Yeah, we know, you've spent months or even years creating your set list, tweaking your plugins, changing them, getting your sound just right. Now you've got hundreds of patches and the notion of having to start all over again seems really painful. But here's a pragmatic approach that you might want to take that lets you move incrementally as needed, rather than having to switch everything in one go.
It assumes that your existing audio host changes patches in response to MIDI program change messages, something that's probably true for every usable audio host out there. The general idea is to run other audio host and Gig Performer at the same time but only one of them will ever be producing audio for a particular patch.
So suppose your existing audio host has 50 patches and each one responds to a different program change message, starting at 0 and going to 49 (say).
Now you want to use a really cool plugin (or set of plugins in a patch) but for one reason or another it doesn't work well in your existing audio host and you'd like to use Gig Performer instead.
- Starting with a new gig, creating as many empty rackspaces in Gig Performer as you have patches in your other host
- Each rackspace will have one default variation and each variation will be assigned a new program number
- Go to the rackspace whose program change number matches the patcher you want to replace
- Insert and configure your plugins as desired
- By the way, you might have to export the plugin patch in your other audio host and then import it into the same plugin running inside Gig Performer
- In your other audio host, using whatever is the appropriate mechanism, disable the patcher that you now use through Gig Performer
- You're done
Now, when you send a MIDI program change, your existing audio host and Gig Performer will both switch to the desired set up but only one host will actually produce output.