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Rayk86ss

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Posts posted by Rayk86ss

  1. I've tried to use the free Cubase Elements software that came with my Spider V, but it is way too complicated for me.  What easy to use multitrack recording software should I try instead?   I really liked GarageBand on my wife's 20 year old Apple Imac, but I don't know where she buried the old computer, and I do not know if there is a Spider V sound driver for the old IMAC G5.  (kind doubt it)

    I'd like to be able to overdub no more than 10 tracks with mic, Spider V, and midi as the only inputs.  Effects are not needed.  I'm using a Windows 10 laptop, and I'm pretty sure many of the Cubase problems I've experienced are really Windows 10 problems, but simple software would be better.  Thanks.

  2. My HP windows 10 laptop has locked up many times while playing audio, but not to a total blue screen level of frozen.  The problem is the Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation bug.  The only solution I've found is to go into task manager and delete Windows Audio Device Graph Isolation.  Audio plays normally after that. 

  3. On 7/27/2019 at 9:00 AM, Benj99 said:

        One of my old favorites was RezoDecay,   At first Rezo seemed a little useless but then I wrote a song that really took advantage of it. Out of curiosity I checked the Cloud to see if I can find it anywhere.  

    I found Rezodecay on Customtone, and it still seems to work fine.  If you wish to annoy your neighbors just load Rezodeacy and play the riff from Bolin's Post Toastee.   Childish but fun. 

    I hope all of the old presets will remain on Customtone. 

    On 7/27/2019 at 9:00 AM, Benj99 said:

     

     

     

     

  4. What's with all the negative waves man?  I understand the argument--in a market economy every commodity product becomes a race to the bottom.  "Sell Grandma for a nickel of per unit cost, and sell your wife for a dime."  Cheap crap that looks cool is what usually make the most money, but with the latest updates I think the Spider V is an exception.  I bought my Spider V 60 used for 100 bucks.  The store had two of them, and had marked them down, so I did not expect much.  Much to my surprise I have received full support from Line 6 including a free Cubase download, and now the update to MK2.  For my purposes it sounds quite good, but I don't play in stadiums, and I  tend to use more of the clean and chime style presets.  I never really expected the Spider V to sound just like a big vacuum tube class A stack amp.   I guess if I had spent $500 for the V60 I might be a little disappointed.  Wait a minute.... Forget all that.  Please tell everyone you know that Spider V amps are crap.  I  want to score a used V240 with stereo chorus really cheap.  Big time thanks to the line6 guys for listening to the customers and giving us this update. 

    • Like 3
  5. I noticed the same thing.  Where is the classic speaker setting?  Upgraded to Spider remote v 2.00 and it is there, but I'm running Win 10 on a laptop.  Will the Ipad run Mac apps?  I noticed that most of the presets now use the classic speaker as the default setting.  Christmas came early with line 6 this year.  July 25th is cowboy Christmas.  Myabe the Ipad app will be available then.  There are at least 3 new things to do: Update the updater, update the firmware, and update the Spider remote. 

  6. I wonder if the problem is the users more than it is Line 6?   Customtone seems to work fine for downloading tones, but customtone is becoming a swamp of poorly described tones.  The vast majority of people uploading tones don't provide any descriptions of effects, amp models, songs, or equipment emulated.  Since the cloud  is an even more dynamic interface than customtone, is it possible that the cloud tone storage is overwhelmed by the sheer amount of mess uploaded and deleted on a daily basis?   I should admit upfront that I am old, grumpy, and somewhat computer illiterate.  I have not uploaded a single tone so I can't be too critical of those people who are sharing their work with other musicians.  Thanks guys!  I just wish it were less of a mess to wade through. 

  7. 14 hours ago, Hankon6 said:

     What are the hookups for computer to amp...the 3.5mm jack in the back of the amp? Where does it connect to on the Pc......the HGMI output on the video card?

    I just use the USB connection, but my amp is a V60 so it may be different from yours.  On mine there are two USB jacks on the back with a tiny selector switch.  The computer connects to the larger square shaped one using a standard USB printer cable.  The little jack is for a USB phone connector.  My amp does not have HDMI as far as I know. 

     

    USB digital audio has been a little bit buggy due to windows 10 issues.  I've encountered the Windows audio graph isolation bug which locks up all audio, and another issue involving the power conservation settings which turn off the USB for no readily apparent reason.  Once the USB interface is working and the Spider V is the computers sound card for output and recording it becomes a rather powerful tool.  The looper feature built into the amp is a bit limited, but using the computer you can create any chord progression or multi track recording that you want and play along with it. 

  8. Unless I misunderstand the question, all you need to do is install the Line 6 USB audio drivers on your computer.  The computer should use the amp instead of the computer's sound card, and the computer audio will come out the amp's headphone jack along with the guitar as you play.  You can also play along with Youtube videos, .wav files, midi songs, whatever. 

  9. Well... This has been quite an ordeal, but none of it is the fault of Line 6 or Steinberg.  I obtained the access code from Line 6 and installed Cubase Elements 10 along with the license manager and download manager.  (You get three programs from Steinberg)   Cubase did not seem to work, and to make matters worse, the Spider Remote program failed to work correctly, when it had worked fine before.  After trying everything else I could think of I formatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows 10.  Reinstalled Spider Remote, the Asio drivers, and the three programs from Steinberg, and everything works now.  I needed to email Steinberg support to get a helper file to reset the license manager, and get a fresh activation code.  I think the problem was related to the way that Win 10 manages USB.  Excellent support from Line 6 and Steinberg. 

