Delete patch on iOS?

[craftygrass]

Hopefully this is something really simple, but I sure haven’t figured it out yet!

The question. In MG3 on iOS, how would I delete a patch?

The context. In order to test MG3’s response to MIDI Program Change messages from my Boss MS-3, I set up a few stub MG3 patches with silly names to test the idea. To wit:

• 001 Stub
• 002 Git-tar
• 003 B’asso’on
• 004 Otto approved
• 005 Here be dragons

I did note, when I saved under the name “003 B’asso’on”, that MG3 replaced the apostrophes in the name with dots, but I didn’t investigate further at the time. After all, the MG3 patch save was successful, and I was just trying to test and see if I could use a patch change on the MS-3 to send a patch change to MG3 at the same time…

Anyway, I created a few MS-3 patches with a “patch MIDI” message to send a PC number to channel 1 (along with the two comitant CC messages it supports along with the PC), and ran the test.

The test: success! The test, itself, worked great! Selecting a patch on the MS-3 clearly caused MG3 to respond with the “right” patch, and apparently without any offset (e.g, sending PC 1 gave me “001 Stub”), and I could see down in the MG3 Patchbay that the two CC messages were received as well. Wonderful!

Now…I did notice that when I sent PC 3, MG3 failed to actually load the properly-selected patch (“Error loading plugin Keyboard in patch 003 B’asso’on.patch”), and it was here that I figured I should just delete that one, having perhaps got a bit too cute with the silly name. I can certainly live with that…

Managing patches on iOS: delete or rename? And so, when I went to try and delete the patch–or at least rename it–I couldn’t find a way to do it. Instead, in the interest of science, I created a new patch named “003 Bassoon”, and that then worked wonderfully for PC 3, but the still-existing-but-later-sorting “003 B’asso’on” patch seemed to cause an offset for subsequent patches. To wit, now, if I sent PC 4, I’d get the error on “003 B’asso’on”, and if I sent PC5, I’d get “004 Otto approved”, etc.)

So, if I’m interpreting things correctly, MG3 may not even care about the actual nomenclature of patch names, but might simply present the “first” 128 patches that appear in the “select patch” list for response to PC messages? (JTBC, I’d be perfectly happy with that, provided I could delete and rename those patches to organize them…) Or, is there a logic/value other than readability and sorting, for prefixing MG3 patch names with a three-digit number like “004”?

File locations on iOS? This then brings up as well the question of file locations on MG3 for iOS. I couldn’t find an obvious location within the iPad’s Files app for where MG3 might store its stuff (the way some apps such as GarageBand do), and although I haven’t yet started trying to work with Tunings, Backing Tracks, Reverbs etc., presumably there would be a place where these should go as well.

Am I missing something obvious here? Or is this perhaps not implemented yet?

[Vaultnaemsae]

For iOS/iPadOS, counter to what you might expect, you have to click “Save” from the main GUI first. Then, rather than entering a name to save, hold down on the title of the preset in your preset list that you want to delete (give it a good long touch). This executes a deletion of the preset you want to get rid of. It’s not yet all that elegant and I hope it will be addressed going forward as we approach an official release candidate for the iOS version of MG3.

User presets (before selection):

Click “Save”:

Hold target for deletion (you’ll get an “erasing” message but it’s too fast to capture here):

After deletion (actually, I deleted both presets one by one before this screen capture):

[craftygrass]

Man, thank you again, most kindly–that worked like a charm!

I’ll agree that it’s not exactly intuitive, but it’s absolutely workable, and frankly I’m suddenly more confident that it might get significantly improved when time permits. As a former application developer, I can conjecture at least one possible scenario of how it got to be that way…

In the beginning you’d need to create workable backend CRUD operations for patch management, but creating a fully-featured editor for those takes time and attention, so how to back-burner that for a better time? Well, the truly critical operations would be the patch opener/selector, and the Save operation, so implement them in a rudimentary-but-functional way, and then find a way to bolt the Delete operation into the Save operation on a different event trigger. I don’t know if that’s what was done here, but I could totally see myself doing it this way for exactly that reason!

Anyway, again, thank you–this is exciting news for me, this ability to use my MS-3 with MG3 for iOS in this way. Glorious personal T&E to come!