zooey

Care to estimate how may preset files in total?

Thanks for taking the time to lay all that out HO. Some questions etc... Re how I can know the slot number of an IR, don't you use the 3-digit naming prefix strategy that's been discussed on this board (and elsewhere)? How else can you put your IRs back in their slots after an upgrade? For example: 025 OH 412 MES-ST V60 MDRN came from slot 25. That prefix is how the app "knows" what slot an IR file was in. Not sure I get what you mean by "When I make new backups I append a new version number to the file rather than doing an overwrite." Are you saying that... All your preset backups for a given editor and firmware version are in one 'Presets' directory? You don't keep the presets for a given backup or setlist separate? If that's the case, this app won't work well for you, because it can't tell which files are in a given backup, or within that, in a given setlist. (What I think I understand to be) your organization makes sense for a library, as opposed to a backup. Are you thinking of your actual setlist and bundle files as your backups, and preset files as a library? Back story: It hasn't happened to me (knock silicon), but I know some people have had a corrupted preset lock up their Helix, until they figured out which one it was and didn't load it. For that reason, I've always backed up individual presets as well as setlists. I restore from setlist files when there's no reason not to, it's just simpler and quicker, but I always make individual preset backups too. I keep them in separate directories by setlist, because it's easier for me to think about them, and reduces the odds of duplicate names. Since my backups are laid out like I described above, it's easy for the app to know which presets and IRs belong to a given backup, and which presets are in a given setlist. Not that you're doing anything wrong of course. This is exactly why I asked these questions. The app fits MY workflow, but it might be a lot less useful to others who work differently, at least until it can read actual setlist and/or bundle files, which it currently can't. Re the types of output you want, I meant to ask what exports you might want, as distinct from what it shows on screen. On screen, for a given backup, the app can show you the things bulleted below (among other things). Given those onscreen views, do you care about exports, like to get the data into Excel maybe, to plan juggling your IRs around (before the app can do that itself)? The IRs that are and aren't used Presets that do and don't use IRs, or that use more than one different one For a given preset in a backup, it can show you all the IRs it uses, and how they're hooked up (snapshots, footswitches, directly to the IR block, etc) Agree that an IR compare tool would be great. Doing that is complicated by the way Helix exports IRs. It embeds the name it has in Helix, including the typical 3-digit prefix, as metadata in the actual .wav file. For that reason, the exact same IR in slot and and slot 17 won't be identical when exported. You'd have to strip the metadata out to recognize that they're the same, which I do plan to do, but not in version 1. You might want to do that stripping anyway. Helix honors the Title metadata field (if I remember right) when you import IRs, so if you rename your IRs in the file system (there are tools to do that in bulk), without removing or updating that Title field, the result is super confusing. They end up in renumbered filename order, since the file system sorted them that way, but with old-numbering names based on the old titles. Really what you want is a tool that can examine your whole IR library, and for a given IR in a backup, recognize the original source file, with its original too-long-to-fit-in-Helix name. I hope to get there too. Besides the title metadata thing, to compare Helix exports to your library of IRs that haven't been through the import/export process, you'd need to exactly duplicate the audio conversion Helix does -- truncation, bit reduction, etc. I've tried some likely settings using external tools, but haven't matched it. Yet. I've also asked some of the publicly visible Line 6 guys for details, no response. I do hope I'll suss it out at some point. But all those futures aside, I really want to get this out there, even though it doesn't do everything we'd like yet. Working on it... Thanks again for your input.

Thanks for the feedback Peter. I think that 3-digit-prefix strategy is what most of us do. It's kind of required, given the current technology. But that's not the problem this app is trying to solve, and it doesn't :) What it IS for is to figure out which IRs are used, and by which presets. That's a necessary first step towards removing ones you're not using, to make room for new stuff. Similarly, once you know that the IRs in slots 17, 18, 42, 55, 63, and 87-110 aren't being used, you might want to juggle things around to make some contiguous blank areas to put the new stuff in. Otherwise, it gets spread all over, which makes auditioning them a pain, and probably isn't how you'd like them to end up. The app can: Show you which IRs aren't used by any presets in that backup For each preset, show you which IRs it uses, and how they're hooked up (via snapshots, footswitches, directly to the IR block, etc.) Make sense?

