Please add a tagging system to the browser

Share what you’d like to see added to Ableton Live.
jbw
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Please add a tagging system to the browser

Post by jbw » Wed Jun 11, 2014 7:57 am

Edit: Upon further thought, a tagging system would be the best solution. You could tag items as "favorites", or "effects", or both if you wanted to be able to see all your favorite effects, and so forth and so on.

I wish there was a way to easily mark favorite items. I've got Live Suite along with 20 or so packs installed, and browsing through everything is a nightmare.

There's probably a workaround to this, like setting up another folder and just copying stuff I like in there, but ya know... Would be a whole heck of a lot better if I could just hypothetically right click an item and select "Mark as Favorite" and then be able to quickly find that favorite item later on. That way I wouldn't have to have copies of everything I liked.

A favorites section would fit nicely in the "Places" section of the browser.

Or maybe you could just add a highlight to items selected as favorites.

Please add something like this soon!
Last edited by jbw on Wed Jun 11, 2014 10:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Idonotlikebroccoli
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by Idonotlikebroccoli » Wed Jun 11, 2014 8:51 am

Agreed! Here are some suggestions of my own:

1. Combined favourite list

For me, it would be nice to have a custom combined list of my favourite Live devices, VSTs, folders and samples. I always use EQ Eight and Sylenth1, but I've never used Resonator or External Instrument. Sure, CTRL+F works quite nicely, but the results get kind of cluttered. I don't ever use any Live device presets (.adv), so it would be nice to be able to hide these.

2. Track colours

Track colours is another aspect of Live that needs favourites. I tend to always use the same 6 colours for my tracks (percussion, bass, etc.) As default, newly created clips could be assigned their respective tracks' colours, with the option to colour them differently - for me at least, this would be very nice. Navigating among 60 colours is a bit unprecise, from an interaction design point of view.

3. Zooming/views/looping areas in arrangement

Zooming in and out and expanding/minimising track heights can get tedious. It would be nice to be able to save the current zoom level and track height in arrangement. The various views could be stored in a tab area in the top area in arrangement view.

Also, I think it would be cool to be able to create several loop regions. There could be an option of keeping the current behaviour, or to "grey out" the previous loop after creating a new one. It could work kind of like the locators, only with loop durations too. Sure, looping an area in arrangement already works well, but not having to create loops all the time would feel very nice, I think.

4. Solo

Soloing a bunch of tracks that are next to each other is fairly simple - you just select them all, and click the solo button. If I want to solo tracks that aren't next to each other, I hold CTRL when selecting - slightly more tedious, but not too bad. But when I want to first solo tracks 1, 5 and 20 - and then all the prime number tracks, that's a lot of CTRL+clicking. It would be neat to be able to save solo selections. Or maybe I'm getting carried away?

5. MIDI notes

I enjoy entering arpeggios with the mouse, but it would be cool to be able to do it with the click of a button. One thing I do a lot with chords, is enter a bass note, and then have the chord an octave or two above. MIDI favourites of some kind would be a great feature for me. It would be kind of like a painting palette, rather than the current one-trick-pony CTRL+B brush.

jbw
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by jbw » Wed Jun 11, 2014 3:15 pm

After thinking a bit more, a "Favorites" folder in the "Places" section would probably work best, as opposed to a highlight option.

Say you get a new pack with a ton of samples, you could quickly go through that pack and right click to "Mark as Favorite" all the samples that stand out to you, then later on easily find those samples in the "Favorites" folder.

This would be huge!

Please add. :mrgreen:

Though if the highlight route was taken, maybe there could be a button on the browser that toggled back and forth from "Show All" to "Show Favorites" with the latter showing just the highlighted items.

The "Favorites" folder option seems like it would work better though. Either way, some sort of method to easily mark and then find favorite items would be a much welcomed addition to Live.

jbw
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by jbw » Wed Jun 11, 2014 4:02 pm

Another example of how a "Favorites" folder would benefit Live:

Say I download the Max device packs, which are filled with a large number of unique and unconventional items. After sorting through it all I finally find an item to use, and use it in a project. Without a way to mark it as a favorite, that item essentially gets tossed back into the endless sea of items, because later on I may not remember exactly which item I used.

That process repeats itself every time you open Live and work on a new project. So unless you expect users to familiarize themselves with every item Live has to offer, searching for useful and likable items will always be a laborious process which drags down the usability of Live and saps the creative process.

Whereas with a "Favorites" folder, over a brief bit of time you quickly build up a nice collection of useful items which you can easily find and use, and get right after making tracks without having to waste time sorting through the browser.

There, I've made my case about as well as I could make it. :mrgreen:

Hopefully the advantages of this are clear.

re:dream
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by re:dream » Wed Jun 11, 2014 4:09 pm

Here Ill Gate's advice in his Ill methodology courses is really useful.

The key thing is to NEVER use the factory browser as your way of storing presets or sounds.

