User presets in the same files as factory presets?

[fgimian]

Hey there Melda friends,

I will admit that I already find Melda plugins to be one of the messiest that I've come across as they install all presets for all plugins regardless of selection, but ignoring that ... there is another issue.

User presets are added to the same XML files as the factory presets, making it really hard to understand what is user content and what is factory content. Further to this, all presets are stored in a single file instead of individual files.

This is contrast with almost all other devs that store a single preset file per preset in a dedicated "User" directory or similar that make it very obvious what is user content vs what is factory content.

I was just curious why this is the case and if there are any plans to change it?

Some good examples of this being done neatly are u-he and Native Instruments:

u-he products put user presets under a UserPresets directory with one preset per file

Native Instruments place all user content in ~/Documents/Native Instruments.

Voxengo uses a more similar approach to Melda, placing all user presets in a file named shared-banks per plugin, but even they don't mix factory and user presets a single file.

[Hexspa]

Hi, hope you're well. I see that you have a way of managing presets and that's good. Let me tell you how I manage my Melda presets:

Open the a preset menu, say the Global one at the top of most Melda plugins, in the Folders panel, click Root in the file tree then click the Add button at the bottom. A naming dialog will appear into which I type 'User' then click Ok. A User folder will appear and that's where I store all my presets.

As you've noted, all developers have their own way of doing things. Personally, I try to avoid as much default/proprietary structuring as possible. This is because, historically, I've switched DAWs, 3rd party developers and OS platforms more than once. To solve this, I store all (or most) of my presets in a dedicated folder on an exernal drive. To export your User Presets, simply select your User folder in the Folders tab and click Export. Now you can save all your presets - without the factory ones - wherever you like. You can also add them back in with the Import function which allows you to Add To or Replace whatever presets you have in the currently-selected Folder in the tree.

To me, the only way the Melda preset system could be better is if it was perfectly managed behind-the-scenes, i.e. all the various preset menus could be managed from one spot. Mr. Melda has said that's not going to happen so you'll have to perform these tasks manually for every plugin and sub-preset folder (like, for example, your Color Settings presets).

Melda also has a Backup Presets and Restore Backup function but I haven't used it. I'm assuming that it includes the factory presets as well. Hopefully that helps.

[fgimian]

Hi, hope you're well. I see that you have a way of managing presets and that's good. Let me tell you how I manage my Melda presets:

Open the a preset menu, say the Global one at the top of most Melda plugins, in the Folders panel, click Root in the file tree then click the Add button at the bottom. A naming dialog will appear into which I type 'User' then click Ok. A User folder will appear and that's where I store all my presets.

As you've noted, all developers have their own way of doing things. Personally, I try to avoid as much default/proprietary structuring as possible. This is because, historically, I've switched DAWs, 3rd party developers and OS platforms more than once. To solve this, I store all (or most) of my presets in a dedicated folder on an exernal drive. To export your User Presets, simply select your User folder in the Folders tab and click Export. Now you can save all your presets - without the factory ones - wherever you like. You can also add them back in with the Import function which allows you to Add To or Replace whatever presets you have in the currently-selected Folder in the tree.

To me, the only way the Melda preset system could be better is if it was perfectly managed behind-the-scenes, i.e. all the various preset menus could be managed from one spot. Mr. Melda has said that's not going to happen so you'll have to perform these tasks manually for every plugin and sub-preset folder (like, for example, your Color Settings presets).

Melda also has a Backup Presets and Restore Backup function but I haven't used it. I'm assuming that it includes the factory presets as well. Hopefully that helps.

Thank you so much for the reply and I hope you're doing well too. I appreciate the detailed explanation of your approach and the amount of effort you put into your post to help me. Your approach is indeed likely the best way that one can manage presets with MeldaProduction plugins with the current system.

The issue sadly is that all presets (even under the User folder) still get saved in a single XML file along with factory presets, so as you mentioned, the only easy way to backup only user content would be to go through each individual plugin and export the presets.

Contrast this with preset management systems used by the majority of vendors, and you'll realise this is quite cumbersome. When user presets are stored as flat files in a dedicated location away from factory presets, you instantly have a clear divide between your own content and factory content.

I suppose as you said, this may never happen, but I just wanted to raise it here because I think it's a poor design decision personally.

[MeldaProduction]

Actually all of these things have very important reasons:
- Storing in global and user locations is used because e.g. universities want to install under a single admin user, but other users also need the presets, and ideally their own.
- Having presets as single files may seem obvious, but it's actually unusable for plugins of Melda power, where you can have thousands of presets per plugin (thousands of files would clutter and slow down the file system and slow down all access) and there is a hierarchical system with additional settings such as sorting and faviourites (which would otherwise need yet another file to store). All of that would be SOOOO inefficient!

[fgimian]

I do appreciate the reply, but there are too many examples of other plugins with thousands of presets in individual files (u-he Hive has around 2,500 presets all as individual files for example), yet they don't suffer any performance issues if designed carefully.

But having said that, even if a single file is used, factory presets really should not be mixed with user presets. I haven't seen any plugin manufacturer do this and IMHO it's because it's confusing and messy.

In an ideal world, there would be a MeldaProduction directory in ~/Documents which contains only user presets (even if it's one file for all of them per plugin). This makes it easy to backup and completely clear for which plugin a user has added presets.

Companies like Native Instruments use this approach and IMHO it is by far the cleanest and most elegant of all solutions I've seen. Factory presets can be hidden away in C:\ProgramData (Windows) or ~/Library/Application Data (macOS).

Just my thoughts of course