I’m a new user as of last night! I’m enjoying playing but choosing plugins with this app very cumbersome compared to other apps I’ve just tried. I’ve got a ton of installed plugins which most I don’t know, but when I right click they’re just listed as Installed and categorised by company. So I’m trying to look for instruments but some I have no idea if they’re an instrument or effect unless I choose them. When the block gets added, it is a different colour based on instrument or effect, but I’ve no idea why the right click menu doesn’t care and piles them all together, when the app already knows they’re different.
I’ve seen some users on the forum suggest using the Favourites for this, but as a new user to go through every plugin to do what the app already knows is time consuming, and Favourites is a sub menu and I’d stop using the root menu, which sounds like a UI prob.
Why don’t you use this? Quick Plugin, Favorite or Preset Finder
Aha, thanks, I’ll use that from now on, since that’s what the UI should have intuitively led me to use; the right click into an installed mess is a bit much for beginners. The rack list on the left gets a ‘+’ button but there should be one for the wiring view too that opens the plugin manager, instead of it being hidden away in the menu.
Even better, the right click should have Favourites listed in the root menu since Favourites are important to the user. Installed could instead be multiple submenus like Installed Instruments, installed Effects, etc
With respect, it seems to me it’s not unreasonable to have a little awareness of what one is installing 
The right-click menu is there simply because most users expect right-click to do something. The plugins are categorized by manufacturers and I think most users, particularly beginners, won’t have plugins from a huge number of manufacturers so the right-click menu would generally not be that huge.
Actually, if you open the plugin manager, you can see the category of the plugin directly via the Category column and you can insert plugins into the wiring view directly from the plugin manager as well (by just double-clicking on the row of the desired plugin).
Further, you can use the filter field in the plugin manager to narrow down your view, e.g, look for distortion plugins…
Further, you can add your own keywords to classify your plugins, or some subset of them, perhaps just your favorites, and then those keywords will also be found when you use the quick finder dialog
Beyond favorites, which by the way also allows you to manage groups of multiple interconnected plugins, when you save sounds as GP Presets, those also show up in the right-click menu as well as being findable in the quick finder dialog so if you have created 10 different versions of a “String” sound (say), then you can quickly find your string sounds and insert one, without even having to know which plugin was used, the correct one will be inserted automatically.
Finally, if you have plugins you don’t actually use, or if you only use a single format, it’s very easy to disable groups of plugins in the plugin manager (sort by format or manufacturer for example and then select and disable in one go) so that they don’t even show up in the right-click menu or in the quick finder dialog.
So I think there are many ways to manage a large number of plugins with very little difficulty but to be honest, you have to start somewhere - the plugin manager (for example) can only expose whatever information is provided to it by the plugin developer and so it’s really up to the user to do a little work to classify plugins in whatever way fits their workflow.
All of these options are described in the user manual (e.g click here to read about the plugin manager itself) but GP is sufficiently deep such that it’s not really possible to discover everything by just clicking around (say)
I’ve finally located that help text you mention. It only appears if you make an empty Rackspace unfortunately. As a new user I’m shown a ton of cool templates to try out, which means that help text isn’t shown
Thanks to you as before for leading me to the plugin manager. Locating it is the main issue I’m now raising, which means the wiring UI isn’t intuitive.
As for having a ton of plugins, they all came as a single install with the keyboard I purchased, before I got to try GP. Some have obvious names, some don’t
By any chance is your previous usage of plugins based around a channel strip model?
While we’re at it, it would be nice to have an option to hide plugins of certain types from the menu (instead of disabling) - i.e. I never use AU or VST unless there’s no VST3 available - and recently found that I added at least one VST by accident. But disabling can probably break existing gig files.
Nope, I last used real instruments with Ableton like 10 years ago, and returning to making music only this month. Ie children older finally!
Ideally, but in case of installing bundles like those from Waves or NI you might not know that you have a certain plugin for years
And then plugins may have fancy names that don’t mean much (I mean, what the heck should Saturn mean? In hindsight it’s easy to see it rhyme with saturation, of course. Same with names like Timeless or even Pro-G. Okay, all these examples may be bad in that if you installed them you probably know what they are, but you should get the idea, I think.
So it would be nice to have grouping by category in the menu indeed, and not just for new users - it’s nice to be able to see what delays you have right when you’re adding the block because it may inspire you to use something you didn’t think of at first. In DAWs that have groupings I only use those views as the entry point for selection, I don’t care much about the manufacturer, it’s secondary information.
You can give custom tags and sort by them in the Plugin Manager Window
Cool. You can review this getting started blog article: Getting started with Gig Performer - Gig Performer®
You’ll quickly figure out everything.
I can, but a) it’s much better to have the categorization directly in the menu which I use all the time to add or replace blocks, b) why do I need to do manual tagging when categories are already present?