Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....

[Lindon]

Well Im sure I will have a truck load more questions but lets start with this....

I have a Player project that will load the Full Expansion, now how do I get that full Expansion project to show up in a specific location in my player (so where the red X is ):

[David Healey]

@Lindon What do you mean by "show up"?

[Lindon]

@David-Healey said in Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....:

@Lindon What do you mean by "show up"?

well its a full instrument - so it has its own User Interface, I mean the user interface to appear in this spot...

[David Healey]

@Lindon Ah ok I understand. When you load a full instrument expansion it completely replaces the entire plugin UI, it doesn't load within it. It's like you're launching a completely different plugin.

You might find this video informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4b8WlStG40

[Lindon]

@David-Healey okay, watched that...

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Surely to God its more sophisticated than this???

Now I have to duplicate all my Library(expansion) management display and functionality in every Full Instrument I ship......God help me.

[David Healey]

@Lindon Yes if it's a custom preset/expansion manager and you want it in all of them then you need to duplicate it. Or you can do like Rhapsody and have a button that unloads the current expansion and returns you to a dashboard type page where you select your expansion.

I think maybe the regular expansion system might be more suitable in your case.

[Lindon]

@David-Healey said in Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....:

I think maybe the regular expansion system might be more suitable in your case.

In what way? I need each expansion to have its own UI, its own widget set, its own samples and its own functionality. I cant see how I get there with anything other than a Full Expansion approach

[David Healey]

@Lindon Yeah if each UI is totally unique then yes the full expansion is probably the better option.

What I do for shared stuff that is reused across all my expansions is I put it into a set of scripts that are loaded at the beginning.

[Lindon]

@David-Healey yes that will have to be my approach....luckily this compartmentalising of functionality has been my std. approach for some time.

[Lindon]

Ok on to the next round of questions:

(forgive me I havent built one yet as Im busy trying to build the player functionality)

What does FileSystem.getFolder(FileSystem.AppData) return?

• The Players AppData folder?
• AppData/Expansions/ExpansionName ?
• something else?
• nothing?

[David Healey]

@Lindon The player's app data folder

[Lindon]

@David-Healey great!

[Lindon]

@Lindon Ok here I am back again ... so I've built my player(well enough for the purpose of demoing to myself that I can in theory load and unload instruments using it..)

..and I've built an Full expansions, well again caveats: its trivially simple a background image and a single Sampler loaded with one sample map....

..so I've read as much of the documentation as I can find, so this (unsurprisingly) has generated a bunch of questions, but lets start with a simple question:

Is there a "how to" anywhere that walks thru the steps to build a full instrument expansion and get it to load in a "player"?

How far have I got? Well as I say I built the player and in the settings I set Expansion Type = Full and added a (trivial text) Encryption key... I did the same in the expansion project...

Then in the expansion project I ran Export>Export Project as Full Expansion

This gave me a info.hxi file in the root of my expansion project

So of course this gave me at least a couple of questions:

What the *** do I do with this info.hxi file?
-- I assume I put it somewhere in the player project but that then leads to another question

I want to have tone of Full expansions, surely these dont all get called info.hxi - unless they are placed in some sub-folder structure in the player project (like say the Expansions folder)???

Al help appreciated.

[David Healey]

@Lindon said in Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....:

Is there a "how to" anywhere that walks thru the steps to build a full instrument expansion and get it to load in a "player"?

I think I covered this in the Expansion Installer video I posted on Patreon in February.

@Lindon said in Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....:

I want to have tone of Full expansions, surely these dont all get called info.hxi - unless they are placed in some sub-folder structure in the player project (like say the Expansions folder)???

Yes all are info.hxi in there own subfolders.

[Lindon]

@David-Healey said in Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....:

@Lindon said in Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....:

Is there a "how to" anywhere that walks thru the steps to build a full instrument expansion and get it to load in a "player"?

I think I covered this in the Expansion Installer video I posted on Patreon in February.

Thanks yes you did, but it makes some assumptions, mostly that I want to use this expansion handler way of installing the expansions, and I dont - I have a fair bit of meta data to install as well so I want to use the powerful installer I've already written..so basically Im asking : what needs to go where in a finished completely installed Full Instrument Expansion?

part of this is clearly the (non standard) way I work with file based expansions, in Im installing them in the finished plugin myself...

So to be clear:

I have an installer system that will put (I think) any file anywhere I want it....
so what does an installed Full Instrument Expansion look like? ..and if I copy all this stuff in myself where does this Full Instrument expansion look for the samples?

@Lindon said in Full Instrument Expansions - how, what where....:

I want to have tone of Full expansions, surely these dont all get called info.hxi - unless they are placed in some sub-folder structure in the player project (like say the Expansions folder)???

Yes all are info.hxi in there own subfolders.

-- so I think this leads me back to the question above....

[David Healey]

@Lindon In the project's app data folder there should be an Expansions folder. Inside there create a sub folder for your expansion.

In that sub folder drop your hxi. Add a subfolder called UserPresets and another called Samples. Put your Link file in the Samples folder.

[Lindon]

@David-Healey golden, as it happens I dont have any expansion presets, so do I need the UserPresets Folder?

[David Healey]

@Lindon Only if you're using the preset browser and the user might make presets.

[Lindon]

@David-Healey OK well there no way in the instruments to open the preset browser (yeah strange I know) so crossing that off the list.

[Lindon]

Ok some progress...

My player now loads a very simple test full instrument expansion....but the expansion cannot seem to find its sample maps....so Im doing something wrong...

So how I have this set up:

In my HISE project for the Player I have an Expansions folder, in there is an expansion folder (named for the expansion)

inside the individual expansion folder I have the classic folder structure...

..as well as the info.hxi file

In the Samples folder here I have a LinkWindows file (only)

and in the SampleMaps folder I have all the xml sample maps for my expansion, but when I load my expansion using the player I get this in the sampler:

So no sample maps found...

How I set up my info.hxi file:

I loaded my expansion as its own project, with sample and sample maps set up.. and generated the hxi using the export menu...

What is it Im doing wrong?