Arturia's V-Collection expanded with five more emulations

[bayswater]

I got email from Arturia with an upgrade offer for Analog Lab to V2, presumably because I have a Keylab controller. Apparently, some of the new V Collection patches are in there. I wonder if that includes any of Mr Polich's presets?

[mhschmieder]

I found a few more of the old presets today, hidden via renamings and recategorizations.

Unfortunately, right before these updates, I had just bought two third-party sound banks from Le Lotus Bleu (for Jupiter) and VSP (for Prophet). I cannot find any way to import those, or to export individual patches from the old GUI's to make them available to the new GUI's.

What I am doing instead, is painstakingly recreating the patches that I am using in current album work, to future-proof those projects and also because I am re-rendering after some cleanup of articulations etc.

I am finding the Arturia updates are indeed better for the most part sound-wise, but this isn't evident when re-tracking MIDI that was generated with the old versions plugged in. Regardless of the emulation, ALL of the new versions seem more sensitive to sustain and resonance. I find this common with VI's and even sample libraries as they get better; it's a side effect of improving the dynamic response and the naturalness of the articulations. So I adjust accordingly.

Synclavier V has now been used for three tracks, in place of other sound sources. I haven't had time to fully explore it yet, and it is quite wide in its range of sounds, but I am finding that it can often be good to have one lead voice be a Synclavier when others are traditional subtractive synths or even FM, because it tends to sound thinner, dryer, and cut through for warmer contrast with existing parts vs. building up the mud frequencies.

[doodles]

The backwards compatability is the HUGE problem I have with arturia. When they went from Analog Factory to Analog Lab, they lost half the presets that I had used in previous projects. Even trying to export the preset from the old version and importing to new version wouldn't work.

It meant i had to use 32 lives (buggy as hell) to get it to kind of work, using analog factory. A messy messy workaround.

I've bought these updates, so will see how the update works, but my experience with Arturis is I adore their products, but they're buggy as hell, mostly to do with stuck GUI, etc.

[mhschmieder]

Big software update of the entire V-Collection today -- took quite a bit of my evening. Now I need to review some stuff I did last week that didn't end up how I expected, based on some actual bugs that were fixed:

Mini V -- wasn't saving waveform width previously (would apply to user presets only, I think)
Prophet V -- lots of mess-ups with the Prophet VS wavetable stuff, now fixed
Solina V -- brightness wasn't reacting properly to aftertouch, if assigned as its destination

I have ported a few more missing presets by now, but will have to review them once again to make sure the waveform width isn't missing or zeroed/defaulted.

[waxman]

What controller runs Analog Lab?

[bayswater]

What controller runs Analog Lab?

The Keylab series.

[waxman]

will the experience factory 32 work?

[mhschmieder]

I finished porting all of my in-use-and-missing Arturia presets last weekend. It took a bit of effort in some cases due to GUI changes and the inability (on Macs at least) to fine-tune some of the parameters, but all sound "slightly" better with the new TAE engine.

The patches that I was unsuccessful in porting were from the Prophet VS. They seem to have recoded that synth from scratch (but not the regular prophet V -- though it too got an overhaul). There is almost no compatibility, which probably explains why none of the factory patches made it into the new release.

I gave up, after hours of trying, as it wasn't like the sounds were that great to begin with, and sought out better patches and synths for the tracks in question instead, settling in some cases on new Prophet VS patches and in others on either Prophet-12 hardware synth patches (some of which are my own) or Synclavier V patches.

[mhschmieder]

Unfortunately, Synclavier V is useless as a plug-in, unless sticking with stock presets and no tweaking.

The problem is that the GUI is WAY too tall for a 23" wide screen monitor. It's the same size as the standalone version, plus plug-in decorations at the top, which add another inch or so.

The standalone version is too tall as well, but just barely fits. Why did they make it so tall, when the usable part of the GUI only takes up the middle third of the overall height, and the rest is blank black space?

In the new edition, the Arturia VI's show their parameter values at the very bottom of the GUI instead of next to the mouse. This is less convenient, but probably more performant in terms of rendering.

I was trying to figure out why one preset was out-of-tune, but I was at least able to open it in the standalone version and see that it isn't detuned even though it sounds like it. Ah, the wonders of FM!

Anyway, I moved on from this one patch and decided not to use it or tweak it, but it's annoying to realize that I won't be able to create or tweak new or existing presets in a project context and can only do so in a vacuum using the standalone mode of the VI.

[doodles]

Unfortunately, Synclavier V is useless as a plug-in, unless sticking with stock presets and no tweaking.

The problem is that the GUI is WAY too tall for a 23" wide screen monitor. It's the same size as the standalone version, plus plug-in decorations at the top, which add another inch or so.

Bollocks - sound like they STILL need to sort their GUI out. Why oh why can't they sort this •••• out? I love their stuff so much, but I've been having those issues with the gui since they changed from analog factory to analog lab. AND none of their stuff is very backward compatible. They just change/lose all their presets.

[mhschmieder]

I received an email from Arturia today that they have now released a Preset Updater function, which can be downloaded from their website.

