Analog Lab 5: the night of the long knives, or 'Where have all the presets gone'

[MajorFubar]

Unfortunately Arturia seem to have massacred the number of presets available in Analog Lab unless you also own their V Collection software.

It took them a while to cotton on, but they've finally figured out that lots of potential V Collection customers only intend to use presets. Consequently they were haemorrhaging V Collection sales because upto VC6 all the presets were included in the full version of Analog Lab which costs a fraction of the price. That trend ended with VC7. In AL4 which accompanied the launch of VC7, only a tiny percentage of the presets from the new synths were included, but AL4 did at least keep all the 6.500 presets from VC6 / AL3 for both new and existing users.

AL5 changes all that completely. 4000 less presets than AL4 is a big ouch for new buyers, but at least existing AL4 owners can keep their old AL4 and its presets.

[dkettle]

Managed to install AL V alongside AL 4, and yes, I see only 3,268 presets in V as opposed to 7,311 presets in 4. However, there are a few more instruments available, as well as updated versions of old ones (31 instruments in V as opposed to 22 in 4). You can download the manuals for both versions to see the lists of instruments.

It's good that I'm able to install both (no extra cost to install AL V if you already have AL 4, it seems), but I think it's going to be really annoying to have to switch back and forth to use an instrument that's only available in AL V or a preset that's only available in AL 4. What were they thinking? I wonder if there's some way to copy the extra presets from AL 4 to AL V, so I'd only have to use AL V.

Their naming convention for the different releases kinda sucks too. Could they possibly make it any more confusing?