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

Question

Over at LogicProHelp there is a very useful topic relating to Logic presets - in which many users have spent time saving individual third party plugin settings as LOGIC presets... which is enormously helpful when selecting instruments etc because they can be selected using a keystroke etc and found within the Logic Library browser window - which is of course searchable!
These presets have then been uploaded to the forum for others to download.
http://www.logicprohelp.com/viewtopic.php?p=367267#367267
I posted on the topic recently and thought it worth mentioning over here on the Apple forum.
Here's what I said - does anyone agree/disagree? Is this something that Apple should work on? For me it's a no brainer but I'd like to know what others think....
"MO 3rd party instruments that rely on mouse-clicks or anything more than one button press to change a preset are incredibly badly designed. It's massively frustrating and impedes creative flow to have to use a mouse, or press several keyboard buttons just to move from one sound to another. Native Instruments interfaces are amongst the worst offenders - you even have to MANUALLY specify what presets you want to use with specific MIDI Program Change messages - because the latter are the only way I know of using anything other than the NI interface to change sounds in their plugins.
The Logic Channel Strip settings saved along with 3rd party Plugin settings saved as Logic Presets have proved a recent revelation for me.
Now I can change instrument presets using a keystroke, a midi message, almost anything I want.
And then there's the Logic Library browser - now that so many sounds are saved as Logic Presets, the Logic browser window has become really powerful - being able to search my entire library for "bass" or a particular instrument name - REGARDLESS of which third party plugin is required to play the sound - IT JUST LOADS AND PLAYS!
Maybe I'm in the minority but I think of a sound I want first, NOT which instrument I should load and then browse through - the latter is kind of backwards for me.
I really think that we users should pressure Apple and plugin developers to provide Logic (and indeed other DAWs) presets with ALL of their products because the amount of effort on their part is minimal compared with countless end-users doing this task manually over and over. The current situation is ridiculous.
DAWs are incredibly powerful these days but the lack of a plugin preset/sound library definition standard is quite crippling to work flow.
I mean if there were a STANDARD LIBRARY DEFINITION such as with Native Instrument libraries or Apple loops where sounds are defined universally and supplied as such in a common preset it would revolutionise sound discovery/selection within DAWs.
Kind of like a document management system that applies to ALL plugins, by ALL developers and the installer for a plugin would then add all its presets to the management system/common library"

Answer 1

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.