Recently stumbled about the limited VST preset managment, so as the title says some more editing options like renaming and sorting would be nice.
keeping with the renaming / sorting theme but not directly related to vst’s - how about a find/replace function ie Find 0910 replace 09A0.
or just a way to highlight single fx columns and edit en masse ie cut, copy, paste etc
i’d find a find replace function really helpful - if there is already a way to do this then i apologise and ask… how?
There currently is only such a function for instruments column (swap / remap / delete).
The current trick for your question is to select the stuff you want to the clipboard and either paste it in a text-editor (yes it’s really that simple!) where you can use the search and replace option (and paste back the changes into Renoise) or download the XRNS-PHP tool, install xampp and ajust the searchandreplace script to your needs: http://xrns-php.sourceforge.net/
ah - thanks that works quite well - but would be good to see it inside renoise imo
hang on, i thought this was ideas and suggestiond for the developers!! i’m not clever enough for all that.
it took me about a week to get a php mailing list to work!
Oh and you cant select the vol / pan columns individually either - would be handy also.
renaming VST preset/patch name is like a basic feature and should definitely be added. i was stunned when i tried to do it and found out i could not.
is it hard to implement?
thanks!
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For FX you already can do so: click on the presets field in Renoise, then choose “rename”.
Most VSTs offer preset handling renaming/moving/whatever by themselves. Some don’t allow the host to change preset names. Some even dont have presets. This is one big mess if you ask me. Whatever we do, it will never always work with all VSTs…
definitely agree it will never work with all, but at least it could work for the ones that dont have any built in management tools. nearly every host i’ve used offers such a feature, even if it’s not a perfect one. the loading and saving of banks and presets is good but if you have 50 presets named all the same from your last sound design session within renoise after it’s not helping anything it’s making it worse 
because now we have to sort through them in a host that has the rename feature and such.
one possible work around could be some kind of FXP tool that looks at the filename and renames the FXP preset name outside of the host to whatever the file is named. so if you have been saving them in renoise without realizing that the name was all the same at least then the tool could use your filenames to do the dirty work. though it wouldn’t be as elegant as built in support for such.
i empathize. vst is a mess. but you could have said the same thing about adding support for VSTi to a sample-only tracker yes?
“well vst spec is a mess so whatever we do it wont be perfect” - surely, but i’m 90% certain that the majority of your users are thrilled with the less than perfect VST spec and how it works in renoise. i know that i am for one extremely grateful for the efforts to add in vsti and vst support to a tracker. 
You are of course right - excuse my ignorance. My thought was just to maybe skip the internal VST Preset handling more or less completely, and take care about this by using the Renoise internal presets - as suggested by Bantai. Which VST host do you have in mind as a good example regarding the VST preset handling?
And you guys are talking about the “internal” presets (the ones you see in Renoises Program DowpDown in the instrument Properties), not the ones you load/save via external files, right?
my 2 cents : I don’t bother with FXP/FXB at all at the moment because it is such a hassle. I have a dir with loads of downloaded preset-banks for quite a few synths, but I actually don’t use them at all.
There are a few plugs with great internal preset handling that I actually use because of that, apart from that I sometimes store my own sounds in XRNI-Format (VSTi+Values).
But especially for effects a better preset-handling would be much appreciated.
While some own preset handling might be easier to implement, i think it should at least support renaming and sorting of standard VST FXP/FXB files too. Best example is probably Tobybears Minihost, which works very reliable it seems. I had to design presets for a synth developer recently and he would’ve had no use with an own Renoise format, since he had to compile a default bank from the presets. I can name the FXP filename and i’m usually fine with it, but in that case every loaded patch in the bank would’ve been called “Init” internally and would’ve required him to edit all my submitted presets. In the end i’ve downloaded and used Minihost to compile the bank.
Yes, one simpler method to implement might be maybe, that when a FXP file is saved the internal name in the file header get’s set to the filename. One could then start a new bank and load the presets at their proper positions. Not fully featured, but would be already an improvement.
+1 to the minihost as an exemplary implementation of standard fxp/fxb stuff. another good one is cantabile. and yet another is flstudio. they all allow these basic operations (only new one here in this case is the renaming); load bank, save bank, load patch, save patch, rename.
those 5 functions are pretty much universal in my experience.
All this is already possible for VST FX right now in Renoise. For instruments only rename is missing. So we are only talking about a rename function for VST Instruments as a must have?
Delete is not possible (the VST standard doesnt allow this), swap/remap would be.
yep. that’s all.
Having multiple undo levels for VSTi presets would be nice too… just in case you mess up your VST preset or want to see how the current preset compares with one you tweaked a few song versions ago. And on that train of thought, keeping the undo levels separate per application panel/widget would be nice too… I absolutely hate it when I change a sample, lay some notes down, play the track, go back to the sample window, and undo because I didn’t like the results only to have my precious pattern data undone :s … I think I might actually post a separate thread regarding that 
One example of a VSTi which totally relies on the VST-host’s handling of fxp/fxb and surprisingly doesn’t have any functionality on it’s own is DiscoDSP Phantom.
Sounds more like a/b editing buttons in the vsti window should make its prominent debute as well along with the quick presets.