OmniTag - Tagging Engine for Third Party Omnisphere Libraries [50% off through Dec 31, 2022]

[marclawsonmusic]

Just saw your other post... yeah each library is supposed to be directly under 'Patches'.

You can just restore inside OmniTag to put everything back. After that, if you were to move those folders up one level to 'Patches', they will stay as-is

PS - After you restore, if you open any of those patches in Omnisphere you will notice the category will say 'Capricon', 'Horizon', etc. That's because Omnisphere expects a structure of Library\Category under 'Patches' not Dev\Library\Category. The extra level of folders is throwing things off.

[aMUSEd]

Yeah I had them organised by dev, then bank, to keep things neat. Didn't see an error messages though.

[aMUSEd]

How do I restore to normal?

[marclawsonmusic]

In OmniTag click on the Library, and then click 'History'. On that next screen, you can click on the conform event and press 'Restore'.

[GMusic]

Thanks for the update. I really wish Spectrasonics would partner with you on this. Presenting users with a built in system like Omnitag is a great selling point, in my opinion.

There are a plethora of 3rd party banks out there and they really mess with the superb tagging system Omnisphere has. There's really no other tag system out there this complex from what I've seen. But with complexity and freedom from patch creators comes great disorganization. The misspellings, the redundancies are not only tacky, but they make navigating the library much less effective.

Keep up the good work!

[noiseboyuk]

aMUSEd - glad we got to the bottom of that one. I was going to suggest that once you've restored the patches, put them where they're supposed to be and conformed with Omnitag, you could THEN put them all back with your extra developer folder categories. But thinking about it that's not such a great idea. The whole purpose of Omnitag is to conform to Spectrasonics' standards so when you search in ARP+BPM, you get all your results in one place. By adding an extra layer in the hierarchy that advantage has gone, and you're back to having to search in multiple places and will have an inconsistent browser, which sorta defeats the object.

A suggestion though - what you COULD do is rename all the developer folders you want to keep together to always start with the developer name. Then when you are searching, visually you will see them all grouped together one after the other. Many may already be named this way in the first place (like The Unfinished is), it's just catching the other names to make sure they're consistent.

[noiseboyuk]

Thanks for the update. I really wish Spectrasonics would partner with you on this. Presenting users with a built in system like Omnitag is a great selling point, in my opinion.

There are a plethora of 3rd party banks out there and they really mess with the superb tagging system Omnisphere has. There's really no other tag system out there this complex from what I've seen. But with complexity and freedom from patch creators comes great disorganization. The misspellings, the redundancies are not only tacky, but they make navigating the library much less effective.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks! Omnitag was only ever created because I kept on and on about how messy it all was, and there really wasn't any reasonable solution out there. Marcus is the genius who figured out how to do it. The amount of work he put into it was insane. He was convinced he could make a "magic button" that sorted it all out automatically, turns out he was right

[LFO8]

I think Spectrasonic’s categorization and tagging for Omnisphere is way too all over the place.

In my sound design (on any synth) I force myself to categorize the following way:

[noiseboyuk]

LFO8 - that's all great, and I too think Spectrasonics' own categorisation is in need of streamlining. The problem for end users though is that consistency between developer patches for different synths is much less important than consistency between developers in any one synth. Every developer makes their decisions differently, and that results in a confusing overall user experience navigating between them with a huge long list of similar but different folders, and no way of easily finding patches. That doesn't bother some people, and for them the status quo works just fine. But Omnitag is there for those who want to keep things consistent within Omnisphere.

[LFO8]

I certainly don’t disagree with that premise. Just expressing my desire for more conformity across plugins. I also find it equally annoying when one developer assignes the alt, ctrl, shift keys for fine control adjustments or resetting the value one particular way and another developer mixes that up again.

[aMUSEd]

I think Spectrasonic’s categorization and tagging for Omnisphere is way too all over the place.

In my sound design (on any synth) I force myself to categorize the following way:

Yeah it's stupid - I don't want silly categories like 'Hits and bits' whatever that even means, and 'Ethnic World' just creates an us and them approach to music, all music is world music and music from any one culture could be seen as 'ethnic' to someone from another culture so just categorising by sound production type (Woodwind, bowed string etc) is better.

[aMUSEd]

In OmniTag click on the Library, and then click 'History'. On that next screen, you can click on the conform event and press 'Restore'.

Thanks that worked but I'd suggest making it clear to users that if they have reorganised libraries as I had done already then it may affect the retagging process - looks like people need to stick to the original organisation

[noiseboyuk]

In OmniTag click on the Library, and then click 'History'. On that next screen, you can click on the conform event and press 'Restore'.

Thanks that worked but I'd suggest making it clear to users that if they have reorganised libraries as I had done already then it may affect the retagging process - looks like people need to stick to the original organisation

Yup - as Marcus said it should have automatically flagged as a problem, so that's something for us to look into. Probably after Christmas though!

[aMUSEd]

aMUSEd - glad we got to the bottom of that one. I was going to suggest that once you've restored the patches, put them where they're supposed to be and conformed with Omnitag, you could THEN put them all back with your extra developer folder categories. But thinking about it that's not such a great idea. The whole purpose of Omnitag is to conform to Spectrasonics' standards so when you search in ARP+BPM, you get all your results in one place. By adding an extra layer in the hierarchy that advantage has gone, and you're back to having to search in multiple places and will have an inconsistent browser, which sorta defeats the object.

A suggestion though - what you COULD do is rename all the developer folders you want to keep together to always start with the developer name. Then when you are searching, visually you will see them all grouped together one after the other. Many may already be named this way in the first place (like The Unfinished is), it's just catching the other names to make sure they're consistent.

I thought of that but initially removed the developer names from each patch folder as I prefer to see 'The Unfinished/Horizon' to having long bank names like 'The Unfinished Horizon'. tbh on reflection I also prefer the way Matt categorises his patches which is much more logical and reflects his music style than the Spectrasonics categories which are often illogical or gimmicky ('Electronic Mayhem' ffs). I may use it to conform some by other sound designers though that don't use categories at all like Luftrum.

[noiseboyuk]

The core problem is always the same though - Spectrasonics lay the ground-rules and they cannot be changed. I like Matt's tagging a lot, but it's not possible to conform everyone else to his standards (and of course that goes for anyone). So the only way to achieve the aim of having one place for everything is to conform to Spectrasonics' own standards, however idiosyncratic they are.

Sometimes I've found Type is a better place to start than Category, btw.