kylotan

How foolish of L6 to deliver the Helix's most requested feature! I'm sure it'll prove useless to the thousands of people that requested it over the years. The metering is pretty much the only thing that interests me in this update so I'll take it.

Still just sounds like either: (a) you're pushing the signal too high on the way into Native, something that isn't really possible with Stomp (or Floor, etc), or (b) the cab sim impulse is different For what it's worth, I loaded your preset into my Helix Native and my riffs through it sound fine. No time to compare it with Floor, however.

Without us seeing the exact chain, levels, your DAW etc, it's only ever going to be wild speculation. It's very unlikely to be down to the brand of hardware you use and quite likely to be down to some extreme level differences or mistakes in setting up the patch. If I had to guess I'd say the 1st and 2nd examples in that Helix_test.wav have the guitar signal coming in too high. I have released 1 album and 1 EP almost entirely of Helix Native tones and I've gigged several of those songs live with Helix Floor, and I never noticed any significant difference that I couldn't just put down to the virtual cab vs. a real cab.

You're getting a lot of interference from your computer, probably the monitor. Does the sound still happen if you sit further away from it?

My understanding is that this was more about the way the software was engineered, and that this limitation was lifted when they implemented the improvements to the tuner recently.

Eric from Line 6 has said that the Helix will probably get meters sooner or later, just that they want to make them foolproof so people don't get misled by them. I suspect this will include some notion of trying to understand the expected levels in and out of certain blocks so that they don't get a ton of complaints when things are working as intended but looks weird.

I think it's natural - for years computer people have expected consumers to get used to things taking a whole to shut down, telling them not to eject USB drives without 'safely removing' it, etc. This is because a lot of things on a modern computer don't safely store things to disk immediately, but wait a few seconds first to improve performance generally, in much the same way you might not go to the store every time you need something, but instead wait until it's worth doing a general groceries shop. Thankfully most digital devices designed for musicians are set up for ease of use instead, and make the writing process very visible. If it says data is modified and you switch off, you lose it. If you instead save the data, it usually pops up a screen showing that it's saving and you leave the device on for the duration. And when it says there's no modified data, you can switch off whenever you like.

It's fine. The only time it'll be a problem is if you switch it off during saving a patch, in which case it'll probably not save properly.

I pretty much only use snapshots, so this might be wrong, but I suspect that you are actually toggling between Preset Mode and Stomp Mode. And since you have no Stomps set up for the current preset, the scribble strips are blank. I can't download the Helix manual to check right now, but I recall that switching to and from snapshots might have involved pressing both Up/Down buttons simultaneously, rather than pressing the Mode button. Hopefully someone else can confirm/deny this.

Judging by the initial post, the issue is that the computer keeps micro-freezing for 40ms at a time, which leads to audio dropouts regardless of how the audio interface is connected. This is usually down to bad device drivers, and in this case it looks like the networking is the culprit. To the original poster, I recommend trying to update those drivers. Create a system restore point. If anything goes wrong, you can restore this to get your system back to how it was before. Make sure you know how to do the restore process before moving on to step 2! Try updating your network drivers automatically. Type 'device manager' into the search bar, click the top result to open Device Manager, look for 'Network adapters', expand it by clicking the arrow. You'll probably see several things in there, but one of them will probably start with 'Intel'. Right-click on it, select Update Driver. Allow it to search automatically, and if it finds something, install it, reboot, try the latency test again. If that didn't work, try getting specific drivers online. If it's an ASUS motherboard (as the model number suggests) they have a Support area on their site for that model, containing a Driver and Tools section. Find something that looks like 'LAN' or ' Intel(R) Gigabit Ethernet Driver'. Download, run, install, reboot, test again. Obviously if you don't have an ASUS motherboard, go to your manufacturer's site and do the equivalent.

Looks like your network driver is not a good one. When you say direct, do you mean via an Ethernet cable? And if so, do you know the make of your motherboard?

Impossible? Certainly not. Unnecessarily awkward? Definitely. I'm happy to step in and defend the people asking about this strange absence, because it's a totally reasonable query. I do all my editing in Helix Native because metering is an important feature for setting up signal chains. Hopefully one day this will be available in the unit.

Your claim is that dialling in transparent-sounding compression just by ear is simple enough that you don't see the need for metering, despite the vast majority of hardware and software units having metering for this very purpose. You're right, it is getting quite tedious to keep hearing your variations on "you don't need this" or "you shouldn't do that". Literally thousands of people have asked for metering on Ideascale and yet you still talk like everyone who asks for it is wrong and should just use their ears.

A VERY common compression workflow is to dial it in so that it's essentially imperceptible but taming some of the peaks (and maybe increasing sustain a little), and then you have increased headroom and a reduced dynamic range. This will help you sit in the mix (stage or recorded), avoid clipping, etc. This is very easy to do when you have metering that shows when your signal is being subtly attenuated. This is much harder to do if you're trying to listen for a change which is deliberately hard to hear.

Maybe so, but there's a difference between "no increase until 75%" and "10x decrease at 50%". Is it a realistic model of a Rat? I have no idea. It definitely isn't a realistic model of the specific Rat someone else was gigging with and which I was trying to emulate. The R47 VST plugin was much closer in that regard. Metering would at least have avoided me wasting a lot of time trying to work out why the Helix one sounded so bad. (In the end the Helix Native metering helped a lot. Hence why it should be in Floor as well.)