Sharing your own NKS patches - reducing tag proliferation

Kymeia

I am always grateful for people's work in creating and sharing NKS patches but it sometimes leads to me having to clean up my database afterwards as I find people using their own Type and Character categories rather than the existing ones. So I end up with 'FX' 'SFX' 'Effects' and 'Sound Effects' for example instead of just 'Sound Effects' (of various types). The problem with this is not just that it creates clutter - remember that KK has the disadvantage of being non resizable at the moment so the more categories in the 'tag cloud' the less space there is for actual search results. But more importantly it makes searching for patches inefficient. If I want to find all 'Synth Pads' for example I need to include also now all the other variations such as 'Pad' or 'Pads' - some of which may only relate to one particular plugin or library. The whole point of Komplete Kontrol as a universal librarian is to break down barriers between particular plugins and instead treat sounds as a database inclusive of all plugins. tbh I also end up deleting things like 'Genre' 'Hits and bits' and other esoteric terms some plugins use (Omnisphere being the main villain here as it has far too many meaningless or unique categories). They don't help me when trying to locate sounds that are shared between Omnisphere and all my other plugins, I would rather have general categories than categories unique to one plugin only, again otherwise it renders the while idea of a universal library redundant.

JesterMgee

Yep, biggest issue is many people don't really pay attention to that. I have culled a lot of tags over the years such as ones you have mentioned, I have still maintained "Genre" and "Mood" from doing Spectrasonics years ago but have been contemplating removing these also since I don't add this to any new sounds, tho suggesting that to some users I have been asked to NOT remove those ones because they can be useful. Hits & Bits is no longer a tag I use, that was culled over a year or more ago, I think the only other custom "Type" I implement is "Ethnic World" since there are so many libraries that have an ethnic class that basically covers most non-western instruments and it's nice to have a simple option there, tho most of these are also tagged under "plucked strings" etc, it is for convenience for certain users who express their appreciation for the fact it's catered for.

I stick 98% to NKS 1.5 standards but add Arp / Sequence as a main category since over the years I have discovered there are many synths out there that use this as a main type so it is mostly to save insanity tagging otherwise you will have 500+ sounds in a synth tagged as a Arp but now have to try find what the type is and then tagging a character of Arp or Sequence. That is a custom tag I will never remove as I feel it should be an actual type tag since it is a sound type in most instruments. Argument is always "it's a character tag already" but then you cannot easily filter by Arp, Bright for instance, it's proven to be highly valuable as a main tag. and moves all those arp sounds out of the other categories since you cannot exclude sound types from a search

This is what my library looks like over 120,000 NKS files:

Occasionally some mistakes slip though but I do global updates and "cleaning" every 12 months or so to keep things as uniform as possible. Same as artwork, everyone has their own idea on how that should work but the way NI suggest it should be done IMO is the best way when you have a large library of instruments, having the suggested "artistic" shots of each instrument make it much easier to find (IMO) than having every instrument styled with the same photoshop "template", does not lend to the uniqueness of each instrument but again, this is where personal opinion in things differs

This is all a reason why NKS is more of a closed standard, without some form of central quality control it gets out of hand when people can't follow the rules and trust me, no amount of putting anything in stone fixes that. I even spent time to compile every tag and every change that has been made between NKS 1.3 and 1.5 including many suggestions I had made that were actually incorporated as standards now, but that still fell on deaf ears since people don't like to read and research things these days.

Kymeia

I prefer to appeal to people's practical good sense rather than talk about 'rules' which obviously are not enforceable on a community level anyway and nor should they be (although god knows why NI felt they should allow people to change the categories in the first place - I think it shows they did not give user NKS creation much thought - they certainly do enforce it for NKS partners as they go through a screening process and the NKS development kit versions do not have the ability to add new categories)

Anyway thinking practically - someone may think calling some patches in a bank 'SFX' instead of 'Sound Effects' is more to their liking, but if every other bank uses 'Sound Effects' then every time someone tries to search for 'Sound Effects' they are not going to find any of the patches labelled 'SFX' and every time they search for SFX they will only ever find that one sound bank. So there is a practical reason for ensuring all NKS banks use the common categories - it's a common language and it ensures sounds can be located across multiple products.