u-he refurbished Preset Browser discussion

[aMUSEd]

Yet there are products which do exactly that. Guidelines are nice to follow, but not 100% obligatory to get your product approved.

I do this with Kontakt Player libraries all the time as it's my job. Trust me, it's totally fine to do that, if push comes to shove.

There's a different issue that there are some plain synth-related base category tags missing in basic NKS tag cloud, like there's no "Pads" main category at all. There's "Synth Pad", though, so some sort of mapping between u-he tags and NKS tags should exist... perhaps?

I do that sort of broad tagging as well, the second level tags are imho more subjective and I often prefer to leave them to the user - it's easy to say something is a bass, but whether it's an 'analog, 'digital' or 'sub' bass is not always easy to tell, or care about, and sometimes depends on context anyway (eg I may use the same patch as a sub and bass depending on the notes I play). Also if I'm following what a bank designer has given me they tell me something is a bass with a bass prefix - but nothing tells me the second level.

[spacepluk]

Maybe it's because I'm using the beta on Linux with airwave, but the cursor keys don't change the preset as they used to.

Yeah, the cursors work just fine with the Linux version

[glokraw]

Shouldn't everything be inside the 'Factory Beta' folder?
I wouldn't want any heading in the preset gui area,
that isn't an actual folder in the preset path. 'Local', if needed,
should have a folder thusly named, within 'Factory Beta'.
And where is the money in the 'User' folder not being inside
'Factory Beta'? Only a user would be there using...oh, never mind...
I'll just assume somebody hired a former msoft guy who
has lied on his resume'

I also think a 'save-as' option is an important preset-management feature,
where the user decides the name and destination of the new preset,
so a person making a collection of cymbals or flutes etc could have a folder for them
in the desired location within 'Factory Beta/Presets'.

I'm not well read regarding the new database system, I'm assuming
there is or soon will be, an option to add/remove folders and presets?
Cheers

[glokraw]

It looks like 'Users' on the gui does not correspond to
the folder UserPresets. If I save a preset, it goes to
Users, but appended with a 2, while nothing new
shows up in UserPresets folder. A unified filesystem
will be helpful in the long run, on long nights, and when
long in the tooth, let alone all three
Cheers

[EvilDragon]

There are two options in Preferences that govern how things get stored in UserPresets folder. Check them out.

[Urs]

Shouldn't everything be inside the 'Factory Beta' folder?
I wouldn't want any heading in the preset gui area,
that isn't an actual folder in the preset path. 'Local', if needed,
should have a folder thusly named, within 'Factory Beta'.
And where is the money in the 'User' folder not being inside
'Factory Beta'? Only a user would be there using...oh, never mind...
I'll just assume somebody hired a former msoft guy who
has lied on his resume'

Naming conventions, path consistency and all of that were screwed by history, ever changing access restrictions on various platforms and lack of vision/psychic abilities on my side

We could certainly clean things up, but I'm afraid the trouble it would cause our existing user base outweighs the benefits of doing so.

[noiseboyuk]

General question to avoid pointless feedback - are tags and categories themselves fixed at this point?

[Urs]

General question to avoid pointless feedback - are tags and categories themselves fixed at this point?

Pretty much. We can of course always add stuff, but the current selection is the result of a long thought process. Suggestions accompanied by good reasoning will certainly be considered though.

[EvilDragon]

As mentioned before: Brass is definitely a must-have tag. I'd also agree that Plucks should be, as well (I find them different to Stabs, personally).

[Urs]

As mentioned before: Brass is definitely a must-have tag. I'd also agree that Plucks should be, as well (I find them different to Stabs, personally).

But we have both, just not at top level. If we move them up to a major category, what would their sub categories be, and will they be equally as populated as the other categories?

[EvilDragon]

Brass is a major category in NKS... so look at what their subcategories are? Analog flugelhorn, why not?

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

As mentioned before: Brass is definitely a must-have tag. I'd also agree that Plucks should be, as well (I find them different to Stabs, personally).

But we have both, just not at top level. If we move them up to a major category, what would their sub categories be, and will they be equally as populated as the other categories?

Brass and Strings should be top-level categories. Plucks could go under Strings (see below) or Stabs -> Plucks.

I'd say think of how your end-users are interacting with their patches. They're going to start with "I'm looking for a Brass patch" or "I'm looking for a Strings patch." How do we know this? It's exactly how you, and pretty much everyone else categorizes their factory patches. And the categories already exist this way in the Factory Preset folders! Just makes logical sense to have most of these as options in the category tags.

So let's take a polyphonic Brass patch. How would you tag it using the current system? There's no "Poly" category. It's not a "Pad." There's no Pad -> Brass combination anyway. The only possible combination under the current tagging system is Lead -> Brass. This isn't a lead patch though! It's not a Stab. And there's no Stab -> Brass combination anyway. Horns aren't keyboard instruments so it doesn't belong other Keys, and there's no Keys -> Brass category either. There's no way I'm using Other! So we clearly need a Brass category.

We could use Pad -> Strings for a string patch, but that's not going to be my first choice or offer the sub-categories I'd associate with a string patch that I wouldn't associate with a pad patch. So here's some categories and sub-categories I'd like to see added before the official release:

Brass
Poly
Fast Attack
Slow Attack
Section
Solo
Breathy
Fanfare
Swell

Strings
Solo
Section
Orchestra
Fast Attack
Slow Attack
Sustained
Pizzicato
Stacatto
Bowed

[noiseboyuk]

Thanks Urs. I realise the following would likely be far too many changes at this late stage... in the main I think most of the tags are great, but they're not always in the right place for me. Regardless of all that, the last paragraph here I'd lobby for the hardest

Personally I'd prefer a lot of the sub categories re-allocated to Character. Feels a bit too much mixing of nouns and adjectives, and the adjectives are pretty universal. For example pretty much any category can have a plucked sound, or bowed, or even acoustic.

For me some of the Brass / Plucked confusion is that I don't often think of these exclusively as Lead sounds as Funkybot suggests above. Lead to me suggests front-and-centre mono.

And speaking of Character, I'd love one more pairing - Warm/Cold. Warm in particular is one of the most searched attributes I'd have thought, and nothing currently quite covers it. (I really like the pairing idea in general btw, and how you can add multiple attributes but not opposites).

[zvenx]

I agree that Brass and Strings should be their own Categories.
But thats a whole lot of sub categories for a VA synth.......Unless u-he will one day go into either sampling and physical modelling (which they very might) I think currently all those subcategories are more daunting than helpful.
rsp

[noiseboyuk]

(as an addendum to my post above just noticed there's a redundant category in Seq & Arp - there's a Distorted category, and yet there's also a Clean/Distorted character. Basically I think verbs should be banned from subcategories!)