transferring Reaper fx presets from damaged drive

[Crocodiddler]

Greetings all,

Had a laptop disaster recently, but fortunately the drive is still
fully browsable, it just won't boot, and therefore cannot open Reaper
to retrieve any settings.

I had backed up most projects, but had some some recent vsti presets
I saved. I checked the folder where reaper puts them but, apparently
all of user defined presets for a particular vsti are compiled in one file.

I can probably locate this file on the damaged drive, but will it merge if
I copy it over to a new location of

C:\Users\(current user)\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\presets

?

What is the best way to go about this..so I don't write over presets
on the new machine, and yet still use the transferred over ones.

Just occurred to me that loading a project file from the damaged drive might also load all the presets saved/used inside it,
but have never tried this before. Seems logical the user presets file should just update automatically ?



thanks for your consideration..

[xpander]

Originally Posted by Crocodiddler

I had backed up most projects, but had some some recent vsti presets I saved. I checked the folder where reaper puts them but, apparently all of user defined presets for a particular vsti are compiled in one file.

I can probably locate this file on the damaged drive, but will it merge if I copy it over to a new location of
C:\Users\(current user)\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\presets

?

What is the best way to go about this..so I don't write over presets
on the new machine, and yet still use the transferred over ones.

Many VSTs (& VSTi) save their presets to some default or user defined place when you use their preset management. For those you would have to search the appropriate places, copy/save the files and see how you can import the presets using the VST specific preset management.

The presets which you save using the Reaper preset management will get saved to C:\Users\(current user)\AppData\Roaming\REAPER\presets as ini files. For those I would suggest the following approach;

Export the current (new) Reaper preset library as .rpl file. Make also a backup copy of the current preset ini file. Then copy the preset ini file from the old drive and drop that into the current presets folder. This will overwrite/replace the new presets, so now you have the old presets in your current location. Then you can use Reaper preset management to import the preset library (.rpl) you exported earlier.

When importing, Reaper will ask if you want to overwrite presets which have the same name. If you choose Yes, the imported presets will replace the current presets which have the same name. If you choose No, the presets with the same name will not be imported. You could rename the current presets before importing, so that there is no overlap in that regard.

Below is a link to a topic with a preset sorter tool Edgemeal made. You cannot merge preset files with it, but you can sort and rename presets. Alphabetize presets