KVR Audio

urlwolf · Post by **urlwolf** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 7:19 pm

I read here that most people like built-in patch browsers. The top feature request for Charlatan is exactly that.

I prefer not to have them. I use reaper with a shortcut to change preset. This works better, when the presets browsers are native to the plugin I cannot assign a shortcut. This kills the joy for me. I stopped using Diversion for that reason. One thing that hardware people find missing when they start using vstis is how extraordinarily cumbersome is to change patches. Often having to click a tiny arrow with a mouse. In hardware, it's always trivial to change patch.

What do you think?

BTW, I love charlatan. The dev is making all the right decisions, I like his 'unix philosophy' (do one thing, and one thing only; do it well).

BERFAB · Post by **BERFAB** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 7:29 pm

Well, with all the new instruments that now have 1,000's of patches available, well constructed browsers are a necessity.

Omnisphere 1 has something like 8,000 presets. Good luck finding anything in there without some kind of browser narrowing down the choices. O2 is supposed to have a new and improved browser for its expected 10,000 + patches. So the better the search function, the better the experience, for me at least.

-B

padillac · Post by **padillac** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:39 pm

I'm always torn whether to save the patch as an in-synth preset, or as a DAW preset.

Advantage of synth preset: I can use it across DAWs

Advantage of DAW preset: I have easy access to patches from multiple synths

I don't suppose there's some standard that I can save to, so I get the advantages of both?

Using Renoise and Ableton Live on OS X...

foosnark · Post by **foosnark** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:09 pm

I strongly prefer having a patch browser. Tags or categories of some kind are nice.

Some hosts have fairly terrible patch browsers built in. Maschine for instance: with NI products it's integrated extremely well into its awesome browser. But with non-NI products, if there's no patch browser in the synth, all you have is right-clicking on the plugin name to bring up a Presets popup menu with poor scrolling that always starts at the top (not where you left off) and no way to simply pick next/previous patches.

Thankfully, there are few synths of any complexity that don't have their own patch browsers.

chaosWyrM · Post by **chaosWyrM** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:28 pm

yes on the patch browsers.

but real ones...no pop out drop down menus like on serum and enzyme...i hate that. especially since a lot of those just open up a huge list i have to scroll through (enzyme)...and theres no scroll bar on the side, and every time you open it its back at the top regardless of the actual patch thats loaded...so annoying. #firstwoldproblems

aMUSEd · Post by **aMUSEd** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:30 pm

Ideally I would love there to be one common format for all plugins and presets and for hosts to have a comprehensive system for patch management, but I can understand why most developers these days don't leave it to the host to manage presets - the big problem is nearly all hosts handle preset management very badly, partly due to competing formats and aims, and partly due to treating preset management as low down on the list of priorities in host development. Just look at this comment for an example of this;

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... k#p6062518

the fact is that I only know of one host that is able to correctly manage to load and save presets for all 3 major non proprietary plugin formats and that is Studio One. The rest have only partial support, for example many load AUs and a few load VST3s but in most cases they either don't support their preset formats at all, so you can't load or save them, or when they do they do it in a half assed fashion (such as a dropdown menu containing hundreds of presets in one long list, not organised by their folders). Some like Bitwig don't even bother to support fxp/b format (for VST 2). It's a mess.

beely · Post by **beely** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:26 pm

Patch handling in all hosts and plugins is an inconsistent mess - I'd love for something truly comprehensive, flexible, compatible, supported by everyone and consistent, cross-platform and cross-host - but that's probably very unlikely to happen.

As i result, i tend to prefer to use my main hosts' patch management (Logic) where I can but this doesn't work for plugins with more sophisticated internal systems and browsers and/or often requires a tedious process of saving patches out of an internal plugin format to the host format, together with the loss of useful meta-data searches.

In the old days, with hardware synths, if I wanted to go through my "Bass" sounds I could search for "Bass" in my MIDI Sysex Library software and quickly audition them. Now, bass sounds are scattered through hundreds of plugin presets, channel strip presets, patches, track stacks, EXS sample libraries, Kontakt sample libraries, snapshots of instruments inside Reaktor, other bank files for plugin instruments that need to be loaded separately etc etc - all of these independent, isolated silos of patches that often force you to choose particular silos to look in, rather than just letting you easily find matching sounds on your system, and navigate them with different interfaces and tools.

