is the browser 'sound menu' too restrictive or bad organised

[Angstrom]

You think sounds is broken?

Let's talk about the drum rack category.

The M4L section is even more laughable because there can be hundreds of instruments or effects all in one vast flat list with no differentiation between God-like Ableton effects advertised on the homepage and half baked effects (made by punters), which no longer work. Everything is equal.

ang-test-delete-this.amxd
ang-test-interface OSC broken.amxd
ang-really badly programmed thing try 7.amxd
Convolution reverb pro.amxd
crap reverb test3 ignore.amxd
jims-fartmaker-poss-broken4.amxd
Convolution reverb.amxd
Creature synth test.amxd
Creature final.amxd
Creature final2.amxd
Creature final final.amxd
Creature final final2 broken.amxd
Diffuse.amxd
Different thing.amxd
Different 2.amxd
LFO.amxd
my LFO.amxd
my LFO partially working.amxd
....
list continues for 10,000 entries.

[Tarekith]

Ang-test is a punter one, amiright?

[Angstrom]

Ang-test is a punter one, amiright?

The very worst kind of punter! The kind of guy who half-makes then abandons 80 different versions of the same thing and gives them handy names like "ang GUI test 9". This kind of guy needs a folder to keep all his crappy experiments away from the well made stuff.

He sticks an author prefix on everything he makes. So a search on "ang reverb" will bring up his crappy reverb experiments. Its a naming strategy which works as a makeshift Author filter, of sorts, lets call it a "tagging" system.

[2pauluzz2]

I found myself overwhelmed and I've adopted a minimalist/ less-is-more(-creative) mindset. This is how I've organized my personal library. Each plugin (native/third party) needs to have has a good reason to be there. This is my way of "hiding" some of Abletons native options as well:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a3yhxnq6rzyylbr/Browser.png

I like it a lot! But for this to work don't you have to put native and 3rd party instruments and FX into these folders? Are these Aliases/Links?

You can save or drag and drop any native device into any folder. For 3rd party devices you'll have to group it (cmnd+g) and then click the folder icon on the rack to save the rack as preset. Ableton will suggest a save location in your user library, after which you can drag it to your toolbox (if that's what you want to call it). So in a way, yes, you might see that as an "alias"... the third party plugin still "lives" inside the plugin folder, but you can hide that entire folder from the browser and the plugin will still load when it's called for.

It's lovely having a Reverb folder with "Ableton Reverb", "Eventide Blackhole", "Valhalla Room" all at the same level. Or a Synth folder with "Ableton Wavetable", "Ableton Operator" and "Reveal Sound Spire"

[Horselover Fat]

Cool, thank you!

[Horselover Fat]

It's lovely having a Reverb folder with "Ableton Reverb", "Eventide Blackhole", "Valhalla Room" all at the same level. Or a Synth folder with "Ableton Wavetable", "Ableton Operator" and "Reveal Sound Spire"

But this method does make a clear cut between the pure instances and their presets, right? For native devices to have their presets in these folders you would have to load and drag them one by one, right?

[2pauluzz2]

You can copy in whichever native preset you'd like. I personally like to make my own and not have things cluttered by adding in all of Ableton's native presets, but you could just copy those over if you'd like that. But you can copy multiple presets at the same time, so it's not a one by one effort.