[PD] Preset management for Pd Vanilla

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

It's nice to see many system options, but this is making it a bit hard for
me in general checking it all out, as sometimes the idea of the process
adopted is not quite clear.

So may I please ask you people to check the general principle of my vanilla
prototype and the enhancements I'm providing in my else/abstraction? Just
tell me what you think of it in comparison to the other options you know.
Like what is the difference in the process, what functionality it provides
that I'm missing, things like that. It's just getting hard for me.

I'm hoping we can use this thread to discuss the possible strategies, the
general issues and challenges for preset systems.

What I'm usually seeing is that generally the preset alternatives are quite
complex and require a bunch of different objects and abstractions.
Sometimes you have particular objects to get particular data (like a float
or a symbol), and you need a connection to and from the float/symbol. Some
will give you a number GUI abstraction that handles this, but it's bad
cause you can't edit the size/color/easily.

Anyway, the simplest one I ran into is the one in Purr Data (which I
believe could be compiled for vanilla). It "only" has two objects, but even
so feels a bit over complicated to me in general. Every parameter needs
have a [preset_node] connected to it. My vanilla approach is similar as you
have one object for each parameter as well. It's just a proof of concept
with more functionalities to be added to, so it has less functionalities.
On the other hand, I'm only using one single object (instead of a 'hub' and
a 'node').

My solution for ELSE seems to be as simple as it can get, you can just one
[preset] object for any parameters of any type you want! It's basically
vanilla making use of [text] and [savestate], it only needs one external,
which is based on cyclone/grab. My concern is that I'm missing possible
strategies and use cases with it.

I'm also up for thinking about adding functionalities to vanilla so it can
provide a preset system on its own. But simple solutions that don't require
too many dependencies and just a single external is supposed to be more
than good enough for me. And it's not like we can't have a minimal but
functional preset strategy with vanilla just by getting all the values and
storing them in your patch. It's just that we want easier and more
convenient things and it can (and probably should) be external solutions.

What do you people think?

cheers
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