Who would be up for a Batch Tagging tool for Omnisphere third party libs?

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A comprehensive Omni patch utility app would be fantastic. Not only for tagging and retagging, but for grouping favorites, managing project patch lists and for easier metadata insertion into new patches.

There are 12 basic Omni attribute types, each with a different number of assignments, anywhere from just two or three, up to maybe 200 in the 'type' attribute. And then of course patch creators can create their own new attributes and assignments. What a mess.

I'm currently making a new Omni set (voices) and the metadata part is incredibly time-consuming. I haven't made any new attributes or assignments but have decided to stick with a reasonably tight subset so it's at least internally consistent. Maybe devoting an extra week would bring in every possible relevant attribute and assignment, but would that really help anyone? On the preset info panel patches that do include every attribute look like a desperate keyword spamfest. When searching you want all relevant results anyway not just the handful of patches that have included every possible attribute.

(Just as an aside, there's one attribute which is assigned automatically, and that's 'Osc type'. It's supposed to show whether a patch is synth-based, sample-based, or a mixture of both. Unfortunately when creating new patches it's often wrong and when it is there's no way to correct it. I notified Spectrasonics support who were extremely responsive and passed it back to the devs.)

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Thanks for the feedback Richard - I'd hope OmniTag would help speed things up in your situation.

What I do is what I guess a lot of people do when searching. I pick a Category and / or type, and then see what results remain in another relevant attribute type to further drill down. So just as you say, if there's a lot of sporadic stuff where scattershot attributes have been assigned, that gets difficult / impossible. At least if you're choosing from the same pool of attributes Spectrasonics use in their stuff, that keeps things a bit more contained.
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I have already gone through the excrutiating task of doing this for myself already. However, I would probably be prepared to spend a 20 to not have to keep going through the process each time I purchase new banks. Or in the case that Spectrasonics decide to reshuffle all the categories again.
Last edited by Ben H on Sat Feb 16, 2019 10:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
My main tools: Kontakt, Omnisphere, Samplemodeling + Audio Modeling. Akai VIP = godsend. Tari's libraries also rock.

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Thanks Ben - I sense we've been sharing a similar pain! And yes, I think $20 feels about the right kind of level for something like this.
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Yep, $20 sounds OK here too. As for tagging, I've gone through thousands over patches over the years and organized them into projects ("slow pads", "bass" etc) and then rated them as well. Not perfect but better than the default.

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The basic principle - to tag third party libraries along the same conventions as the factory ones, making searching All libraries much simpler. OmniTag would read the factory databases to find out what tags go with what as far as Spectrasonics conventions go (nb - it would be unable to modify the factory library). Then it would guide the user to change any tags that are not compliant - red is non-compliant, green is good. Everything optional and you'd be able to manually change tags also. It would be able to rename folders and patches also.
I think this is the most sensible approach to take. At least this way you wouldn't be breaking anything by making the other 3rd party libraries conform to the Spectrasonics tagging conventions.

Also, any sound updates would not overwrite any changes you had made.

This is an example of the shmozzle that was just ONE category:
ARP
Arp
ARPs
Arpeggiated
ARP + BPM
ARP + Rhythm
*library name or author name - ARP (seriously, who does that!?) :dog:
BPM
Pulse
RHY
Rhythm
Rhythms
Rhythmic
SEQ
Sequences

I had soooo many categories just like this. :dog:
My main tools: Kontakt, Omnisphere, Samplemodeling + Audio Modeling. Akai VIP = godsend. Tari's libraries also rock.

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Ben, that's an absolutely perfect description of the problem. It's all got totally out of hand. My usual response to watching and listening to any 3rd party bank of Omnisphere sounds YouTube video is to take one look at the names and tags and deflate, aware of the sheer graft it will take to get it into a form I can use. It's super-rare for a library to be so idiosyncratic that I want to trawl just that one library rather than than draw from the main pool. It's all fine when you first flick through a shiny new library in isolation, but after that it may as well not be there. I realised I gotta stop throwing money at new patches when I'm barely finding a fraction of what I already have, and the vast majority is really good stuff too.
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Yeah, it's a bit much. Isn't it?

It might not be so bad if I only had a small handful of banks, but as I purchase more, it gets more & more out of hand.
My main tools: Kontakt, Omnisphere, Samplemodeling + Audio Modeling. Akai VIP = godsend. Tari's libraries also rock.

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Spending time/money to consolidate libraries into an already non coherent base system is perilllous imho. Rebuilding a coherent system first, then aggregating 3rd party libraries into it would certainly make sense though. ymmv.
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Well I've gone a different route to what you are suggesting @Lotuzia.

Anything that correlates to an already existing Spectrasonics category, I moved to that category. Anything that doesn't correlate, I have created a new category.

E.g I placed VOX, Vox, VO, vocals, Voice, Voices, Choir, Choirs, and the other dozen variants into the Spectrasonics "Human Voices" category.

However there is no similar/adequate Spectrasonics category for "Woodwinds" for example. So I have still kept it OUTSIDE the Spectrasonics eco-system.

