Publishing

With the instrument fully built and working, the last step is to package it into a product that the plugin can load. Publishing bundles everything — the patch, all assets, the scripts, and the UI — into a single distributable file. This chapter follows the same flow as the 303 walkthrough’s publishing chapter, with one addition specific to a sample-heavy instrument like this one.

Load the Standard Snapshot

Before publishing, make sure the patch’s current parameter values actually match the standard snapshot. Whatever state the patch is in at publish time becomes the instrument’s initial state when it’s first loaded — and that should line up with GRAND, the entry set up as the default, first item in the model selector back in UI: Static Layout.

Select the standard snapshot and click Load Snapshot one more time to be sure.

Publish the Instrument

Click the Publish icon in the editor’s top toolbar.

A dialog opens asking for the product’s metadata. Fill in the required fields — name, version, and any other details the dialog requests.

Before confirming, also enable the Compress Samples checkbox. Piano sample libraries are large — especially at 24-bit — and this instrument is built from several velocity-layered zone maps’ worth of them; compression meaningfully reduces the size of the published product.

Click Publish. A folder picker appears. Choose a dedicated staging folder — somewhere outside the plugin’s library folders, such as a Published folder on your desktop or in the project directory. This keeps the freshly built product separate until you are ready to install it.

Publishing to a staging folder first is the recommended approach: it lets you inspect the output, move it deliberately, and keep your plugin library clean during iteration.

The editor writes the packaged product into the folder you selected and reports when it is done.

Set Up the Plugin Library

Before the plugin can load the product, it needs to know where to look for installed products. Out of the box no library folders are configured — this is a one-time setup step.

Open the plugin in your DAW, then click the Settings icon.

In the settings panel, add one or more library folders — these are the directories the plugin will scan for installed products. Choose a permanent location that makes sense for your workflow, such as a dedicated Instruments folder on a fast drive.

Once a library folder is configured, close the settings panel.

Install the Product

The output of the publishing step is a folder with an .oxl extension. This bundle contains exactly three files that describe the entire product — patch, assets, and metadata. Copy the .oxl folder from your staging location into one of the library folders you just configured.

Rescan and Load

Back in the plugin, open Settings again and click Rescan Libraries at the bottom of the panel.

Close the settings panel. The newly installed instrument should now appear in the plugin’s product browser. Double-click it to load it.

Congratulations — the classical piano is complete and installed.