Actually, one of the most valuable features, aside for category browsing, is the ability to go through and hide sounds that you hate or will never ever use (eg every synth has a billion wibbly wobbly noisey ambient scifi sound fx that just will never get used here) so you can basically, once you've gone through the patches, get rid of superfluous stuff (but get them back quickly if needed by unhiding them) and thus get to navigating through patches that you like straight away.

So much can be done in this area but there are so many developers with their own ideas of how it should be done, the technologies involved and the amount of developer resistance means it will probably never happen.

yessongs · Post by **yessongs** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:48 am

with sonar you can use ACT to enable a button on your controller to function as the arrow to scan through presets in a bank so I prefer to have a browser that will make it easy for me to find and save favorites.

Mutant · Post by **Mutant** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 2:56 am

I prefer fxb, because some synth patch browsers do not respond to MIDI program change messages and force me to reach for my mouse.

urlwolf · Post by **urlwolf** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 9:13 am

I also like fxb, as long as the host supports it.

One thing that annoys me is that saving the preset can rarely be done with a keyboard shortcut.

In general UX in vst plugins is extremely primitive. It's like programmers have learned nothing for 20 years of usage in windowed interfaces. It's mouse only most of the time, with tiny targets to click. Fitts law, people.

urlwolf · Post by **urlwolf** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 9:17 am

What happened to bigTick Zen?

http://www.bigtickaudio.com/zen/supported-synths

I remember installing it, then uninstalling it, several times, but I don't remember the reasons.

Lotuzia · Post by **Lotuzia** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 11:09 am

Content management. As most synthesizers now come loaded with hundreds of different patches, I think the content management system must be organised into the synthesizer itself, with multi criteria search systems, and with custom tags available.

As most hosts provide similar functions, one can double this with the host functions if desired, though I personnaly have no interest in my host proposing me 15 000 bass patches with the possibility to browse them with a +- function ( even if the said function can be remotely activated from musical keyboard/knobby thing )

Not to be misunderstood, I think that when I need a bass for example, I'll first choose wich instrument will play it, like FM8 for an FM bass, or PolyKB for a fat analog one, or a sample based instrument for a semireal one. This is my logic, and I think this is the same logic for any keyboradist with a little experience. So, once the instrument playing the part is chosen, begins the content management battle, which suppose that the instrument itself has some capabilities to expose the right patch for the right track as fast as possible.

The best synths -to me- to perform such tasks, with a lot of differences though, are some NI synths ( FM8, Massive etc, not the Reaktor based ones ), Omnisphere, Alchemy, and all the Xils-lab synths and effects.

As for UI, the synth parameters should be assignable to midi Ccs. And therefore be controllable with any midi device. Once gain, in this field some companies are ahead and offer such Midi assignation capabilities. All this *ime*.

aMUSEd · Post by **aMUSEd** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 11:26 am

beely wrote: In the old days, with hardware synths, if I wanted to go through my "Bass" sounds I could search for "Bass" in my MIDI Sysex Library software and quickly audition them. Now, bass sounds are scattered through hundreds of plugin presets, channel strip presets, patches, track stacks, EXS sample libraries, Kontakt sample libraries, snapshots of instruments inside Reaktor, other bank files for plugin instruments that need to be loaded separately etc etc - all of these independent, isolated silos of patches that often force you to choose particular silos to look in, rather than just letting you easily find matching sounds on your system, and navigate them with different interfaces and tools.

That's one reason I love Kore as if I want to find say a 'bass' or narrow it down further to all monophonic distorted basses I can regardless of whether they are in a Reaktor snapshot bank, Kontakt library, NI Massive or even many third party plugins (any that support standard formats such as Linplug Spectral or RP Blue). Unfortunately NI didn't make it open enough to be the one browser/format to rule them all but it probably came closest, although it would not have been able to search Logic channel strips or EXS samples.

rasmusklump · Post by **rasmusklump** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:32 pm

The missing patch browser is the reason I don't use Charlatan

Aiynzahev · Post by **Aiynzahev** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 2:02 pm

I don't like browsers to be too basic or overly complex. My favorite design is what U-he's synths use. Where it's really easy to create and name your own folders. I can arrange by bank, or type of sound and a right click takes me to the folder on the system to configure it from there if i want to. It's all quite neat and intuitive. Anything more than this is actually annoying as it adds new layers of complexity that I don't need.

On built-in patch browsers: I prefer not to have them