How do you organize your synth patches and samples efficiently?

[blue monk]

Hi,

This is the situation:

Like everyone, I have a lot of sounds and most of these do not fit my criterea.
A smaller pre-selection of sounds means less searching thus quicker progress with song projects.
I want to organize them.

The ideas I have how to do that would cost a lot of time. I hope for inspiration how to do this in a smarter way.

With samples, this does not seem so complicated: They can be played and copied/deleted in a file manager (Finder in MacOS) without switching the programm. Preview and copy/move favorites into a dedicated directory/folder for use in the upcoming projects.

With softsynths, this seems to be potentially extremely time consuming as the patches can only be previewed in the softsynth but the files cannot be managed there (especially deleting). I could go through the banks, save individual patches to a favorites folder, then re-import, create new banks or I would play each patch in a bank, then delete the patch files I do not want in the Finder.
I wonder wether there isnt a quicker way to do this?

Obviously, softsynths do not all handle banks and patches in the same way.
Some have browsers, some load banks...
It would be great if I could delete sounds right from inside the softsynth (I mean actually sending the patch files to the .trash folder of the OS).
I dont think any softsynth does that. Another option would be rating these patches negatively and then filtering all these patches (still on disk but I never see them again unless I want to), but the softsynths with a browser and rating per patch dont have that option, either.


In general, I see two approaches:

1. Deleting what I dont want

2. Copying favorites to folders that contain nothing but sounds I curated

Option 2 is cleaner. But initially, the favorites folders would be small unless I invest a lot of time upfront into organizing => less time for making music.
Thus, realistically, I would still eventually look for sounds in the unsorted folders.
Building favorites folders takes time, either way. Plus, I probably wont use individual sounds too often. And taste evolves. So it is not like a growing favorites folders makes the usefulness grows linearly.
Therefore, the idea of a allemcompassing eternally useful library seems utopic.
More realistic: A temporary selection for a few months at most.
That would mean having to deal with a lot of managing files. Being able to preview and then delete synth patches as quickly as possible could help.
I could apply both strategies. Some sounds you so obviously do not like, that it is a waste of time having to browse through these several times on different occasions in search for something useful. In these cases I would prefer to encounter them only once and never again.
Ideas to do this in a smart and efficient way would be very welcome.
To some degree, this seems to be simply part of the job. That said, I have to do something in terms of organizing and keep a healthy balance to the time I have for actually making music.

What I have been doing in the last 3-4 months was navigating through the chaos until I got inspired.
This actually works for me somewhat because I get inspired quickly but that does not mean that I want to spend time that I dont have to spend.

I have started creating a template with drums, synth-tracks preloaded for the genre I want to mainly produce at the moment. Prenamed Bass, Lead, Drums, etc. and color-coded.
A few busses/auxs with reverb and delay -the basics. I am still updating this.

I do think though that I need to improve the level of organization.
The goal is to have as many sounds that are useful to me accessible quickly and all sounds that I dont want to use out of the way.

Again, with samples, not that complicated but with synth patches I dont even know how to approach this without carelessly burning time.

Any ideas would be very welcome.

These are the main synths I own licenses for and want to use:
Serum
Sylenth1
Dexed
FM8
Alchemy (Logic Pro X)
NI Massive