Hi folks,
   Been Using X2 for about a year and a half now, and feeling pretty comfortable with most aspects of the program.  But I still haven't found a satisfactory strategy for organizing soft synth presets, loops, and MIDI libraries into some kind of universally navigable system. 
 
Sonar comes with this huge amount of content included, but it's all organized in different ways - a lot of the loops are organized by the library they came in, which isn't terribly helpful for finding a loop to fit a song. The most irritating example of this is that MIDI arp patterns are organized by number, so it's an exercise in patience to just go through each one to hear them. (there is some categorization in Sonar's main arp presets, but none at all in other arp browsers like Zeta+2). Sonar's built-in browser seems to be of limited help here, as it can only filter in the current folder, not search a whole tree, or filter by type. I've tried to partially solve this by putting all of this in a Windows "Library" folder and using the built-in search of windows explorer, but this is also not great since there's not an effective tagging workflow without some secondary program (and I've yet to see a good one)
 
My point is not to complain, just to pose a question to the community; how do each of you deal with all these different organizational schemes? Do you rename things in some intelligent way? Do you reorganize the folders? If so, do you find it helpful to structure things by key? By style? By tempo? By compositional utility (Pad vs Bass vs. Arp). Do you have another application that helps you keep tabs on it all? I know it's different for everybody - I'm interested in learning what works for you.
 
Thanks for your thoughts!

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

Several folks I am aware of have manually gone through giant swaths of presets, creating lists of which presets are most usable, and for what.
 
If I get ambitious, maybe I will put together some kind of application that functions as a preset categorization tool, similar to how one would search in some of the Native Instruments synths.  The number of presets I am amassing is getting to be a bit unwieldy in using the simple list method I noted at the top.
 
I suppose you could build a table in Word or Excel, and use sort functions to provide similar, bur rudimentary, functionality.
 
Bob Bone
 
 
 

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
 
 

one thing you might look into is finding a used version of Native Instruments Kore.  the librarian is spectacular. it's really nice to have my Native Instruments Komplete synths commingled with z3ta+, Z3TA+ 2, Rapture, etc rated (one through five stars) and broken up into many different categories.  such a shame NI discontinued it, but at least they made it 64 bit just before doing so

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
 

Hmm...sad that they discontinued it. I'm not really jazzed to buy something that'll probably start running into compatibility issues shortly after I master it :).
 
I did a little experimenting with the Zen librarian, but I couldn't get it to work quite right, and it was missing a bunch of the synths I use.