Standardise definition & selection method for ALL third party plugin presets!!!

Kind of tough- AU is an Apple standard- so really, that is standardized. I guess 3rd party AU devs could offer up Logic channel strips with their instruments to alleviate the issue- but then again, we could just make them ourselves - as great of a feature it is- I bet most users don't use it as much as just opening up the AU, and selecting their sounds from within the specific GUI.

And honestly, a Standard Library Definition is comoditizing the technology to the lowest common deonominator- any changes/improvements causes mass headache and complaining (VST3 ????)

Tell you what, 'Sid Merrett' - what if everybody (in the whole world) had a standardized amplifier/speaker setup when they were listening to music at home, so we wouldn't have to fret about all that kind of thing?

That would be some kind of standardisation..

I agree with the setiment. I tend to move everything to Logic aupresets as I can standardise preset selection as much as possible and flip through patches on key/MIDI presses etc - but it's not possible to do this with everything.

In these days of hundreds of software instruments and massive disks, in some ways the way I can find and choose sounds for my projects is *worse* than in the days of sysex and hardware synths.

However - it's a very difficult problem to crack, as ultimately an ideal solution would have to support everything a developer would like to do, work in all hosts in all platforms and satisfy everybody - which isn't going to happen.

Sid Merrett wrote:

One more thing Bee Jay - when you say "it's not possible to do this with everything" - I don't understand.

My experience is that it IS possible to save every kind of company's plugin settings as Logic presets - do you use plugins where this is not possible?

Yes, there are a fair few instruments where it's not possible or practical, usually where the instrument settings are always saved in a bank format rather than individual settings, or instruments with custom preset browsers, or instruments that simply have too much data or parameters to be saved/recalled using the hosts preset system, or instruments that use a custom file format that don't save everything via the hosts preset saving system.

Like I say, for many of my instruments, I've painstakingly saved out presets to aupresets or Logic plugin settings, so that I can organise them how I want and have a standard interface to them - but it's not possible for everything, and for those I have to resort to using their own inbuilt patch browsers for that functionality (and I hate it when you have to, for instance, mouse click on patch or "prev/next" buttons to flip through patches... ugh...)

Sid Merrett wrote:

to be able to browse ALL piano sounds for ALL of my plugins in one place (a universal library)

This is one of the things I mean where using sysex was in some ways better than the system we had now. For instance, I could load up my global Soundiver patch library, select all the "piano" sounds regardless of instrument, and step through them quickly, auditioning each (regardless of the target instrument) until I found the one I wanted to use.

With Logic, the library window is fairly basic, and in general for plugin settings you have to load up and instrument, and *then* see what presets you have saved for that instrument - in other words, you have to make the instrument choice first based on some arbitrary decision as to what instrument *might* have the sound you want. You can't just do a patch name (or meta data) search across all your instrument plugin settings... it's pretty basic really.

We really should have something more top modern for this, in 2011, alas...

Sid Merrett wrote:

Can you give me an example of a plugin that doesn't work with the Logic save preset function?

Sure, I could give you lists of plugins for each of those particular scenarios I addressed.

In that specific case, for one example, Spectrasonics instruments for a few years did not support the hosts' save/recall settings function (at least in Logic), and when contacting them and asking why Stylus RMX could not recall settings saved via Logic's preset system I was given the explanation that it wasn't supported for technical reasons.Basically, it only save/recalled a small handful of settings, the rest were lost, meaning it was impossible for quite some time to use the Logic's save/load settings feature to save user presets, you had to use the plugin's own internal save features. (Yes, the instrument's state was saved in the song, but *wasn't* able to be saved via the preset handling, for technical reasons).

A year or so later, and later Logic versions, they finally got round to making it work as the varioous parts of the host and instruments were upgraded to handle larger data requirements. Spectrasonics instruments are examples of instruments with very specific, custom browser features, many of which you lose if you save data using Logic's functionality - not to mention the effort of saving, naming and organising 8000+ patches per instrument. Plus you have many levels of data - you often load a loop into a part, and a part into a group of parts, and they are different types of data. The hosts save/load feature only saves the state of the plugin - it can't be used to load Loop 14 into part 2, for example. It's the whole plugin, or nothing. More workarounds in terms of how you organise your loading/saving of different types of data.

