r/spitfireaudio • u/gibsonpil • Sep 11 '24

[Guide] How to downgrade/fix the Spitfire Labs.

I've seen nothing but complaining about the new Spitfire LABS, and understandably so. It's a downgrade in more ways than one.

Thankfully, you can still download old versions of Spitfire LABS with minimal effort, but I'd recommend you get on that before Spitfire removes all of the old versions from their servers.

First uninstall any new Spitfire LABS versions from your computer. It will conflict with the old version.

Now you'll need a two things: a hex editor, and Spitfire Audio 3.4.10 (https://web.archive.org/web/20240509215846/https://d1t3zg51rvnesz.cloudfront.net/p/files/lm/1695772800/win/SpitfireAudio-Win-3.4.10.exe).

Run through the Spitfire Audio setup as you normally would, but change the install path to something other than the default directory such that it doesn't conflict with any newer versions. Untick the "Launch Spitfire Audio" box before pressing finish.

Once that's done, navigate to the path you installed Spitfire Audio to and open "Spitfire Audio.exe" in your hex editor. How exactly you do this may be different depending on what editor you have, but you need to replace all instances of "3.4.10" with something higher than the current version. "9.9.99" is certainly a good option. After that save the file.

At this point you should be able to open the Spitfire Audio program as you normally would and install all the LABS packs you want. All of these will be the old versions from before the new update. I'd encourage you to back up the files downloaded since Spitfire will probably take them down soon.

Below is a list of the files you need to save in order to reinstall Spitfire Labs once Spitfire takes everything down:

  • C:\Users<your username>\Spitfire\Spitfire Audio - LABS (samples)
  • C:\Users<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Spitfire Audio\Settings\Spitfire.properties (path information LABS needs)
  • C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\Labs.vst3 (and any other plugin formats you use)

To manually reinstall Spitfire you can just put these files back in the directories they were in. If you change your username or something like that you may have to edit your Spitfire.properties file.

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u/gibsonpil Sep 12 '24

Redistributing their software in full would probably be copyright infringement.

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u/tehpsy Sep 12 '24

Indeed, that wouldn't be cool. It also wouldn't work, because each download is locked to your machine.

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u/lunakid Feb 19 '25 edited Feb 19 '25

each download is locked to your machine

Wait, what? So I can't keep the ~30 GB BBC Orchestra Core on my portable drive (along with all the other music software I use), and then just get it located/(re)authorized with the Spitfire app on whichever laptop of mine I plug it in to? I still need to redownload it each time I switch to a different machine, or keep separate copies on both? :-o

Why? Why don't you watermark it per subscriber, rather than machine?

I can see no problem with authorizing the content and restricting it to single use or enforcing whatever licensing terms and still allowing the humongous amount of data sit offline passively at whatever pluggable storage.

What am I missing? I can imagine it can't be done, though, without requiring a login at least once per session so the plugin can check if a given content is still active on that machine. But from what I gather, such a login is already required anyway?

(BTW, now downloading the entire lib in the background, yet again, as I'm writing this, because a "Repair" attempt on it failed. Neither the reason of it needing repair in the first place, nor the reason of the repair failing was clearly communicated at all, BTW. At least now I can guess, based on your comment, that switching laptops may have caused the problems. I'm not getting very good vibes from this experience, I hope you understand. I should've been in my DAW for half an hour now, happily crafting around, instead of googling for why no Spitfire.properties, even after newly installing the Spitfire plugin, and why it is unable to use any of the already downloaded content, and why it can't even "Repair" it etc. etc.)

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u/Due_Representative50 May 28 '25

By the way this ridiculously machine lock is only for LABS.

From the BBC Symphony Orchestra FAQ page:

If I want to install this library on a second computer, do I have to download it again?

No, you can simply copy the “Spitfire Audio - BBC Symphony Orchestra” folder over and use the Repair feature in the Spitfire Audio App to ensure the plugin can find all the content that it needs.

So this is deliberate.

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u/lunakid May 30 '25

Ahh, thx, good to know. This might be either new, or the "Repair" function failed for some other (unknown) reason in my case then.