Welcome to the manual for VeeSTeeEx!
I hope it makes it a bit easier to undstand the purpose of VeeSTeeEx and how it works and how it can be used.
This is still an early release and only covers some basics. It is far from complete.
VeeSTeeEx is an extender for VST 2 plugins, which adds sophisticated preset management to them.
Which means that – besides standard functionality like loading and saving of banks and presets – VeeSTeeEx offers to import banks and presets into its database.
This way you can have all presets available for a VST 2 plugin easily and fast accessible with the built-in ‘Preset Picker’.
But working with thousands of presets wouldn’t be fun without the possibility to quickly filter presets by let’s say category, rating or search functionality.
Therefore VeeSTeeEx comes with clever tagging functionality and easy as well as complex filtering options.
VeeSTeeEx works by wrapping VST 2 plugins.
Instead of loading the original VST 2 plugins into your host, its ‘VeeSTeeExtified’ versions need to be loaded.
To ‘VeeSTeeExtify’ a VST 2 plugin, you need to wrap it with VeeSTeeEx.
Because this is not a standard installation thing, VeeSTeeEx doesn’t come with an installer, but instead a little bit of manual work needs to be done for each VST 2 plugin for which you want to get the extended preset functionality.
Wrapping a VST 2 plugin is done by copying the VeeSTeeEx-*.dll to the folder where the VST 2 plugin to be wrapped is located.
Make sure you use a VeeSTeeEx-32-*.dll to wrap a VST 2 plugin in 32 bit and VeeSTeeEx-64-*.dll to wrap a 64 bit VST 2 plugin.
And then renaming of that copied VeeSTeeEx-*.dll needs to be done with a simple rule:
Give it the name of the original VST 2 plugin and add ‘Ex’ to it (before the extension ‘.dll’!).
3 examples:
Instead of loading the original VST 2 plugin into your digital audio workstation (DAW), just load the wrapper.
E.g. Load ‘CharlatanEx’ instead of ‘Charlatan’ or ‘Obxd64Ex’ instead of ‘Obxd64’ or ‘Synth1 1.13 beta 3 VST64Ex’ instead of ‘Synth1 1.13 beta 3 VST64’.
When you open the GUI of the wrapped plugin, you will see an area on top of it which is not there for the original VST 2 plugin.
On this area you’ll see (by default) 3 menu buttons called ‘Bank’, ‘Preset’ and ‘Menu’.
There will also be a ‘Bank’ (or ‘Filter’) display area and a ‘Preset’ display area, both of them accompanied by related ‘Previous’ (‘<’) and ‘Next’ (‘>’) buttons.
This area gets added by ‘VeeSTeeEx’ and will later on in the manual be referred to by the name ‘Pilot’.
The Pilot’s look can be changed in many ways (currently only by manually editing a XML file) to fit the look of the wrapped VST 2 plugin.
See ‘Styling the Pilot’.
And when you click on the ‘Preset’ display area, then the ‘Preset Picker’ window will open.
This Preset Picker window comes in 2 flavors:
a) The ‘Internal bank view’ and
b) the ‘Database presets view’
The main purpose of the Preset Picker is to quickly select a preset to be used by the wrapped VST 2 plugin.
To have presets available in the ‘Database presets view’ of the Preset Picker they first need to be imported.
Importing works by selecting 1 or many original bank or preset files for the wrapped VST 2 plugin (‘.fxb’ files for banks, ‘.fxp’ files for presets)
from the Windows file explorer which will open after you click on the corresponding menu entries:
‘Bank’->’Import banks…’ for importing ‘.fxb’ bank files resp.
‘Preset’-> ’Import presets…’ for importing ‘.fxp’ preset files.
Another way to be even able to import bank AND preset files all at once is to use drag’n’drop a selection of ‘.fxb’ and/or ‘.fxp’ files
from the Windows explorer while the Preset Picker is in ‘Database presets view’ AND ‘Maintenance mode’ is checked.
For more details see: Import
Once you imported presets – or you use an already offered ‘.VeeSTeeExPresets’ file for the wrapped VST 2 which might be available for download
e.g. here: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/veesteeex-by-zonderp-productions/downloads
then you can just start to find and select them in the Preset Picker.
Tagging is an important feature of VeeSTeeEx.
You can rate presets as well as assign them to authors and to specific built-in categories, expressions and genres.
But that's not all:
You can also add additional categories, expressions and genres as well as even add completely new tag groups with according tags.
And then tag the database presets with those.
For more details see: Tagging
The 'Pilot' is the area which VeeSTeeEx adds at the top of GUI of the wrapped VST 2 plugin.
It allows for quick selection of presets and access to VeeSTeeEx specific functionality via menu buttons
For more details see: Pilot
The 'Preset Picker' is the window which opens when you click on the preset name area of the 'Pilot'
It allows to quickly select a preset and to do stuff like tagging and filtering of the database presets.
It comes in 2 flavors:
a) Internal bank view
b) Database presets view
For more details see: Preset Picker