removing icons from Favorites bar

[Tony Bouttell]

For some reason I thought that pressing option/cmd click erased the selected icon from the favorites bar. It runs the procedure instead.
Pressing cntrl/cmd click bring up the list of icons, allowing you to select and run the procedure.
Double clicking an icon runs the procedure.
How do I erase, just the icon, ( and not the procedure as well )?

Thanks

[Synthetik]

You can goto the main preset browser, choose the Favorites tab, select the preset you want to get rid of, then control click in the preset browser to get context menu commands, and choose the Delete Current Preset menu command. This menu is also available under the main Edit : Preset menu.

You can also go out to the folder in the finder for that particular favorites category and delete the preset file from the folder. And then reload the favorites category.

[gr]

This is scary advice (as much so in 2014 as in 2010), since the OP does not think of himself as wanting to delete a Preset, but only to unfavorite one.

BUT it turns out that SA does not favorite presets by tagging or marking them, but by literally duplicating the preset file and placing it in a Favorite folder (in the Preset folder of your SA application folder). So, to remove a preset from one of your favorites /is/ to delete a (duplicate) preset file. No way for a user who did not look under the hood to know this, of course, and the app offers no user-friendly conceptual buffer for such a one -- by offering a menu item like Unfavorite This.

Caution: This means it really matters which incarnation of the preset you select/activate before asking to remove/delete it. Do not select the preset from its home browser location -- you probably do not want to delete that. Be sure to select the preset that you see under the Favorites browser tab. (The fact that the right preset is showing in the Preset area is not enough -- you need the right copy of the preset to be the one that is showing.)

--Greg

[Synthetik]

You are correct that the Favorites categories can be thought of as unique and distinct categories like any other category folder in Studio Artist. So when you put a preset in a favorites category, you make a copy of it if you are copying it from some other factory preset category. And it has no reference to where it originally came from.

But you might make a unique new preset from custom editing and put it in a Favorites category. I do that all the time. So then it has no potential link back to some other location in the main factory preset hierarchy.

So i don't see the current behavior as being a 'problem'. It's quite consistent with the way the program works in general. When you record something in a PASeq as an action step, you record a copy of the action, not a reference to some original preset file on your hard disk some where.

It sounds like you would prefer that we implement the Favorites as aliases back to some originally referenced preset file?

Now maybe we should support mac alias files as supported contents in preset category folders. I'm certainly open to that suggestion.

But that's a separate issue from the notion that you would be manipulating references to presets located somewhere else in favorites, and that deleting something in favorites would delete something else hidden away on your computer. That seems way more 'dangerous' and prone to 'scariness' than our current scenario.

Our current scenario being where you are working with a unique preset file when you put a copy of something in some other category folder, be it another factory category, or a favorites category.

Here's a tip on preset organization for anyone who is unclear about what we are talking about.

And here's a tip on working with custom Favorites folders.

[gr]

Hi, John,

Thanks for writing. I was not making any recommendations really. I posted here only with the intent of clarifying your (long-ago) response to that first query, so the next innocent user who comes along seeking answer to that same question (like I did) will not have the same reaction I did to your reply. Without understanding how things work under the hood, it looks like your original reply missed the OPs point. Hence, the new visitor thinks they did not get the answer they came for after all -- -so is still stuck.

So, I put in some explanation of a sort that would have been clarifying for me.

---

From a user interface point of view, I am pretty sure every user who comes to your program is going to have that expectation that Favoriting a (built-in) preset is just like tagging it and will expect a way to Unfavorite it that amounts to untagging it. (Is that a good thing for them to be thinking? Not necessarily, but it is what they /will/ think, because that idea is everywhere in their prior experience of "favoriting".)

So, selecting 'Delete Preset' will definitely look like the wrong thing to do. And they will not find anything in the Manual to help them.

For this reason you have a small but bona fide universal user interface problem here -- i.e., user's expectations will reliably be frustrated on this point.

As you have argued that the way you are doing Favorites is actually the good way to do it for SA, the only question is how to avoid or at least quickly alleviate that predicatable user frustration:

  0) I did my small part by putting a clarification above. So the next person who gets this far will be able to resolve their puzzle at that point.

  1) But a quicker alleviation would be to put something in your Manual about this -- how to remove a preset and why the delete operation is the right thing after all, because of how Favorites work in SA.

  2) Better yet would be avoiding the user's frustrated expectation entirely. Not sure it is a great idea, but you could simply include an Unfavorite (contextual) menu option -- i.e., provide just what the user was expecting to find. What would the menu option do? Just the same delete operation (but with a somewhat different warning dialog -- roughly of the sort: "This will remove preset Blah from current Favorites list. This cannot be undone" -- no no mention of deleting the preset. Easy to implement, but possible downsides: i) does not educate the user about how Favorites work different here, and ii) will a user who has favorited a custom preset (which is also not stored elsewhere) understand that they are deleting that for good? Unclear.

Best,

Greg

P.S. Nice to make contact. I have been an admirer of Studio Artist and have been following its development for many years.