"As we have modified in the V Collection 5 the sound engines of our software instruments the presets from the V Collection 4 were not compatible. This new preset converter allows you to open in the latest versions all the sounds you made in the past.

Download it, scan your presets in a click, select the ones you want to convert and you're done!"

https://www.arturia.com/v-collection/re ... 1-textlink

Funny timing; I had just finished going through dozens of projects this past weekend, to future-proof them by converting or replacing all legacy patches that didn't make it to V5.

I will still find this converter useful though, as the third-party patch libraries that I bought have more complicated patches in them than Arturia's, and especially a lot of arp-oriented stuff as well as atmospheric patches, so I will still probably want to have those patches at my disposal for future projects.

It will be interesting to see whether the Prophet VS patches from V4 can pull forward, given what I discovered about the V5 implementation being so different. It may just be organized and parameterized differently; an internal implementation comparison (vs. the GUI) may not be that different.

[bayswater]

In the email I had from Arturia, there were three products being sold at a discount, V-Collection, U-Collection (?), and Analog Lab 2. I went to the site for Analog Lab 2 and there was no coupon or discounted price linked to my account. I contacted support and they said there had been a mistake at their end, and in fact, Analog Lab 2 was free to me because I have an earlier version.

I've had a few confusing situations like this with Arturia in the past, so before you buy, it might be worth checking things out.

[mhschmieder]

I guess beggars can't be choosers. The converter tool is apparently a batch processor with just a thin veneer of a GUI and no user manual.

The GUI mentions the new filters in the Mini and a couple of other caveats about the sound being different in V5, and that some patches might get renamed during the conversion in order to avoid name collisions.

Literally nothing is said about how they'll be filed and categorized. I probably should have just tried it first on one VI that only showed a single user bank (e.g. Jupiter-8 V2), but as usual when I'm multi-tasking (at the moment, up to a dozen tasks), I was focused on time and just went for it.

I'll have to write this incrementally as I am nursemaiding several downloads and updates and otherwise they'll drag out and I'll be up all night, so bear with me, but I'll divulge what I learn as I go along.

First off, factory presets that didn't made the cut are NOT available to this converter tool -- just third-party libraries, your own user patches, and ones contributed by others to the Arturia website over the years.

But, you see, that's where it gets confusing, because many of those patches got worked into the new factory patches for V5. And there's no easy way to tell in advance what is missing.

You can expand to your heart's content to cherry-pick one patch at a time, but I don't have the time or patience for that.

Anyway, I think I purchased two or three third-party patch libraries, but maybe more. Silvere-Letelier for Mini (mostly arps and atmospheric stuff), and VSP's (Vintage Synth Productions) Prophet library. Oh, also VSP's Vintage bank of the original CS-80 presets. And probably that's it as the other bank names look to follow Arturia conventions of author and/or something that includes Arturia in the name.

All told, there were 2287 presets to convert, 61 of which had to be renamed. The conversion was almost instantaneous, so no worries about that.

Once my Spitfire library purchase is done, I'll feel I can dig in and launch some Arturia VI'a to compare -- including the ones I manually converted vs. the auto-convert versions, as a judge of how good and trustworthy the tool is. That requires deep concentration so I can't be multi-tasking at that time.

[mhschmieder]

In terms of coverage, there's still a lot of missing stuff after the conversion, so presumably those were factory patches that they decided not to bother with during the upgrade. Too bad we can run the converter on factory presets as well as user presets, but the GUI only has two buttons.

I had only ported five patches so far. One from Jupiter-8 and four from Mini. Only two of those got re-converted from their sources: the silvere-letellier Mini sound bank (which probably confirms that I bought it vs. it being a donated sound bank from the Arturia website), and the menno.meijer sound bank (many of which were probably retained in the new factory bank, as he's one of their regular sound designers).

The three that I converted and wouldn't have available otherwise are the one Jupiter-8 patch that I needed from the Tasmodia bank (which I guess means I didn't buy it after all), a nice "Singer" named whistler type patch for Mini by Clay Duncan, and an awesome Mini bass patch from JM Blanchet called "Classic2" which did NOT seem to get renamed as part of the new factory bank either. Nor is it part of the JMB2 bank that DID get converted tonight.

Oh, the banks keep their old names and then show up under "/User" in your Arturia subdirectory of "/Library" on the Mac. So there's nothing messy about where they wind up; they don't get merged into the factory bank and make that one hard to navigate.

OK, all my other tasks are done now, so I can load some instances of Jupiter and Mini and see what's going on with the results...

[mhschmieder]

The VSP sound bank for Prophet V is marvelous, so now I'm glad I bought it. It also sounds better in V5 than V4, due to the improved sound engine.

SEM is interesting in that only one bank was seen as available to port, but only one patch within that bank was ported. This is the N. Ubukata bank, and he's one of their regular sound designers, so I think this means that the patch converter is smart enough to detect duplicates and to avoid them. Strange that they only left one of his patches behind, but it's a complex one ("NU_Bite Brass_BR").

It will be easy to identify the ones converted by the batch processor because the Comments section on the right hand side of the Preset Browser says "Converted from VC4".