How are you auditioning and organizing tones in Rig Manager?

I'm currently in the process of trying to match rigs to songs for a project. I've recorded DI tracks in Cubase, which allows me to play the song with the full compliment of bass, drums, vox, etc. and then cycle through the rigs in Rig Manager. I set the cycle to just a few bars that are representative of the tone I'm looking for and just let it loop as I audition tones. So far, so good.

I have all my rigs in folders organized by amp, e.g. Marshalls and Fenders and Voxes (oh, my!). That gives me a general starting point, as I probably wouldn't look in the 5150 folder for a Bonnie Raitt tune. I just finished a pass looking for Green Day sounds, so I worked through each of these folders sorted by gain hi to low. In my current workflow, when I hear something I like I hit Shift-F to tag it as a favorite, then the right arrow to move to the next rig. When done, I know that all favorites represent Green Day tones.

However, when I get ready to look for Deep Purple tones, many of those favorites would be inappropriate. So, I've created a Bands folder in Local Library and beneath that I have folders for band names, e.g. Green Day. I copy all the favorites into that folder, then clear the favorite flag so that I can repeat the process for the next band. This gets it done, and then when I'm looking for a sound I can use band tones as a point of reference, either for that band's song or a "sounds like" kind of filter. I can also flag favorites within the context of a band folder without it being flagged in the higher level amps folder.

Of course, this process results in duplicate copies of the rigs. I'm not too concerned about that since they're not disk space intensive. Nonetheless, I wonder if there's a more elegant way to approach this and was wondering what your workflow is for this kind of thing.

Quote from Wheresthedug

I finally bit the bullet and removed all the folders from my Local Library. Instead of having a Folder for each profile maker I now just have everything in a single list in Local Library. It isn’t perfect but it is better than having to search every folder individually because RM won’t search sub folders ?

Without any folders if I want to find an AC 30 I just search for AC30 and everything appears. I can then order by Gain or Author etc. Instead of having to search each profiler sub folder individually.

However my wish list for RM would be

1 - search all subfolders to make folder based management viable

2 - allow multi level searches. Instead of simply find all AC30. I would like the ability to add additional and and/or/not searches to the first set of results. Find all AC30 AND AC15 but NOT Author Xxx. Or Find all profiles where Author = Tone Junkie AND Amp = AC30 etc.

3 - save searches. So that regularly used criteria can be called up instantly.

4 - Multiple level order. Instead of sort by Gain or Sort by Author. I would like the ability to Sort by Author THEN by Gain within each author.

For the time being just having a single big list seems to be working better than the folder method for me.

EDIT ———————

Something else I should add is that I have already gone through all my profiles to make sure that the Amp name contains the correct data rather than a bunch of different pseudonyms. This is much easier than it sounds. Just do a sort by amp manufacturer. Look down the list and find anything that doesn’t look right. Remember that because you have already arranged them by name all the same names are next to each other. So you might have 50 consecutive rigs that say MeBo. Highlight them all then enter Mesa Boogie in the Amp Manufacturer field on the right side. This will automatically update all 50 rigs without the need to save individually.

Do the same for any fields you might want to search on. Say Amp for example. Sort by this column. You might have 5 - 10 different names for a Dual Rectifier. Bulk update them to the correct name.

This step makes using the Search fields MUCH more viable. And doesn’t take much time.

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I think this would be a huge usability benefit in RM. They only have so many devs and I don't know what the pecking order is in terms of when they decide to spend time on RM, but this would doubtless be appreciated by a great many of us.

Quote from wiegersma

The tones I use and tweak, I rename them starting with my initials. That way all the profiles I use are close to each other and easy to find.

But, but... you're name starts with W. Isn't that a lot of excessive scrolling?

Quote from Wheresthedug

Even Rig Manager can handle reverse sorting Chris ?

Yet another case where the bloody computer is smarter than I am.