There are other instruments too, and ones I've beta tested where I've got into the technical details and had to have the preset format changed or simplified because hosts had difficulties storing the data correctly. It's quite a complex thing, in the main, and different instruments implentation of preset handling mean that the whole thing is full of workarounds, compromises, or plain failure to use the feature completely.

Other instruments, such as Minimonsta, lose functionality when saving via the host - for example, you only get the meta patches and patch morphing functions when saving via the plugin's own file format, and that stuff doesn't happen when saving via the host.

I could go on and on about this - every develop has different requirements and they mostly all either do it very basically and rely on the host, or bypass the hosts save/load functionality and implement their own which they can be in control of and that will work across hosts and across platforms. For instance, there is little point having a beautifully organised Oddity library if all those sounds are now unavailable to me if I choose to work in Live...

That's why the whole preset thing is a complicated mess and isn't liable to be sorted soon.

There is a developer over on the PC trying to make a system to unify this stuff between plugins - it's PC only right now, and I forget the details this second, but it's acknowledgement that people recognise this whole thing is a mess and looking at ways to improve the situation.

Sid Merrett wrote:

I hadn't spotted that - thanks. You can't use the Logic Library window to search for Plugin Settings, only Channel Strip Settings.

You *can* use it to search for plugin presets, but only within the context of a single plugin. Ie, if I select the ES2, I can see, and search, the ES2 plugin settings. But often I want "a bass sound", I don't necessarily know that I was an "ES2 bass sound", or a "Minimonsta bass sound" or whatever.

The point being, I just want a sound that will work, and I don't know where it will come from. Forcing me to choose and instrument first can be counter productive. How many times have you needed a sound, and you go "Ok, there might be something in pluginX that'll work?" - you load up pluginX, flip through the sounds, don't find anything useful, then go "Ok, let's try pluginY", no... pluginZ etc etc

I miss Soundiver in many ways. *Ideally*, I'd like one central method of storing my presets which will work cross-plugin, cross-host, cross-format and cross-platform that is a standard that all developers and hosts support, and that offers the main core features that developers need, from simple, single patches with names, up to full meta data, cataloging, organising, author and notes tagging and so on. You can still give the users a choice to use the individual plugin and individual plugin's gui for patch selection, but you can get far more standardised if you want, with the advantages that gives - and you don't have to export patches into the system, as it's developer supported, all presets for your instruments would be instantly available in the library, just as they are in the instrument directly.

But it's difficult to get developers to agree on much, these days - the most likely thing to happen is someone somewhere creates a cross-platform standard for this that gains momentum and that developers and hosts want, or *need* to support.

Sid Merrett wrote:

From what you have said regarding Minimonsta for example: In certain circumstances, when I save presets manually within Logic, I am losing information - perhaps "breaking" the Minimonsta sound/settings in doing so - right?

It depends on what you are doing. For example, let's say you tweaked the gui and made a bass sound you were using in your track. You don't have to save it, because the state of the plugin is saved with the project.

But let's say you want to save it, so you can recall that bass patch at a later date, or in another project. You can save this via Logic's preset management to an aupreset, or you can save it as a MM patch. The former will show up in Logic's preset menus, the later in MM's own preset browser.

So far, so good.

But in MM, a patch is actually a "meta-patch" - in other words, a "patch" can actually consist of up to twelve sub patches, which you can do variations or nice nice performance things with. So for example, I make a kinda synthy epiano sound, and I save internally to MM as metapatch 1. I then make a variation and have an LFO gate the output in 16ths, and save that to 2. I then vary the LFO to create 8th, 4th note versions, and reversed versions, and set up the patch morph to jump quickly between them.

Now when I play, I can morph between the meta patches and "perform" the LFO/gating effect in real-time, to get all kinds of cool effects.

I then save the "patch" as a MM patch, and all that is saved. I recall it at a later date, and my patch and all sub versions necessary for the cool real-time performance stuff is intact.

*If* I saved my patch as a Logic setting, it would only save the current state of the front panel - which ever meta-patch I was currently editing. Al the other meta patches would be lost and when I recalled that patch in future, I would have lost all my cool performance stuff which was kinda the reason for making that patch.

Like I say, different plugins have very different approaches to data saving, or organisation, and in many cases, the hosts' system might be generic, but it's often basic and inflexible.

BTW This was the thing I referenced above but couldn't remember:

http://www.bigtickaudio.com/zen/about-zen

http://www.dontcrack.com/freeware/downloads.php/id/5743/software/Zen/