Staying organized is probably one of the most important aspects to producing music. Your desk might be messy, your cords may be tangled, but you sure as hell better have your digital workspace organized. I made the mistake of migrating my VSTs from one folder to another. I had the intention of cleaning up my file structure (for simplicity), but that ended up being a giant hassle. I truly hope I never have to go through another move like this. If it happens again the way I just stumbled through, I’ll lose another few days of my life trying to figure out where I went wrong.
Let me back up. I was trying to pack up my VSTs into an easy-to-move package because I had too many scattered files (and too many duplicates/locations). I didn’t realize until i tried to load an old song, that I had accidentally removed NI Massive. Nothing would load and I had a moment of sheer panic. I thought to myself, “Did I just completely ruin the last few months of music?” I never want to have to come face to face with a reality like that, because I really don’t know how long it would take for me to get back to producing after something catastrophic like that.
I took a step back, and thought about what went wrong. I dug through all of my files, and realized i had deleted (accidentally) my copy of Massive somehow during the folder swap. I took a deep breath, and realized there was some hope of recovery (I still had my presets, so not ALL of my work had vanished). I installed my copy of Massive, and waited patiently. At last, it loaded, it existed, I was back. Wrong. It was recognized, but none of my presets would load, i was getting a nice error message, and everything was unable to load. What the hell was going on? I tried as many different explanations as I could through Google, to no avail. I was about to give up again, until I remembered something fishy. Previously I had problems loading custom patches that I found or been sent. They wouldn’t appear. I couldn’t get massive to display new or custom patches, really anything other than the defaults.
Problem Solved: I was using an incredibly old install of Massive. It wouldn’t recognize any of the new files. It was so simple, but I just didn’t think about. 10 minutes later I was ready to rock with Massive 1.3. Instantly everything started to work again, and all of my older files i was able to updating using File>Batch Convert.
The Quick Fix: Massive won’t load new patches with an out-of-date Version. Get the latest updates, and you will be fine.