Neural DSP is a company that produces guitar and bass plugins, mostly known for their Archetype plugins such as Archetype: Gojira or Archetype: Nolly. They also have the Quad Cortex amp modeller hardware device.
Recently, the thought of an NDSP preset file viewer entered my mind. Instead of opening up the xml preset files in plugins, being able to read the settings in a separate standalone app of some kind.
Upon opening up the xml file, you quickly learn the file is not XML at all. You are met with a series of numbers and letters. This appears to be some form of hexadecimal code.
Putting this hexadecimal code into one of those hexadecimal-to-text converter tools yields something somewhat decipherable.
As you can see, this is a preset for the Neural DSP Gojira plugin, designated by the marker neural_dsp_gojira
It’s apparent we are not dealing with your grandparent’s XML here, people.
When we run the preset code through a tool again but choose octal instead of hexadecimal, we get something even cleaner this time.
Still, the parameters themselves appear in some other form of encoding, evident by the non-renderable characters appearing after the PARAM designations. I haven’t quite determined what kind of encoding Neural DSP is doing, but I am determined to find out.
I will keep this post updated with my efforts.
The values between PARAM id and “nameActivevalue” are simply hex values 😉