Organizing Presets and MIDI libaries

Hmmm...am I alone in having this problem?

Thanks for the reply Bob.
 
I've occasionally embarked on that giant folder restructuring you mention, but I've always been stymied by an inability to come up with a common structure that remains flexible. I think a scheme that allows one to slice and dice the info in more ways is required. Tagging seems like the way to go here, though I'm open to other ideas as well. Some of the most common use cases I have are...
 
What was that preset I used in that project 3 weeks ago?
This one happens to me all the time. I want to go back to a certain sound or loop that I liked before and work from there. I either have to find the file and open it up, or it's on me to remember both the synth I employed, and the name of the preset (relatively easy if it was Kontakt, not so easy if it's a synth with a bazillion unnamed or oddly -named presets, like some of Sonar's bundled modular synths). I could create a track template for each synth I think I might want to re-use, but that seems a bit overkill, and would require a lot of maintenance to keep the structure reasonable.
 
Experimenting
In the experimental phase, when I'm deciding which sounds to use for a project, I'll often be sorting through several presets in several synths, tweaking and evaluating them, then loading another, deciding which are candidates for what I'm looking for. I can write down their names-indeed that's the best way I've found so far - but that seems pretty analog :). 
 
I think Alchemy implements tagging reasonably well. They have their own tags, allowing searching and browsing across many "domains" (style, spatial qualities, spectral qualities, etc) and allow for pretty easy editing of user tags too. An example workflow in Alchemy that I use is to narrow down to a few dozen presets using their built-in tags, experiment with all of those, and add a user tag-usually shorthand for the name of the current project-to each one I'm considering, so I can easily find them later on. Once I decide on one, I'll remove that tag from the rest, leaving me with an easy way to access the ones I've used before in later projects. Alchemy also has a rating system (0-5 stars), but for some reason I've never found simple rating systems intuitive. The only place Alchemy's system falls down, for me, is that it's not very easy to see a list of user tags in a summary view that makes it easy for me to organize/clean them up.
 
I honestly haven't even really dug in to Sonar's loop library because I can't figure out how to organize the information. A simple, lightweight way to organize both presets AND loops would be a godsend. I'd love to see this in a future Sonar release, but seeing as that will probably be a while, a third-party solution would be useful. I wonder if it would be possible to rig something up with CAL scripting?
 
Cheers,
Mike
 
 

I agree on the Kore system being spectacular for categorization.  That is precisely what I would have modeled anything off of, with perhaps some comment block for preset-specific text, in addition to the attribute tagging.
 
Bob Bone