RE: losing presets…
This reminded me that I’ve been meaning to come to terms with this issue for the longest time. It hasn’t been an issue since I stopped gigging as I no longer expect reliable preset loading and rather set the plugin up every time I need it. But I remember it causing me grief in a club one night back in 2018.
Here’s what I found after an hour of hard crash testing tonight:
On my 2015 MacBook Pro (Intel running Ventura under OpenCore Legacy Patcher), MG2 standalone always recalls the last patch you had active when it opens — it briefly shows “DEFAULT” then opens the last preset selected and shows the name correctly.
MG2 AU seems to default to the “TEST PIANO” preset, but if you change it to another preset e.g. “ACOUSTIC PIANO” the AU will also generally recall the last selected patch and display the name correctly…but, selecting some presets (especially “DEEP JAZZROCK DYNAMIC,” ”DEEP JIMMIE”) crashes Live 12 and, on relaunch, when reinstating the AU of MG2 it reverts to the “TEST PIANO” preset. I have not verified this on every preset. The mentioned problem presets do not crash MG2 standalone.
Saving an AU preset using the disk icon in Live’s plugin windows will sometimes render a live crash when you recall that preset. It certainly won’t recall the preset within that AU preset correctly. However, it can recall the plugin parameters configuration “correctly” but this is a shaky way of handling the plugin — not all that reliable.
As for MG2 VST2, at first instantiation, it always opens on the preset named “DEFAULT” so it is more difficult to crash Live with it. I’m not sure why it is a different default (for lack of a better word) preset.
As I was discovering all the ways to break MG2 as a plugin, I noticed that loading a Live project with MG2 AU or VST instantiated opens the selected-saved preset BUT displays the name incorrectly! Presets that have been saved in a project always display the preset name incorrectly as “DEFAULT” which threw me off. So, just beware that the preset name you see in the GUI might not be the actual preset loaded.
I switched over to my M1 MacBook (Sonoma 14.5) running Live 12. Live projects containing MG2 AU (Rosetta 2 not activated) load as expected with the correct preset names, at least the first time you reload it. Then, launching a project with an instrument rack with multiple MG2 instances makes the names display incorrectly as DEFAULT, though the presets’ settings themselves should be correct. Once this has occurred, opening the original project with a single instance of MG2 makes the preset name start showing as DEFAULT again.
It’s quite hard to test because every time you reload the AU you affect the behavior of the future instantiation of the same plugin. All that said, MG2 didn’t crash once on the M1 when playing with this preset issue. I crashed it no less than 15 times on the Intel MacBook.
I’m not sure if this is even of interest anymore as MG3 is under rapid development. I haven’t taken the MG3 beta’s preset system for a drive around the block yet in the latest version but I intend to. Without officially having tried to break it yet, it seems more robust.