Thursday, October 12, 2006

All about Cupul



Summary

With today’s proliferation of free VST Plugins, it can be hard to keep track of which Plugins you actually use. You may want to spring clean and delete Plugins you think your don’t use, but how do you know whether any of your Projects use them? You may have a new improved Bass Plugin and want to know which of your Projects use the old Bass Plugin. You may want to know if there are any Plugins that are used in your projects but have since been deleted, or not reinstalled after migrating or upgrading.

All this information is at your finger tips; with Cupul you can:-

  • Search for Projects that use a particular Plugin
  • List Plugins in a particular Project
  • List unused Plugins
  • List used Plugins
  • List all installed Plugins
  • List uninstalled Plugins


How it works

The first thing you do with Cupul is search through all your Projects for used Plugins and search your PC for installed Plugins. All the information is written to two, comma separated value (csv), result files. This information can then be queried within Cupul or opened up in an external application, such as Excel. Because the information is written to file, you only need to perform the initial search again if you add/remove/amend Projects or install/uninstall Plugins.


Some definitions and technical details

In Cupul, a Plugin is defined as a DirectX or Vst Instrument or Effect. Midi Plugins are not included.

A Plugin is defined as used by Cupul if it is found in that Project. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Plugin is “used”. For instance, a Plugin could have been added to the instrument rack or an FX Channel, but never routed though.

Cupul marks Plugins as On or Off depending on their State in the Project. If a Plugin occurs multiple times in a Project, it will only appear once for that Project in Cupul. If all the occurrences of the Plugin in the Project are Off then it will be appear in Cupul as Off. If there is at least one occurrence of the Plugin as On then it will appear in Cupul as On.

E.g.

Project 1

Reverb

Off


Project 1

Reverb

On


Project 1

Reverb

Off

In this case, the Plugin “Reverb” will appear in Project 1 once and the status will be marked as On.


Compatibility

Cupul has been tested with Windows XP Pro SP1 using Cubase SX3.

I know that it doesn’t work with Cubase VST but I wouldn’t be surprised if it works with other versions of Cubase SX including the cut down versions - LE, SE and SL. If you can confirm this, I’d appreciated it if you’d contact me.


Getting started

As mentioned above, the first thing Cupul needs to do is search through all your Projects for used Plugins and search your PC for installed Plugins. Before doing this, you need to make a few settings in the Options menu.



Options
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