Guess I should have added another question: Does a tool like this seem like something you'd use?

I've mentioned before that I've been working on an app to help with some aspects of IR management, presets too, a bit. It's coming along pretty well, but I thought I should check in with the community to see if its workflow fits with how you do things. Apologies for the length of this msg, I couldn't figure out how to be much shorter and still clear. The basic idea is that the app reads a nested directory of Helix backups and analyzes them. From there, it can show you what IRs are and aren't used and by how many presets, and what presets do and don't use IRs. Version 1 probably won't actually DO anything, only tell you what you've got. At this time, it doesn't read setlist or bundle files, only actual IRs and presets, and because of that, it expects your backups to be laid out in a certain way. Which brings us to my first question: How do you organize your backups? What I do, and what the app currently requires is something like this: firmware 2.212017-11-05 IRs Presets Setlist Foo Setlist Bar It doesn't actually care what the directory structure above your IRs and Setlists directories looks like. Doing by firmware version then backup date makes sense to me, but it's not required. You tell it the root directory to look in, and it can scan for directories under there that contain both IRs and Setlists directories. Once you've done that, it can scan for new or changed files, so it doesn't have to process everything all over again. It treats each directory containing both IRs and Presets directories as a backup set, whose name in the app is the path to it from the root, like "firmware 2.21/2017-11-05". It assumes that... Your IRs are directly inside the IRs dir Each IR filename has a 3-digit numbered prefix, like "013 Allure 59_Tweed_P10N"That prefix thing has been pretty standard in the community for a while now, since you need it to load them back into Helix after a firmware update etc. The directories inside Setlists are named with setlist names Your presets are directly inside those individual named setlist directories Does that seem like it'll work for you? Alternatives I should consider? Second question: How many backup sets do you have? I'm just trying to get a ballpark idea. Of course over time there will be more and more, but still, I don't want to be completely in the dark here. Third question: What sort of output would you like from this program? The app itself is pretty good at showing you what you have and the relationships between presets and IRs. However, if you want to reorganize your IRs, like to get rid of unused ones and make room for new stuff, I thought you might want to export some usage info into Excel or something. You'd use that data to plan out your IR renames, and to know which presets should end up pointing to which new locations. Of course we all expect Line 6 to completely obsolete this program, with much better IR management tools integrated right into the editor, but in the mean time, hopefully this will help folks out some. It helps me :) Any other thoughts are welcome, of course.

That I've got, and a bit of other OH stuff, it's Rosen Digital I hadn't tried :)

...a a a n n d , after listening to a bunch of those, I have no idea. I have a medium-size bunch of IRs already, but nothing from Rosen. Can't say as I've found The One IR, or the one brand, or type of cab that's Me. I try different IRs, and built-in cabs, with different amps and stomps, different kinds of tones, and save setups I like at the time. No plan, no conclusions, just some presets I hopefully like when I come back to them later, often do. I'm not in a band, much less a cover band where there's an existing tone you (might) match, or gigging at all any more, so my lack of focus is, uh, ok I guess. Or predictable maybe. Or evidence of my lack of clue. Or something. Anyway, got a few by the seat of my pants, trying not to think too hard about it, since they're on multiple levels of sale, and I'd never tried their stuff. We'll see,..

So it turns out their YouTube channel does have demos of lots of stuff, maybe all of it, in different genres. Each video seems to be one cab, in different styles, so it's not super smooth checking out different cabs with the same music, but it's still very cool that they have this.

Coming along pretty well, thanks for your interest. Will post some questions for people separately, shortly...

Are you saying you find the RW stuff more familiar and realistic? Sounded like that's what you said, but then you want a more original sound rather than familiar.

Re Rosen Digital, no audio samples at all makes it hard to have even a faint clue of what they're about or the differences between them. Not that I find samples all that easy to make decisions from, but still, flat out nothin'? Just blind faith I guess? Also, I don't see any mention of a sale, except a Sept 4 post on their Facebook that says 30% off until Sept 9. Do the $8 prices I see include the 30% off?