Happy medium. ;)
Last edited by Ben H on Sat Feb 16, 2019 12:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
My main tools: Kontakt, Omnisphere, Samplemodeling + Audio Modeling. Akai VIP = godsend. Tari's libraries also rock.

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Lotuzia wrote: Sat Feb 16, 2019 12:16 pm Spending time/money to consolidate libraries into an already non coherent base system is perilllous imho. Rebuilding a coherent system first, then aggregating 3rd party libraries into it would certainly make sense though. ymmv.
We can only do what we can do. At the moment we have a poor factory system, exacerbated by every developer grafting on their own rules, ending in a really really really REALLY poor overall system.

That said, its important to keep OmniTag future-proof. Spectrasonics keep moving the goalposts, usually to make things worse. But there's always the hope they will one day make them better. If and when that happy day comes, you'll just need to run OmniTag again for your libraries. It's not a one-shot deal, using it now wouldn't be perilous in any way I can fathom.

Also if there are specific custom tags you like to use, it would be easy to add those and make them consistent among all the 3rd party libraries, so you could always create your own custom system consistent at least for 3rd party patches, much like Ben does.

Side note - one of the most ridiculous changes Spectrasonics made was to remove the Hybrid Organic category from version 1. That was one of the most useful there, and absolutely a core strength of Omnisphere. I have sympathy here with Matt Bowdler who carries on using it for his Unfinished stuff... why they chose to nuke it is beyond comprehension.
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Hey, I have only one request. Omnisphere has long exceeded 14000 sounds. There are other synths that have 1000+ patches as well.

When you search thru patches in some instruments you get the option to browse by rating. Of course you would also like to filter this first, such as by genre, category, or keyword. (In the improvement I suggest here, these could all be done in very simple boolean and/or logic I imagine, but the rating itself is key, since it is the qualitative aspect that makes this work for long term cataloging.)

Yet, at present in my experience, all the instruments that have ratings, use a graphical approach, which means the rating goes only up to 4 or 5 starts. (The granularity of the ratings must be dense enough so as not to need room to display 10 or 50 starts IOW - but it sucks that they've let such low granularity dictate how we must locate appropriate sounds.) When I go to rate a patch or multi or sound source in Omnisphere, and I hear something amazing, or super amazing, or absolutely phenomenal, say in one particular category, like hip hop or trap or trance or general EDM, or some such, I am expected to rate it between 4 and 5 starts. Then if I browse by rating, the system will use that 4 to 5 star approach to give me back my results. As you build a library of 100+ film-useful, hip hop-useful or trance-useful patches, this is virtually useless no matter what you do.

But you, my friend, as brilliant as you must be to start this thread ( :D ) could take those rating systems, of not only every path-containing plugin that has one, but also to wave files in directories, such as single hits and loops, and turn it all into a percentage based system, and let the user update their ratings to finer and finer gradation, as they so choose, to keep them useful. (For example, the more patches/sounds the user has rated, the more room to distinguish, in percentage, such as 100%, 78.6%, 93.9% etc.)

If there is some way that you could solve this, globally or on a plugin by plugin basis, and even better to search loop and hit libraries, it would be incredible. Then we could start rating things on a scale of percentage, and whenever we go to choose sounds, we would get to update the ratings.

I would absolutely love that, there is no question.

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Ben H wrote: Sat Feb 16, 2019 10:39 am
The basic principle - to tag third party libraries along the same conventions as the factory ones, making searching All libraries much simpler. OmniTag would read the factory databases to find out what tags go with what as far as Spectrasonics conventions go (nb - it would be unable to modify the factory library). Then it would guide the user to change any tags that are not compliant - red is non-compliant, green is good. Everything optional and you'd be able to manually change tags also. It would be able to rename folders and patches also.
I think this is the most sensible approach to take. At least this way you wouldn't be breaking anything by making the other 3rd party libraries conform to the Spectrasonics tagging conventions.

Also, any sound updates would not overwrite any changes you had made.

This is an example of the shmozzle that was just ONE category:
ARP
Arp
ARPs
Arpeggiated
ARP + BPM
ARP + Rhythm
*library name or author name - ARP (seriously, who does that!?) :dog:
BPM
Pulse
RHY
Rhythm
Rhythms
Rhythmic
SEQ
Sequences

I had soooo many categories just like this. :dog:
lol, that absolutely drives me nuts. That's why I started batch tag renaming to begin with. It's ridiculous.

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Any progress on this front or is this a general wishlist "call" out there to developers hoping someone will pick the project up?
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Touch The Universe wrote: Wed Mar 20, 2019 2:53 am Any progress on this front or is this a general wishlist "call" out there to developers hoping someone will pick the project up?
There is progress! Don’t want to say too much yet - I have no idea how long it will all take, but work has begun and I am beside myself with excitement. That’s pretty sad I know that I care so much about tags, but there we have it.

I’m not quite sure I understand your system Moonchunk, but my first question would be that on the face of it it involves the factory patches. The one thing I know for sure we can’t do is touch anything to do with the factory tags or how they are displayed - forgive me if I’ve mis-understood.
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http://www.sound-on-screen.com
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