Greetings, Friends in Scaler!
The discussion the other day about a standalone version of Scaler leading to recommendation of Tone2’s NanoHost minimalist VST shell had me play more with Scaler in the NanoHost app. It turns out Nanohost lets you save Scaler state as MIDI standard patches in .fxb / .fxp format (program banks & patches) files, which then can be read by DAWs.
This explanatory snapshot is taken from within Nanohost…
So if you save certain Scaler configurations in Nanohost (Scaler itself does not seem to offer that capability yet - the native Scaler preset saves in a custom XML format), you can manage the presets in your DAW’s preset browser, such as for example in Bitwig…
This should also make Scaler presets easily exchangable across DAWs. This of course also works with the Scaler native XML files, but people familiar with their DAW might already do that .fxp/.fxb based process and it might fit better into their workflow - plus, you see Scaler patches integrated with all your other plugin presets.
In Ableton it looks like this:
Seems like Nanohost stores the preset files by default in the VST directory, but you can customize that to your liking.
Just realized another benefit of this way of managing Scaler presets…in some DAWs you can automatically load a plugin by selecting corresponding presets. This method would take one step out of the workflow
Load Scaler plugin into DAW
Load Scaler user preset in Scaler (XML file method)
Versus:
Load DAW preset for Scaler (.fxp file based), voila: Scaler is on your track already with the custom preset loaded in one step.
Funny you were working on this today. I use NanoHost almost every day and today I was playing with it as a midi “sketch pad” and then dragging the clips into my other “DAWs” to quickly audition instruments, effects and layers. (I use it with Studio 1, ZenBeats, NI Maschine and MPC Beats.) I love the way Scaler encodes the chord midi according to the PERFORM and Pad edit settings as well as in real-time while capturing. (For months I was midi capturing anything I was doing with PERFORM on…until I noticed the obvious and just started dragging chords while PERFORM was enabled)
This, plus your .fxp approach, combined with Scaler’s cross-DAW synching, makes for some crazy flexibility.
Thanks for sharing…but curse you for finding one more cool thing to explore.
That works great…thanks. Now it is even easier to work with internal and external versions of Scaler dragging and synching between each.
Thanks @Bernd!