There's some point in backing up the factory stuff before modifying it. I pretty much never modify the factory presets directly anyway, only copies. That said, I don't think I've ever used a factory patch for anything anyway...

I'm pretty leery of writing preset files out from scratch, thought I'd just do string replacements in the existing JSON data. That's simple enough that it might make it into v1. The bigger question to me is what the part of the app where you build a new set of IRs looks like. I haven't tried seeing what Helix does with JSON created by the standard tools in this environment. It might be fine, if it reads generic JSON, rather than being tied to the specific (non-standard) version the app writes. In the mean time, replacing text seems way less risky.

But just to say it, the initial release of it probably won't actually DO anything, it'll just tell you what IRs are used by what presets, and how they're hooked into them. That info lets you decide what to toss. Ability to reorder your IRs and have it update your presets (really, export new presets using the new slot numbers) probably won't be in v1. Among other reasons, that's to get some feedback on how the whole thing is put together, and how this platform works out for making cross-platform Mac and Windows apps, since I don't have a Mac to even try it.

Thanks for the support guys, appreciate it. Hope this turns out to be useful. I agree that compatibility with older fortunate isn't a huge priority, but I at least wanted to say what versions it works with. My suspicion based on the current format is that older version will be fine with the way I've coded, just want to check. More details to come...

Right, I knew that, which makes the odds of the original USB stick including any patches that use them really really low. So, does anyone have any ancient firmware patches with IRs they'd be ok sending to me? If you don't want to make them public here, I take back my concern about getting too many PMd to me, have at it! I don't need the actual IRs either, just the patch, and ideally info about what IR indexes were used, and how that were connected to the IR block.

Hmmm, think I do have that. Not interested in downgrading my actual firmware, but if it has sample presets using IRs, that'd be what I'm looking for. I'll check it out, thanks for the idea.

I'm working on an app to help with IR management. I've been using my own backups as sample data, but it appears the oldest ones I have that I can put my hands on are firmware 2.0.1, and it'd make sense to look at some from older firmware too, to at least know if my code handles them correctly.. If anyone has a couple they don't mind sharing, please do. I guess the best way to do that might be to post them here, instead of PM-ing them, so I don't get 8 million of them. Please add a note about what IR slots are being used, and how -- directly set in the IR block, brought in by a footswitch, whatever. Is there any technical reason we can't post presets here? Thanks.

Turning networking off is often recommended for serious DAW use, to cut down on background tasks, but it sounds like you can't when you first start Native. Software authorization is a hard problem. It's a constant battle between pirates and developers. One of the key pieces of such tech is some means of uniquely identifying each computer, and NIC cards are often part of that, since they have supposedly unique MAC addresses. So as usual, it's honest customers who get inconvenienced, while pirates and their "customers" have their way with it anyway. This is NOT a dig at Line 6. Hard problem, they do the best the can, like all devs.

A manual control you could set yourself for the volume you're playing at might be useful, a quick one-stop on-the-fly adjustment. OTOH, I'd hate to think of my patches as having to work well, and make sense with each other, across all settings of a control like that, and at various volumes.

Contact support, they'll do right by you. You'll have to send it back, but it should get fixed under warranty, assuming you bought it new.

Amp preamps give you much more tone and drive control than just about any pedal.

I played an American Pro at GC a while ago, really dug it, but that's a lot of money to me, didn't do anything. Went back some months later, tried another one, wasn't blown away. Played a Modern Player tele then too, actually liked it best of all those, way cheaper too. In some ways that's my ideal pickup set, at least conceptually, whether those actual pickups do the thing or not. FWIW, some random customer at the counter who'd been trying other guitars went out of his way to tell me the tele sounded better than the Am Pro. None of them were set up super well on the rack.

Just to say it, where I ran into that most was doing firmware updates.

I've pulled low end before the drive stages and maybe boosted it back up after, keeps the low end from flubbing out. Not always, but more than once or twice.