Organizing favorites?

[Naenyn]

Hello, all!

I recently picked up my first Virus .. a TI Snow. I'm loving it!

I was wondering.. is there a recommended way for organizing favorite patches? I noticed there are some "Favorite" categories .. but adding the category to each patch I like seems tedious. Is there a better way? Love the sound of this thing, but I feel like the patch browsing could use a little redesign.

Please let me know if you guys have any suggestions. Thanks!

[MBTC]

What I do is just create my own banks, like Favorites1, 2, etc. and but those on the bottom window pane of VC, then drag from the source bank (top pane, which is either factory or some third party library) to the bottom pane.

Most of the time I end up going to my faves first and working from there. I've tried to set them up so that all the "fundmentals" are easy to get to (i.e. patches that I might want to use as a starting point and tweak from there).

It's not really obvious at first that you can do this but actually in terms of patch management it's one of the more efficient mechanisms I've seen. Only thing is the drag and drop can be buggy, at least the Windows implementation. I've seen it do everything from overwrite patches in the destination with duplicate names and the completely wrong sound, to just deleting them wholesale. Just take it one step at a time and confirm the sound you think should be in whatever slot is in fact there and sounds like it should.

[Naenyn]

Thanks for the response! That does seem like the quickest way to go about it. It'd be nice if there was a way to list only your favorite banks by category .. so you could, for example, see all of your favorite leads without seeing all of the other leads in your collection. Would that be possible..?

[MBTC]

Well I'm assuming you've already found the category button in VC but are looking for a way to not assign a category to each patch you create?

Then what I'm suggesting is you could create a personal library called Leads, another one called Pads, another Perc or whatever. Yes you are limited to 128 sounds per bank but that's a lot, and if you need more then name them Leads1, Leads2, etc.

Another thing you could do is just use the first two or four columns of a bank for a particular sound type, like Bank1 and the first two columns are bass, columns 3 & 4 are leads, columns 5 and 6 are pluck, etc. Bank 2 can be more of same or a different category of sounds. Or if you want all 128 slots for leads, the entire library becomes Leads1, second library becomes leads2, etc.

It just depends on whether you want to avoid the Virus way of assigning category to sounds (thought that was what you were looking for). If you ever get into pro sound design you will probably want to organize/categorize them using the standard provided by the software, but I like to just come up with whatever workflow is most intuitive to me right off the bat so often times I don't bother with that. With the VC software I just physically group bass together, leads together, etc in each custom bank so I can flip through them easily and select a different category with the mouse. A lot of that just comes down to individual work flow and how you think about finding things.

[Naenyn]

I understand what you're suggesting and have even seen the column thing in some banks I've got. What I'm wondering is .. once I've sorted my favorites in to their own favorites banks .. is there a way to browse those favorites (and only those favorites) by category?

For example, the upper half of the browser display has a Category drop-down. It allows me to choose a category to show all of the patches for (ie: Lead). Is there a way to limit the scope of it such that it only shows me all of the patches in my favorites banks that are tagged with the category "Lead"?

[MBTC]

Ok, I think I see what you're saying -- use the category filter to show only those patches assigned to that category in a given bank. I think the answer is that it currently does not allow you to do this, there is only the category button at the top and once you save a patch (in any library) with that category assigned, it will group them all together (in other words they intend category to be like a search-across-all feature).

I can see it would be useful if category could be applied to current bank, but I guess they figure that within the scope of one bank its easy enough to scroll through? Also some folks might call with support questions of "why is my bank showing as empty! I lost all my patches dammit!" when really they forgot they have the filter set to "Organ" but they did not categorize patches as being organ patches... lol.

I know that sounds crazy to some but as a software developer myself, sometimes we have to take support costs into consideration and you have to design the user interface to have just enough flexibility to get the job done, but not enough rope for the user to hang themselves. Too much customization allows the user to paint themselves in a corner then it takes many expensive man hours to help rescue them

This is what I meant earlier by "individual workflow". What you want to accomplish (i.e. be able to get to your favorite patches for a given category quickly) can be done, just have to get a little creative in your workflow design. For example like I said, for me I group them by column rather than chronologically or some other order. For example if first two columns have empty slots, in means I can copy more bass patches there, etc.

[Naenyn]

Thanks for taking the time to explain! I had a feeling that's how it was working... Ah, well... it'll get me close enough to what I was looking for.

Thanks again!