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Custom Tones For Pod Xt - Any Interest In An Organizing Tool?


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Hello.

 

I inherited a pod xt live as a fathers day gift. Prior I had an old Korg effect board. I am only a beginner to the world of guitars (about 1.5 years new) but I am a hardcore computer geek.

 

As I have been downloading custom tones (or patches or whatever you call them) I have noticed that many are duplicates and many are labeled haphazardly at best. Since I am a geek I of course proceeded to download a few hundred.

 

I come across the problem of sorting through all these tones. Gearbox is ok to use, as it does display the tone and especially the TAGs that each tone (that is, .l6t file) has. And the editor allows you to modify the TAGs, but its a slow process.

 

So, I have a program in the works already that can be run on a given directory full of .l6t files, and it reads them, finds any duplicates (based on a crc32 checksum) and displays what files were found to be duplicates and in the end shows a grid of every song and all its TAGs.

 

The end results is simply a way to rename the song (which could be both the TAG name and the physical .l6t file name), modify any TAGs (ie. to correct the spelling of song title or just to make them all the same spelling) and eventually sort them into subdirectories, all compositely from a grid rather than one by one. The sorting part is one reason why I make this post.

 

My initial thoughts were to take a directory with say 300 downloaded .l6t files, and once duplicates are pruned, to make subdirectories like  - Amp, Guitarist, Song, Style (etc etc) and because the .l6t files are so small, copy the file to the given subdirectory. The end result is that a vanhalen tone might be put in an amp subdirectory as well as a guitarist and a style, because it fits all three. This would at least let one choose which tone to load to the pod with some form of organization.

 

So, is there any interest in this tool first off, And secondly, as I am currently constructing the GUI for it, what ways (more correctly, what subdirectories) would be likely used to sort out a gob of new tones so that one can try them out knowing before hand what to expect (based on the TAG information).

 

BTW, the TAG information is just a bit of text appended to each .l6t file, such as comments, guitarists, etc etc.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks for your input.Line 6 was once a leader in facilitating online advantages for guitar related applications.I have personally had bad experiences with the new generation of products.I think that your idea is fantastic.For example,BOSS/ROLAND has many User groups where common sense,everyday  application of their products is discussed in detail.LINE 6 was once the USA leader in Modeling,but seem concerned with profits over customer service.The so-called EXPERT (signature) users who post on the forums have an agenda,and 98 of 100 posts solve no problems at all.As a dedicated user of XT era products,I am terribly excited by your idea.Sadly,it might be best to host a link away from company influence.Line 6 is confused about customers who utilize what they have,and show no interest anymore in correcting known problems in the newer equipment..

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Thanks for the replies.

 

@Anse

 

I have experienced the issue you speak of many times, concerning many different product categories. We all have I should think. It is such a sad thing to see. The saying that always comes to mind to me is "cutting your nose off to spite your face". I haven't been dealing with Line6 long enough to know, but I would certainly hope they have not followed suit of so many other businesses.

 

@Triryche

 

I agree, more of a niche tool, likely for those who are similarily as anal as I am about this sort of thing. The majority probably just download, listen and use if they like. lol, not me though. I like things orderly ;)

 

And as someone with a pretty healthy amount of time spent coding many different things, part of it is an "itch" as you suggest :) The other part though is the sheer amount of duplicate or near duplicated tones that can be downloaded. Finding a faster way to view and categorize what I just downloaded, as well as being able to modify certain TAG parameters for better categorizing is paramount to me if I am going to try and understand what I just downloaded. Personally I don't like the idea of having something like this:

 

whole lotta love.l6t

whole lotta love 22.l6t

whole lotta love 22 (2).l6t

 

That would literally make my eyeballs implode... or explode... well, something would hurt regardless ;)

 

I revised my idea a bit and settled on these functions:

 

1. parse a given directory for all .l6t files

2. find duplicates based on crc32 checksum

3. move all duplicates to a subdirectory named "dupes"

4. parse the remaining .l6t files, gathering TAG info (but ignoring some, like date)

5. display the results

 

currently working on methods to:

 

6. allow modification of the TAGs - setting correct spelling etc, changing file name or display name to put things in order

7. commit the TAG changes (requires complex-ish method of rewriting the .l6t file but ONLY the TAG portions - the rest of the file cannot be changed or it will lose the information needed by the device to set the parameters of the tone)

 

Its not overly ambitious, but anytime you work with listviews  to create an 'excel like' table with rows/columns/cells, things get exciting. Unless you port it into something like excel. But thats where the 'itch' comes in lol... one can learn more by doing it themselves.

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