Feature request: Categories/Filters for MIDI Presets

[ChrisMikolaj]

Hi Arlo

Hope you're doing well.

We're just in the process of updating our MIDI presets and purposes a bit, which means that we will have quite some commands for different pedal boards and even our light systems as we now can convert MIDI to DMX - super decent!

But that also means there will be quite a number of MIDI presets, that will be more and more difficult to overview. So I thought maybe there's a way to add tags or categories or any sort of filter other than the name of the preset. Currently I can only try to make the name as unique as possible with a prefix, so I can determine what the preset does.

But it would be nice to be able to differentiate them with dedicated fields for that.

I remember you wanted to re-purpose colors and tags at some point as well, maybe the MIDIs are something to take into consideration in those thoughts as well. Or "simply" user defined fields for different purposes or something like that.

Thanks a lot,
Chris

[arlo]

You can set a color for MIDI presets and filter the list by color, or enter notes for MIDI presets and filter the list by notes text.

[ChrisMikolaj]

Colors wouldn't be my first choice, as I'm using the colors for my guitar pedal board to represent the colors on the effects. So I'm pretty much through most of the colors already.

Filtering by notes might be okay, but I cannot show the notes on the list of MIDI presets, so I kind of need to guess which would be the correct notes then?

So maybe if the notes could be shown it would already resolve the situation?

[arlo]

Can you describe in more detail what the problem is and what you want to accomplish?

[ChrisMikolaj]

I'll try to explain it as clearly as possible.

In the screenshot you can see how my current MIDI presets are organized. The brown-colored ones are presets for our lightbar. At the moment, this color coding is only temporary, as we've just started testing these presets and they are not final yet. Depending on how the different color modes end up, I will probably adjust the color scheme as well.

The presets in the other colors at the bottom are currently pedalboard presets that are assigned to individual songs. As I continue to assign presets to more songs and add additional presets, this list will inevitably become more and more cluttered.

That's why I think it would be really helpful to have tags or user-defined fields to categorize presets — for example "Lightbar", "Guitar", or even more specific categories like "Ambient" or "Crunch". This would make it much easier to find, adjust, use, and assign presets later on.

With the current list view on the website, I feel that managing a growing number of presets will become increasingly difficult over time.

Maybe I'm a bit picky here, but I thought this perspective might still be helpful.

[arlo]

This isn't quite getting to what the problem is. You said the list is "cluttered." Can you describe a specific task you're doing that is difficult to do now?

[ChrisMikolaj]

The core "problem" is that the preset name is currently doing too much work.

Right now, I have to structure the name in a very specific way so it stays sortable. That works, but it means the names keep getting longer and more artificial over time.

For example:

Light presets often need to start with something like "Lightbar ..." just so I can group or filter them

Guitar presets may include the guitar or board name in the preset name, even though that's not really part of what the preset does

What I'd actually like is:

Use the preset name to describe the function ("Ambient Wash", "Crunch Verse", "Clean Intro", etc.)

Store what it belongs to (Lightbar, Guitar, which guitar / board) in a separate field

With the current system, if I don't encode that information into the name, I lose the ability to reliably filter or sort the list later.

That's why I was thinking about user-defined fields:

One field for "Device / System" (Lightbar, Guitar, Bass, etc.)

Maybe another for "Category" or "Sound Type" (Ambient, Clean, Crunch, Lead)

Then allow filtering by those fields in the MIDI preset list

This would keep preset names short and readable, while still making large preset lists manageable in the long run.

As a lightweight alternative, even showing the Notes field directly in the list view would already help, since it could act as a visible classification instead of hidden metadata.

So long answer short: If I would change the names of the presets to what they actually are doing (which is what I would like to do to be able to have a smaller MIDI field on my performance layout on the iPad), I cannot do that as of now without losing the ability to actually know what the preset does to which device.

Does that make more sense? Sorry if I cannot really describe what the issue is sufficient enough. I appreciate your time and efforts on that

[arlo]

You're telling me what solution you want, but not what problem you're trying to solve. Please describe a situation, like "I need to do ____, so I click ____ and ____, and then I see ____ and that's a problem because ____."

[ChrisMikolaj]

I'm very sorry.

I need to assign MIDI presets to buttons on a performance layout.
So I open the MIDI preset list and select a preset.

On the performance layout, the MIDI label is the preset name.
Because the available space there is limited, long preset names are hard to read, so I want to shorten them.

When I shorten the names, I can no longer tell in the preset list which device a preset belongs to (e.g. guitar vs lights), because that information currently only exists in the name.

So the problem is that shortening preset names improves the performance layout, but makes the preset list ambiguous.