Auto-load a preset on start up

[HughBanton]

Hi all; wondering if someone can help me with a preset problem?

Since returning to FS in February this year (I briefly played with SM around 10 years ago) I've been developing a 'Virtual Pipe Organ' generator. I've been involved with digital church organs for much of my career - semi-retired now - and my project is mainly based on known techniques, but naturally I'm trying to step it up several gears from it's original 80s / 90s hardware inception.

All working pretty well on the audio front, my current problem is only to do with presets. So I won't put up an .fsm at this stage - still a bit buggy and would need endless explanation. Suffice it to say that it's an additive system; there are harmonic sliders for several 'voicing points' on the keyboard and the system interpolates between them and ulimately writes 61 waveforms, one for each note. Similarly I have pitch & amplitude envelope & randomisation generators which are also rate-scaled & interpolated up the keyboard to make 61 of each. Finally it's layered (up to 4 at present), so that you can have more than one sound playing simultaneously, e.g one for the sustained tone and one for attack transients.

Anyway ... the intention is that it simulates just one pipe rank (one organ stop), so if you want an organ with say 12 stops you would have 12 vst instances. (Desperately keeping my eye on cpu% - it's looking feasible so far!). Once set up, 'voiced' and all parameters saved you'd leave it alone and just switch the 'stops' on/off as required, via MIDI.

What I cannot figure out is how to get it to automatically load a preset upon start up. I've currently got a regular preset manager working fine, but in reality each 'instance' only needs to load a single preset, for whichever organ stop it's generating. I can load and save OK, but I can't figure out how to make it automatically load its nominated preset.

Thanks for any help.

[Spogg]

Hello!

I made a preset management tutorial:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5985#p28501

I think your answer is there but any further issues or questions please just ask...

Your project sound fascinating BTW!

Cheers

Spogg

[HughBanton]

Many thanks Spogg. I'm aware of your tutorial, in fact I doubt I could have got the pre-set element working without it! I'd go on to say that your enthusiastic input & links on this forum have helped out with all sorts of technical hurdles that I've managed to overcome, brilliant

Having now knocked up a 'simplest possible' test vst I can see that the answer to my question is rather obvious - the vst host takes care of reloading the last-used preset, not the plugin. (Correct?) In which case I never really had a problem ...

Yes, the project is indeed proving fascinating: the inspiration is the 'Bradford Computing Organ' system (googl'it), originally conceived in the 70s (pre sampling), and which used Z80s and 64k ram! So being able to throw quad-core and Gb of memory at the concept is most liberating, hence my novel approach of writing waveforms for every note, which would never have been possible ... with 64k! Allows for perfect keyboard scaling and graphic-equaliser-like frequency response adjustment, most elegant when compared to the old hardware versions I used to regularly deal with. (Two issues that are always a major struggle with sampling, by the way).

No doubt I'll post some examples when I'm further down the road. Many thanks again.

[Spogg]

Having now knocked up a 'simplest possible' test vst I can see that the answer to my question is rather obvious - the vst host takes care of reloading the last-used preset, not the plugin. (Correct?) In which case I never really had a problem ...

Yes, that's correct! It's saved with each song/project file.
If you want to make a VSTi for each and every individual register/pipe length you wouldn't have to have the preset manager on the front panels. Of course if you want just one VSTi then you'd need it to be able to load the appropriate pipe preset when setting up the DAW for your piece(s).

Sounds like great fun and I can't wait to hear it...

Cheers

Spogg