a preset should save everything 100%. it does for me.
Thanks, @davide. I’ll try it again tomorrow. I’ve been finding the save functions non-intuitive, so I need to train myself better. I’ll report back either way.
My stopgap solution, which is not ideal, is to drag my work-in-progress midi into the DAW, and to save it there.
@davide & @Tristan, through a lot of trial and error, I got it to work. It’s very non-intuitive and cumbersome, so I’m either doing it wrong, or it might need some tweaking. Here’s what I did, and my observations:
When I save & reopen the project in my DAW and then open Scaler, the mixer tracks with the plugins show those plugins as unloaded - they have the exclamation points indicating they are missing. (Picture #1. In my DAW, I’ve called this project Scaler Save Test, but in Scaler it’s labeled Eb Descending Ballad.)
With your guidance, I understood that I needed to load my saved preset file. I didn’t see any obvious way to do that, since Scaler 3 already believed that file was open. Through trial and error, I found it: Go up into the preset window on the top center of the SC3 screen, and open the preset browser. Load another preset, and then go back to the preset browser and reload the project on which I’m actually working. Only then does Scaler reload my project’s SC3 plugin instruments and the states they were in. (Pictures #2, #3, #4). (As best I can tell, Scaler defaults into loading the project without the plugins, but because it thinks the project is loaded, you need to “unload” before you can load it completely.)
My other observations:
I don’t think of a work-in-progress as a “preset.” So it’s not intuitive to think of saving a WIP as saving a preset.
Also, a “save” function is usually automatic, or it’s macro’d to a CMD-S or CTRL-S keystroke, or there’s a big “save” button. It’s really not intuitive to have to go into the preset window to do a save, and doubly unintuitive for that to require uncovering an otherwise hidden “save-to-disk” icon, (the moreso because the gray-on-black background makes the icon hard to read).
The whole process of saving a work-in-progress as a user preset involves four or five separate steps: Go to preset window, uncover icon, click icon, save to file (or overwrite existing file). That’s more steps than a typical save.
