Session Portability: Play-only Plugins?!?

[peeder]

We were discussing the idea of engineers sharing their mixing secrets on another thread. The blu-ray disc format will be great for this: you get full PCM audio (multichannel even) plus video and data. So we could film all the details of a great engineer working on a song, listen to all the decisions they make as they make them...incredible education opportunity.

The best will be opening up the actual mixes and the files and seeing the final settings for everything. Obviously these are "master tapes" and the artist/record co would need to approve it. But Duncan Sheik just did an album like that where he had a second disc of raw tracks included, intended for engineers to remix. So it's possible...

The problem of course, is portability of mixes. This isn't just a problem for education, it's a problem in general. When I take a Pro Tools session from studio to studio, the plug-ins aren't going to follow me around necessarily. The ilok brings my plugin licenses with me, but I might want to use some pretty nifty plugs at one studio that neither I nor another studio I visit will have available. And so I'm stuck.

This problem exists in other technologies, and the most common example would be Microsoft Word. Not everyone is willing to $hell out for a copy of Word. But Word is the lingua franca...people send you Word documents, and expect you to read them. Microsoft realized at some point that the people who weren't going to buy Word probably wouldn't do it even if forced to this way...and that it was far more in Micro$oft's interest to have Word be the lingua franca than to engage in such force. Since people would return documents to their senders saying "I can't open this file" it was actually stunting Word's dominance as a standard.

So they created Word Pad and other freely available technologies to make sure everyone could open Word files. They didn't act to stop competitors from opening those files (must have been hard for them to repress their monopoly reflex). They just gave it away!

Back to audio plugins. Why can't we have Play-only plugins: versions of plugins that don't allow parameter modification (other than bypass) but are able to load settings and apply them to audio passing through. The user interface would be accessible, just the knobs and sliders wouldn't turn. Automation would continue to work but the DAW wouldn't allow new automation to be written to a play-only plugin (otherwise you'd just change the settings that way).

Every studio could just download all the plugins available in play-only format and we could have complete mix portability. There would be no better advertisement for a plugin than seeing and hearing it applied to great effect on a mix by a top engineer. People would be drooling over what it did to the sound and would have to buy buy buy.

This would also motivate the various manufacturers to go native and cross-platform with at least the play-only versions. All the developers would be interested in becoming a "standard" for excellence at their stock-in-trade. No one would want to hit the sour note of "we have to get rid of that plugin because it won't work in the other room."

It would take one programmer less than a day to disable the UI controls and make an installer and web page for the play-only version...the cost of doing this is negligible. Since code would be conditionally stripped, it would be way too hard to make a play-only version fully operational via hacking. The DAW manufacturers would have a field in their plugin metadata for "Play only" and would simply prevent new automation from being applied to any so marked. They could also prevent them from being copied or moved to other tracks/sessions.

Anything I missed?

[zimv20]

Originally Posted by peeder

Why can't we have Play-only plugins: versions of plugins that don't allow parameter modification

it's an interesting idea, to be sure. back to that in a sec...

my producing partner ran PT 6.4 for a long time, and when i opened his sessions in PT 7, some delay plugs didn't "make the jump". instead of a greyed out box w/ all the "medium delay" parameters displaying, it just showed a greyed out medium delay plug.

wtf use is that? i always thought digi could do much better w/ their own plugs: instantiate the correct new one, and copy the values. i don't understand why that would be difficult.

SO: it would be cool if plug-in makers could do something where, if the plug didn't validate, you had the option of opening a comparable digirack plug with the plug-in makers best guess for similar sounds.

i realize this could be pretty difficult to implement in a useful way, but i think it's worth a shot.

of course, there may not be a digirack equivalent, but for EQs and compressors and delays, et. al., i think it's doable.

[Bounce]

Originally Posted by zimv20

it's an interesting idea, to be sure. back to that in a sec...

my producing partner ran PT 6.4 for a long time, and when i opened his sessions in PT 7, some delay plugs didn't "make the jump". instead of a greyed out box w/ all the "medium delay" parameters displaying, it just showed a greyed out medium delay plug.

wtf use is that? i always thought digi could do much better w/ their own plugs: instantiate the correct new one, and copy the values. i don't understand why that would be difficult.

Ya know, that annoyed me as well with the Digi delays when I switched to HD from mixplus. Someone tipped me off that in the Digidesign folder where your Pro Tools app is, there is a folder called "unsupported something or other" and the old delay plugs are in there which you can drop into your plug ins folder and they work fine for me :-)

I like the idea of "play only" versions of plug ins. That's excellent!

[zimv20]

bounce -- thanks for the tip!

[C Heat]

Cool idea.