FabFilter

Do you mean something like Ozone mothership?

Not sure there is much sense in such a rack made by FF for their plugins unless it offers some perks compared to separate plugins. There might be some benefits though: less memory and CPU use by sharing loaded libraries between plugins, may be some performance improvements by reuse of calculations, etc.

I would prefer if FF offered more granular plugins available, such as a separate multiband (or parametric) transient shaper.

I just made my own FF rack in Cantabile. More effort to configure than with simple drag and drop UI, but works fine. I guess any modern DAW offers something similar, not to mention VE PRO.

I also have racks for few usual signal chains with a mix of plugins from various developers, of course. And one rack for multiple reverbs for quick comparison by quickly switching between them. Will probably do the same for spatial plugins.

not familiar with the mothership but i am with the rack by soundtoys and flow from soft tube. it just makes massive sense for people who deal with longer program material to have a chain handy for offline processing.

or MELD by metric halo/make believe studios.

i guess they tried to do it with the control center type thing they’ve got going with the pro q update. still not the power and flexibility of a channel strip with all of their plugins available. sigh.

You could always use Blue Cat Patchwork to host the plugins. Works a treat for doing all kinds of plugin chains.

Another option is a free chainer StudioRack by Waves whcih also offers powerful scripting.
I remember somebody created FabFilter Pultec emulation by combining Pro-Q and Saturn in StudioRack.

Hi guys,

we heavily discussed the channel strip or rack options before we decided to go with the instance list. We know the channel strip was often requested. However, it felt a bit strange to release a new plug-in with a more limited feature set than the plug-ins they likely already own, and charge them for it. It would be impossible to combine all features of e.g. Pro-Q 4, Pro-C 3 and Pro-DS in a single plug-in, either from a processing standpoint as for a design standpoint. Offering a plug-in with less bands and features as a completely new plug-in did not feel right.

The rack idea was discussed, but it did not feel very useful. We wanted to minimize the amount of windows you need to open in order to access a plug-in, not add another window first before opening your plug-in, like in StudioRack. Combining modulation among multiple plug-ins would be cool, but quite niche. We did not see this getting into the daily workflow of a lot of people.

So we decided to come up with a sort of combined channel strip/multitrack solution that is now knows as the instance list. It will work like a channel strip but still allows for the full feature set by opening the individual plug-ins if needed. There are a million things we'd like to add to the instance list, but we also wanted to get it out into the world. We think it's already very cool and can improve a workflow a lot. But we will keep working on it, adding more plug-ins to access via the instance list and adding new features. Some wishes we have are simply not yet possible in the current plug-in formats. However, since we released Pro-Q 4 and especially after adding Pro-C 3, Pro-DS and Pro-G to the instance list, we've noticed that plug-in format developers see where this is going and are more open to adding more controls to the plug-in.

Hope that clears up how we ended up with the instance list.

How about a rack like Soundtoys uses? You have a sidebar that shows every plugin that Soundtoys has. You have full access to all those plugins when you drag them into the rack. You also can use their plugins without the rack. That way you have the best of both worlds. Nothing is handicapped or limited in any way.

Hi Jack,

We did not really see an advantage to use our plug-ins in a rack format like that, other for maybe a global mix knob. So we decided to go for the instance list instead.

It's a shame FF went that way - you're missing a lot by doing what you did. Maybe because it's from another developer that beat you to the mark? The instance list was/is a waste of programming time. Or is FF afraid of stepping on someone's programming? FF does some amazing things but falls short on what are logical processes that real users want/need.

I do not understand why Jack shows so much anger if something is not to his liking.

Jack,

If you are so disenchanted with FF, maybe you just go off and make your own company with VST's that do what you want.

Just sayin

Jack has been a loyal customer since 2017. While we surely appreciate everybody's input, we simply cannot please everybody I'm afraid.

A public beta is not doable for us. We've got a good selection of professionals in all parts of the field on our beta team. We heavily discussed the side-chain panel update with them, which basically was a request that was backed up by most of our beta testers. The way it is implemented in Pro-C 3 is the way we and most of our testers preferred, so that's what we went with.

(Related. Even without C3, just using Q4, the instance list is FANTASTIC! Love it!)

Personally, very excited for the future of the Instance list and how you develop this approach to mixing across your plugins.

Also, looking forward to MB, G and DS getting updates then I can add those other my arsenal of tools.

Christopher

Hi Christopher,

Pro-G and Pro-DS have already been added to the instance list. With the Pro-C 3 release we also released a new update for Pro-Q 4, Pro-G and Pro-DS, making these 4 all visible and controllable in the instance list.

What would be cool is if I could have the instance view in a separate plugin - that would almost be exactly like the rack setup imo.

For the time being I'm going to have an empty Q4 sitting on my monitoring bus to see all my instances.