Relocating specific VST patch that's become unreferenced

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
Post Reply
batsonjay
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Nov 13, 2017 5:17 am

Relocating specific VST patch that's become unreferenced

Post by batsonjay » Mon Nov 13, 2017 5:30 am

Hi -

I have a project using N+I Kontakt as a sound source in a channel. I had to do some disk reorganization, and ended up moving various Kontakt libraries.

Now, when I open this project, Live still knows that Kontakt is the plug-in, but it has forgotten the sound name. The instrument for the VST is there, but it says "unknown" in the drop-down under the title bar, and the sound doesn't play. Even though I know it's a horn (trumpet-like), given the zillions of sounds available in Kontakt I've been unable to find it again.

I have a number of different versions of the files for this track around (courtesy of Splice), but several of them have the same behavior.

Does anybody know if there's a way for me to peek inside one of the project files in Live to look where it keeps track of references to outside VST instruments to see if I can find this again? I'm hoping I could use (unix) 'cat' or something similar to look through the old versions of these project files and find a reference to a patch name, or even index number or path I could use to relocate the sound.

Thanks in advance if you have a hint.
-jb

theophilus
Posts: 531
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2009 3:54 pm

Re: Relocating specific VST patch that's become unreferenced

Post by theophilus » Mon Nov 13, 2017 4:28 pm

depends... an ableton project is just a gzipped xml file (iirc).
So you can probably gunzip it, look at the xml, and figure out where kontakt was.

But... usually, the vst has its own internal format for its data, so it just gives it to Ableton as a binary blob. This is just uuencoded (or base64 encoded? i forget) into the XML, and not really readable. If Kontakt stored all its information there, probably not very likely to find it. But maybe you'll get lucky and it will be in there as plain text (after decoding it, of course).

batsonjay
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Nov 13, 2017 5:17 am

Re: Relocating specific VST patch that's become unreferenced

Post by batsonjay » Mon Nov 13, 2017 5:16 pm

Thanks.

I unzipped the file, and you're right - there was no way to track back to the patch name.

Happily, I found a version of the project that *did* have the patch name in it, so life is good.

Thanks again
-jb

Post Reply