Transfer plugin settings from AU to a VST equivalent

I use renoise at work, and recently I’ve had to migrate from Mac to PC. I primarily use softsynth plugins and lots of DSP effects, and previously I was using AU versions of all these. I’ve just gotten set up in Windows 8 with all my plugins installed with their VST equivalents.

However, now I’m finding that I don’t have access to any of the plugin setttings in the old songs I created on the Mac, because the XRNS files are all saved with AU plugin data, not VST plugin data. So no plugins are found (obviously - no AU on PC) and therefore I can’t transfer settings from each plugin to VST equivalents.

Does anyone know of a tool or any way to transfer the parameters of an AU softsynth or DSP effect into a VST equivalent?

I know that I can go back to the Mac and export all the plugin settings as plugin presets, and then reload all those on the PC in the VSTs, but with all the data I need access to and the sheer quantity of plugins I use, that really isn’t practical.

Hoping someone can help!

I know that I can go back to the Mac and export all the plugin settings as plugin presets, and then reload all those on the PC in the VSTs, but with all the data I need access to and the sheer quantity of plugins I use, that really isn’t practical.

Both AU and VST plugins may look the same, but that is only the GUI, otherwise almost nothing is identical.
AU and VST plugins are two different architectures and on each areas stuff is treated and shared differently.
This already makes saving stuff on your Mac inevitable.

A tool (which i couldnt find an existing solution or something that comes close) could indeed soften the pain of having to do this manually per plugin, but needs to be investigated.

Stuff that has to be saved in that case are automation data attached to parameters and linked parameter values. And then hope that all parameters are still in the same order and thus values match properly.

Thanks for the reply vV.

Regarding scripting (i.e. with a tool), I work in a team together with a few very fast programmers, all who have experience with Lua, so this could be a potential solution.

Do you know off hand how renoise stores the parameters set in soft-synths and DSP effects? Are the parameters stored in a way that is independent of AU/VST, and unique only to each plugin developer? Or does the vastly different nature of AU and VST indicate that even the parameters are stored by renoise differently for each plugin type? If the former is true, then theoretically it might be possible to use Lua to pull out the settings of an AU without actually needing to load it… no?

The symbiosis AU wrapper has an algorithm inside to convert from fxp (vst preset) to aupreset at least. If someone wants to program a vice versa converter, maybe this is a good starting point?

Thanks for the reply! I think I’m probably going to just have to go through each file and manually save out presets in each AU plugin’s preset manager (i.e. in that plugin’s native preset format), then load that into the VST equivalent. This is probably the safest solution, assuming that the plugin developers in question have created their own proprietary preset formats independent of AU or VST. Even if there was a tool that could do this automatically using *.aupreset and *.fxp formats inside Renoise, I would still have to go through each plugin, replace it with the VST, then load up the converted presets individually anyway – meaning that not that much time is saved in the end.

The moral of this story is don’t ever switch platforms when you work heavily with plugins! :slight_smile: