Presets best practices

Hello!

I’m working on a module that will benefit greatly from having a set of factory presets. Initially I thought it might be nice to bring the presets to the forefront and list them in a nice selection box on the front panel, similar to how I’ve done sample selection on the wave bank mc:

But, maybe it would be confusing to be selecting factory patches from the front panel, but having to dive into the context menu to save and load user presets? What do you think?

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I like the system that many VSTs use, as it’s compact yet informative:

Display the active preset in a single line, mark by a star if changed, have left and right arrows to scroll up and down, and a down arrow to fold out a list of all available presets (including a scroll bar if too many).

Could this be done?

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You can do it Alesis Midiverb style, all the factory programs and then a dozen or so (depends on what it is, maybe even few dozen) of blank user programs that could be renamed and rewritten by user.

Or maybe you can do it by making this module to refer to a user presets folder, so with a switch that goes “Factory presets/User presets” and Factory presets could be coded into the module, while user presets are listing the contents of a “User presets” folder or something. I hope that makes sense, haha.

I’m curious on how to do something like that. I tried something similar and ended up storing the preset name in JSON. It’d be pretty neat though to have them listed out like your example.

I would love to see a smart preset loading method on some of the modules. I don’t like to dig out presets from the context menu.

As for the representation I agree with @Alphagem-O as this method is a tested and well working:

An alternative solution would be to allow users to use the context menu to dedicate certain presets (like “MyFav.vcvm” or “Jennie’s set.vcvm”) to 5 or so buttons on the module panel.

Just for the record: occasionally I also use docB Preset but I find it too bulky and then I end up with stoermelder 8FACE mk2 instead.