Preset-Handling

Hey people,

I’d like to make a suggestion regarding the handling of presets.
While I didn’t work much with presets at first and used rack states to control the plugins parameters I started to create my own presets.

So, what I think is not useful (this is the behavior now) is, that changes made to a preset will instantly be overtaken in that preset. So f.e. if I open the cutoff, advance to the next preset and go back, the cutoff is still open. Is that useful? Doesn’t it make more sense to have a button which saves the changes to the preset instead of doing it automatically? I’d love to have the option to turn that function off. Or maybe having an option that a dialog opens up and asks if the changes should be saved? Of course this can lead to problems when using and modulating presets within a song. So this dialog should be optional.

What do you think about it? Or does it have something to do with how plugins handle the presets themselves? Maybe @brad can enlighten me on this.

Best,
Chris

Ah’; thought I was the only one who found this behavior strange.
Now I always use a new rack state to try out changes to parameters.
Hardware synths often had a “compare” button that was nice to have but it is mostly gone in vst world.

Yes. And every application needs the user to press the save button to save the changes… word, Photoshop, etc.

Yup, this is generally how the VST standard handles things - no saving for “standard vst presets”; they just incorporate any changes directly into the current instantiation. Still, a number of plugins implement their own preset mechanisms (u-he synths among them); for those, Cantabile provides “pseudo presets” which are essentially a full plugin memory dump for every preset.

Sure, @brad could implement an “explicit save” behavior for these presets - but that would create strange behaviors: some plugs (standard vst presets) would keep every change; others (pseudo presets) would need explicit saving. Not sure if that creates even more confusion.

Personally, I really like explicit saving, so for most of my recent racks, I use “full bank” state behavior where that doesn’t create strange conflicts with plugin-internal preset systems. With this, I explicitly save the current config with “update state” - keeps things predictable.

Cheers,

Torsten

I fully agree, imo the songs should reset when switching back and forth.
I installed the R shortcut for that.
But i would love to see it as a standard behavior.
Or at least have the option in the settings.