Toxic Biohazard Online Preset delivery sillyness

[blatanville]

So, yesterday, I noticed that there were three "new" collections of presets in my Toxic Biohazard's bank select window, listed under "Online Content."
Pleasant surprise: three more banks (ToTc Bass, Pad & Seq) of Frank's programming!

I D/L'd them, auditioned them, and decided the best place to keep them was to move the new presets into the appropriate "Basses" "Pad" and "Sequences" bank folders, thus keeping things to a manageable number of bank folders in the drop-down. I then deleted the "ToTc Bass" "ToTc Pad" and "ToTc Seq" folders, as they were now empty

Lo! as soon as I re-instanced Toxic, the "Online Content" section told me that there was new material to download: the same three banks I just sorted.

This is going to prove to be a big pain in the ass for this kind of online patch delivery: the presence or absence of a particular folder being the only indication to the IL Downloader that I do or don't have the patches, is stupidly simplistic. Why not some sort of "cookie" file that the downloader can reference to see if I have downloaded the extra content?

methinks the "online content delivery" service wasn't fully thought-out...

But I still love TB!

[antoine.bertier]

The main problem for me is that the folders appear fine, but not the presets. This is because they are installed in a nested folder :
so in your ToTc Bass folder you only have another ToTc Bass folder that does contain the presets.

But since TB does not see nested folder, the result is seen as an empty bank. Son after being happy to see new presets online, you become disappointed that it is just empty banks and wonder whether you had problems with the download manager or whatever.

The fix is simple just take the presets in the nested ToTc Bass folder and place them in the ToTc Bass directory above:

Code: Select all

- Toxic Biohazard
-- Presets
--- ToTc Bass        <<-- move them here
---- ToTc Bass       <<-- the presets arrive here

But the online preset distribution should be foolproof, or it will aggravate enough people to get quickly a bad reputation. I agree that it could be improved, to provide for better preset management (especially since I could use Toxic III with Wusik VM, but not TB), but at least the current basic delivery should be rock solid.

[Lotuzia]

Well maybe not perfect, I agree, but nevertheless the idea of DL additional presets from inside your synth is the quickest way you can ever think of so .....

My first thought would be to thank Image-Line for this innovative method (Even if my own main daw is not web connected so that I did have to do some wizardry to make Varazdin Orchestra appear on my studio comp)

Also the fact that IL does give take care to offer free presets to its customers can only be seen as a good thing imo.

So that the fact that they could gain some bad reputation, as Antoine said, for offering something, even if its not perfect, just appears to me amazing.

I'd rather say its an innovative process (And I'll admit here that I was a bit sceptical when the idea rose some months ago) and let IL the time to make it work bullet proof.

Just my two cents

LotuZia

[antoine.bertier]

So that the fact that they could gain some bad reputation, as Antoine said, for offering something, even if its not perfect, just appears to me amazing.

What I meant is that after downloading the online presets, it looked like they were in fact offering nothing, since there was no preset visible in TB (the folders were there all right but empty). So my first reactions were:
1 - it must be a bug
2 - no wait, these are not factory presets: they are by ToTc so I must pay something to get them (but where ?)
3 - let's have a look at my preset folder just in case there is a readme that explains where to buy them

And this is how I discovered that I had indeed succeeded in downloading the presets.

I really like the downloading of presets from TB, and I was impressed when I installed TB, since everything worked fine. But this idea generated a lot of debate , and it can become mainstream only if it is really transparent for the end user. This time it was not. Too bad because it is really a great idea to have free presets by top sound designers, appearing directly in your DAW.

So I definitely support Image Line, since they have great innovative ideas, and I just hope they iron out the execution of these ideas.

[blatanville]

Thanks, guys.

I did wonder, at first, why I had to use Reaper's "load bank/patch" function to load the new ToTc patches, but a quick trip to the filesystem told me the problem: nested folders within the presets folder of TB. I moved files "up" on folder, and they appeared perfectly in the TB patch browser: that's where I previewed them, and then decided to move them to the "default" bass, pad and sequence folders.

I agree: it's a great, pleasant surprise to find new patches waiting for me to experience.
Unfortuntately, the implementation is just that little bit "off" and it's only going to get worse as more and more patch banks become available online.
By that I mean that there's going to be an ever-growing number of bank/folders in my TB preset browser, which I can't organize to suit my needs, without making the downloader think, incorrectly, that I don't already have certain online-available patches.

let's hope they can improve this nice service.

[akiyat]

Could someone tell me what banks you are supposed to get with Toxic Biohazard? I just purchased it and besides the "Demo" bank that came with it, the only three that were available for download were ToTc Bass, ToTc Pad and ToTc Seq. In another thread I recall someone saying there were 10 banks, so what am I missing and how do I get them? Thanks.

[Shifrin]

Could someone tell me what banks you are supposed to get with Toxic Biohazard? I just purchased it and besides the "Demo" bank that came with it, the only three that were available for download were ToTc Bass, ToTc Pad and ToTc Seq. In another thread I recall someone saying there were 10 banks, so what am I missing and how do I get them? Thanks.

These are the preset folders that I obtained upon release of TBio, via the d/l manager. [rant]Which I detest as my DAW is offline so I had to install TBio and a host on my net machine to get the things![/rant]

Ambient Textures
Basses
Keyboards
Leads
Pads
Percussion
Rhythmical
Sequences
SFX
Synthetic

If you aren't showing these in TBio as 'online' presets then I suspect something is up

Shif.

[akiyat]

Thanks for the reply. I guess I need to send an email off to customer support during weekday hours.

[C-note]

I love the online distribution. No seaparate sites to go to, no searching every so often to keep your presets up to date, an excellant idea! IL just needs to change the download so the nested folder is not created.

C

[1-2-Many]

Could someone tell me what banks you are supposed to get with Toxic Biohazard? I just purchased it and besides the "Demo" bank that came with it, the only three that were available for download were ToTc Bass, ToTc Pad and ToTc Seq. In another thread I recall someone saying there were 10 banks, so what am I missing and how do I get them? Thanks.

I'm getting the same thing upon installing TB on my DAW - shows only the 3 TOTC banks available, when I know there were many more banks present when I test drove it upon download to my office PC.

Strange...i guess I can just copy the previous banks over.

Seems to me it'd be best if they simply offered all the banks for download from your registered user page as well.

[Shifrin]

Seems to me it'd be best if they simply offered all the banks for download from your registered user page as well.

Indeed, I'd be more than happy with that

I know IL recently had a server change or some such, I also know the three banks that are showing now are the 'old' banks that were made available when TBio was in beta. My guess is during the server switch the old banks were put up, and not the new ones or something along those lines.

Shif.

[blatanville]

that last comment makes sense, as some of the presets in the "new" ToTc folders were duplicates of some already in TB (after initial download, of course).

I also agree: duplicating all the presets in one neat list on your my.flstudio.com page would be a menschen thing for IL to do...

[zerocrossing]

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but after downloading the banks it seems as if Toxic Biohazard can't see them. I can load them by clicking the load menu button, but they show up in the preset menu as being empty. I'm on Vista 64. Anyone else have this issue?

[BERFAB]

Wait a minute. So you're saying that there aren't really any new banks of patches at this time? The ToTc banks are just the old original banks?

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