Organising Presets

I have a ton of presets for some of my synths. Way too many. What many do is to just chuck all their presets and packs into their preset folder and then browse through. Sometimes that's fine, but often that's not idea. Consider a few scenarios:

1. You want to study a few presets in detail to understand how they work: then you only need those presets you intend to study in your preset browser.
2. You are producing in a certain style: then most of your presets are irrelevant.

Now many preset managers, in my opinion, make the mistake of not using the underlying file system to do the organising, with each preset in its own file, sorted alphabetically by default, respecting the file hierarchy on disk, and then only using e.g. an sqlite3 database to cache data about presets. If they do do this, for example U-He synths like Zebra do, as does Serum and ANA2, then you can use standard file management tools to organise your presets. If this is the case, you can, for example, zip up most of your presets and then only pull into the browser the few that you're interested in. This massively reduces the amount of visible presets in your browser and thus massively simplifies how they are organised. Moreover, tried-and-tested file management tools are far better developed and far more efficient than the rudimentary management facilities offered in a synth's preset browser. And of course once you've learned the command line tools once, or some other tool, you've learned them, and it is the same with every synth that uses the file system to organise its presets.

Other thoughts:

1. Make a preset folder for each style. E.g. if you produce both trance and synthwave, then many synthwave presets won't work well in a trance track, and vice versa. So have a trance folder and a synthwave folder, with subfolders like trance/pluck and so on.
2. Make a preset folder for each project (by project I mean a collection of tracks with similar sounds).

The overall philosophy is that of managing a needle-in-a-haystack problem. Even 1000 presets is too many for most of us to not just audition one by one, but also to remember what the first preset sounded like by the time we've reached the 100. So to manage this problem we need to do two things:

1. Reduce the number of presets we need to search through;
2. Learn how to make our own presets.

The latter one, making our own presets, is important: it takes less time to change the synth settings from an init preset than it does to audition 100 bass patches. Thus, if we can recall from memory the settings for a preset we want, then we can recreate it easily. Moreover, by having trained our memory to remember settings for a preset and what it sounds like, which comes through practise of creating/copying presets rather than simply picking them, we will become better at remembering particular patches, both their name and how they work.