Online Repository for Preset Files

I’m having a ton of fun with my Ubuntustudio, and I love Linux Audio. Ardour is a wonderful tool!

One of the nice features of professional commercial audio suites is that they come with a lot of plugins with presets.

Everyone complains that good reverbs are difficult in Linux (unless you’ve already figured out how to do something like have the output of freeverb run through a stereo chorus in Jackrack). Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go online and submit your .rack files (your saved jackrack settings), and your saved JAMin settings (.jam files)? For many audio engineers, this would greatly ease the transition from Windows to Linux audio.

In Windows, for example, when you load the famous C4 (Waves Bundle finalizing Multi-compressor for Protools), there are a lot of presets you can choose from like “multi-electro mastering”, “multi-opto mastering”, “voice over”, etc. etc. It would be nice to go online and download .jam files (for JAMin) that would automatically set it up for a given task. Obviously they could be modified to taste once downloaded. (By the way, these presets on the Waves C4 mastering compressor or very, very good and very useful.)

Or how about the .rack files for Jackrack. If you’ve figured out a good signal chain, just upload your saved .rack files for others. Need a nice reverb? Just download the .rack file and whammo, it automatically sets up jackrack with freeverb -> EQ -> Stereo Chorus -> Amp.

I know what you’re thinking, different distros may have different plugins loaded by default so it might be hard. Ubuntustudio comes with a ton of LADSPA plugins. PlanetCCRMA has them too. I just tried the new alpha of Jacklab and it was loaded too. I think most of the distros are fairly well loaded up with plugins, so I don’t think this would be an issue.

There are plenty of websites for free soundfonts for synth users…it would be might nice to have the same facility for those needing good effect chains (Jackrack) and good mastering settings (JAMin).

If you know of such repositories that already exist, I would be very grateful to know about them. In fact, I’d love to upload some nice presets that I’ve tweaked.

Okay, now I’ve got to go back to my beloved Ubuntustudio to tinker some more. Thanks for listening! I’ll upload this same post to any JAMin and Jackrack forums that I find as well.

-Andy