LOVE the new sound, but why a renamed .dll?

I remembered my workaround.

I got sick of having a pianoteq30.dll, a pianoteq35.dll a pianoteq36.dll all butting heads and causing problems not opening old projects when the new one was loaded, I went with the latest install, and afterwards manually removed the version number from the name so I just had "pianoteq.dll" in my vst folder.

Today, after I installed v4, I renamed my old pianoteq.dll and pianoteq (64-bit).dll's to a backup extension, then renamed the pianoteq 4.dll and pianoteq 4 (64-bit) to the generic names pianoteq.dll and pianoteq (64-bit).dll

Problem solved - old projects load (v4 loads in place of v3) , and I don't have to update my templates and I can add V4 to new projects and only one version shows up in my list of available VST's.  I just have to remember to do this rename every time there is a patch.

p.s.  in reponse to the question:  The reason it bothered me was that next OS system load, 2 years from now I would have had to reinstall v3.0, V.35, V3.6 and v4 to maintain project compatibility.  Reloading all previous instances in projects would have taken days to essentially get me back to where I am, only to have to do it all over again when v. 4.5 comes out or v.5...

I'm just coming off a horrid experience in the other direction that wasn't related to Pianoteq, but it is a cautionary tale for the growing string of VST versioning.

I had a project that was about 5 years old that I needed to simply load and tweak slightly to make it suitable for the client and re-render.

Long story short, it was an absolute nightmare - because of the move to 64 bit and the string of legacy VST's that had been superceded,  about a third of my VST's and FX wouldn't load (even though I had re-installed the 32 AND 64 bit versions where available of all VST's.  Consequently, I couldn't even tell what presets, tweaked or otherwise, had been used for the various tracks.  I had rendered the audio, but I ended up having to look for similar sounds I could only tell what  Battery had been used , but not which of the hundreds of kits or percussion matched up with the mapping of the track.  I looked helplessly through dozens of string patches in my sampler to find the one that worked with the precise articulations I had performed on strings. 

In a word, yes...I would have gladly taken a close updated match to all of my original sounds instead of this complete rebuild which ended up sounding nothing like the original.

BTW, as we are talking about versions, you may need to know that:
1) we reduced the volume in version 4,
2) the default reverb might have changed for some instruments.

For example, the default Rhody is now equipped with the "Long Plate" reverb. If you want the reverb from version 3, it's simple: change it  to "Legacy reverb" and adjust the settings as in version 3.

The solution (on Windows 32-bit) I use is transfer old Pianoteq DLL's to their own unique subfolder in the ...\VSTPlugins directory. Most hosts seem to be smart enough to do a recursive  folder search themselves. For those that need prompting, a one-time entry of the subfolder name usually suffices. I have only been in trouble with hosts that do not display the full name of the DLL (for example, Overture displays three apparently indentical "Kontakt" plugins but which are different DLL's - in this case I have to remember that Overture lists the DLL's in alphabetical order).

For a complete solution to legacy Pianoteq usage, custom presets could be saved into that subfolder also, so that everything is in one known place. Or is there a hidden gotcha somewhere? (I have no experience with mixed use of 32-bit and 64bit VST's).