When you get a new device

(1) go through the presets and store the ones you like in your own user places folder hierarchy
(2) mark favourites by putting an ! or a + in front of the name and you will find it instantly

A mark as favourite function would still be really useful; a tagging function even more useful. But those two bits of advice will save you huge amounts of hassle.

jbw
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by jbw » Wed Jun 11, 2014 6:12 pm

Thanks for that tip re:dream. I was thinking of different ways of organizing things, and another way that came to mind was to simply delete stuff in packs that you don't like, and then be left with content to your liking. That way you don't have to try and reorganize everything.

Thing is, the whole point of operating systems and software is so that you won't have to do stuff like this. Software and operating systems are supposed to cut through the busy work and let you get right to what you're trying to do. Live doesn't really do that in this instance.

It's funny, the way Live has everything set up to make it easier with packs and the items they contain, it really almost seems like they've made it more complex in the end because they just dump a ton of stuff onto the user and say, "Here, deal with it."

A "Favorites" folder would go a long ways, that's all I'm sayin', and yeah a tagging system would probably work even better.

In fact let me change my vote for a tagging system instead. :mrgreen:

It could go in the "Places" section and just let you narrow down the items based on tags, and would be a lot more flexible that one big "Favorites" folder, and it would also let you tag items as favorites.

Yes! Tagging system!

Idonotlikebroccoli
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by Idonotlikebroccoli » Wed Jun 11, 2014 8:32 pm

Tagging system would be a great solution, but I'm more of a delete kind of guy. :P

jbw
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Re: Please add a tagging system to the browser

Post by jbw » Wed Jun 11, 2014 10:42 pm

A tagging system would be ideal. I updated the thread title and first post.

Think of it:

On the left side have a designated "Tags" section underneath "Places" that listed all your tags. Click on one or more of the tags to activate it, and the results are shown on the right. 8)

Example:

Click on "Favorite" and "Kick Drum" to activate them and all your favorite kick drum samples show up on the right. Click on "Kick Drum" again to deactivate it, then click on "Snare" and all your favorite snare samples would appear on the right panel.

A system like this would be highly flexible and would make organizing and finding items in Live a whole lot easier. The workflow would be improved tremendously as you wouldn't be constantly confronted by the great sea of items every time you went to use the browser.

I would love to see this! Good idea re:dream. Let's hope they see the benefits.


Ronin1973
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Re: Please add a tagging system to the browser

Post by Ronin1973 » Mon Jun 16, 2014 9:33 pm

Being able to read and edit metadata would be a big help. KI1RK doesn't give me much of a description. Is it a kick? Is it a kick? Is it something else entirely? Many libraries include metadata. This helps immensely when searching.

ALSO, when exporting a mix, it would be nice if Ableton would save a backup of that exact instance of the session and have the option to store a link to the session in the metadata. It would be awesome to just right click a file and open the exact instance from the session it came from. That would be great for making changes to a mix that you may have already made four versions of.

jbw
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by jbw » Wed Jun 18, 2014 2:10 am

Idonotlikebroccoli wrote:...I'm more of a delete kind of guy. :P
I'm currently going through all my packs and just picking and choosing stuff I like, moving that stuff to the "User" folder, and then deleting the pack. So far it works great.

Still, even with all that a tagging system would be useful.

thundaroll
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Re: Please add a tagging system to the browser

Post by thundaroll » Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:46 pm

yes i vote for tag system for better access

Idonotlikebroccoli
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Re: Wish there was a way to easily mark favorites

Post by Idonotlikebroccoli » Thu Jan 15, 2015 12:29 pm

re:dream wrote:Here Ill Gate's advice in his Ill methodology courses is really useful.

The key thing is to NEVER use the factory browser as your way of storing presets or sounds.

When you get a new device

(1) go through the presets and store the ones you like in your own user places folder hierarchy
(2) mark favourites by putting an ! or a + in front of the name and you will find it instantly

A mark as favourite function would still be really useful; a tagging function even more useful. But those two bits of advice will save you huge amounts of hassle.
I have no idea why I didn't try the user library thing last time I posted in this topic - it works pretty well! :D To be able to add VSTs, they need to be within a rack (ctrl+g). It's not as good as a native proper tagging system by a long shot, but it's a significant improvement for me.

Image

Moiler
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Re: Please add a tagging system to the browser

Post by Moiler » Thu Jun 16, 2016 8:48 pm

try
we have
one folder in there is house

one tagg like "128 BPM"
one tagg like "funky"
one tagg like "hard"
one tagg like ....and so on....

now we search for an funky house track in 128 Bpm

we use our tagg system
we put our 3 taggs and what we see
that what we searching for. all songs in funky house style at 128 Bpm.

this u can managing and using so u think and it will work for all vst audio and so on.

thx

re:dream
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Re: Please add a tagging system to the browser

Post by re:dream » Thu Jun 16, 2016 8:50 pm

We can but hope and pray

One day our cries will be heard.

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