  10. You could always use the headphone out jack as the input to a different power amp and speaker, or perhaps a home stereo system.  (Lame--I know)

     

    I understand the problem.  You set up the preset so that it sounds great through headphones, or on a digital recording on your computer, but when you play  the same preset and guitar tone/volume settings in a live performance, the amp sounds like a cheap cardboard AM radio speaker.  Wtf?    Here's a long winded bit of info about frequency response, that may help.

     

    As others have noted, Line  6 provides a quality full range speaker system and a power amp designed to provide flat frequency response.  The thing is that there is really no such thing as a perfectly flat frequency response.  If you look at a graph of an audio frequency response the graph will be drawn on log paper.   The graph may show cutoff frequencies where the response is down by only 3 decibels.  That does not seem like much, but the cutoff frequencies are actually down to 70.7% in linear terms, and they are half the power output!    Our ears are amazing logarithmic devices that can hear a pin drop, and hear the roar of a jet engine.   A "flat" response curve has little dips, bumps, and resonances in it that your ear can discern.  Other factors such as the acoustics of the room, overall volume level, etc.,   all play a huge role in how the amp will sound. 

     

    I'm an old guy having a bit of deja vu regarding this whole discussion.  Way back in the early eighties a lot of guys bought giant expensive speakers from Mathew  Polk.  We were often disappointed that no matter how hard we tried we could never quite get a true concert audio sound in our living rooms, but the same 33.3  RPM record sounded so good through the old  Koss Pro 4AAA headphones.    As sophisticated as Line6 audio engineering may be, the human ear and brain are about a thousand times more capable of discerning subtleties in an audio wave. 

     

    So... you can replace the speaker.  Make sure to match the impedance, and understand that it is a crapshoot.  It may sound better or worse. 

     

    You can experiment with trial and error.   Set up the amp on the back porch and see how it sounds as you fiddle with the multi band EQ feature.  Do it again in the living room.  Repeat in the church auditorium, or the bandstand at the local park.  The idea is to arrive at a few different versions of your favorite presets that sound good in whatever the acoustic environment happens to be.   To do this really well it might help to use a microphone stationed out where the audience sits, and listen to the mike on a monitor as you play.  The sound is different out there. 

     

    I suppose a scientific approach is possible...  Make a digital recording of a barre G chord.   Find or borrow a really high quality microphone and record the replay of that same chord.  (Use the digital recording as the input to the amp--not the guitar)  Now look at the frequency spectrum of the chord (fast Fourier transform)  and compare the 2.  I expect that the two spectra will be a bit different as the live version will show some frequencies a bit louder or softer than the original.  The frequency response of the microphone would play a role here too.   Looking at the frequency spectra, it may be possible to tweak the EQ of the amp so that the live response sounds more like the headphone response.  (of course then the headphone response will sound like crap when you are done)    Even though I'm a bit of a geek for this stuff, that's may too much work for me, so I'll just use my ears. 

     

    By the way...  Is the headphone jack output of the V60 stereo?   The V120 is a dual speaker stereo amp, that can mimic a Roland stereo chorus amp, or so I am told.  My little V60 is mono, but if the headphone jack is stereo I could use the phones output  as an input to two different amps making the V60 nothing more than a pre-amp and effects processor.  Or I could just buy a V120...., or better yet,  forget all the gadgets and spend all of my time and effort on learning to play. 

  11. Does anyone know if there is an updated video or other instructions about interfacing Spider V to Cubase?  I'm not having much luck, but I did discover a trick that may help some people.  Windows sound recorder is no longer installed with Win10, but it is a free download, and it works with Spider V to download a simple .wav file.  Unfortunately the playback speed is not the same as the record speed so the guitar sounds like it tuned down a whole step on playback.  

     

    I've tried to follow the Cubase tutorial video from Line6, but there are things in the video that do not match.  For example: The video say to go to the device setup screen, but there isn't one.  I eventually found the Spider V under the studio screen.    The Cubzse version that I am using is LE 10 elements --I think.  (There is no built in help on Cubase, nor a version indication that I could find)

  12. Thank you Line 6 !!!    I think I like this solution even better than just creating Windows 10 Spider Remote cloud access.   I would much rather upload and download tone files and organize them into folders on my PC anyway.   This news just made my day. 

  13. Are Amplifi tones and Spider V tones the same?  If so, I found the "Buddy Guy lead" tone to be very nice on my used Spider V. 

    Also...  Does anyone know if it possible to attach tone files to a message on this thread?  This would be a good way to share tones for those of us who do not have access to the tone cloud.

     

    Thanks

  14. Of course there was always the old flip the switch on the Les Paul trick...   Speaking of which it would be nice to have the amp automatically change presets when the switch on the guitar is flipped.  I can think of a few ways to accomplish this, but a plug and play solution would be nice. 

  15. I don't think it sucks at all, but I'll admit that there is more of a learning curve to this software than I expected.  Here's a little problem that I noticed  (sorry if this has already been discussed to death)

    You've chosen a preset that has multiple parameters for a given effect  (example reverb).  You think it sounds pretty good, but you  decide to turn the reverb knob on the amp just a tiny bit.  Surprise!!  All of the little bar graphs representing the underlying parameters for that reverb effect change  A LOT.  You decide to put the knob back where it was, but discover that the only way to easily get the tonal quality where it was is to reload the preset. 

     

    Line 6 has made an amp with amazing signal processing ability and this makes it all but impossible to adjust everything with front panel knobs.  Because of the complexity, they really need first rate software to manage all this. 

  16. On 12/11/2018 at 2:20 PM, gtrman100 said:

    Rule of Thumb #1:  don't buy a product based on future functionality, buy it for what it can do now. That goes for guitar stuff, cars, computers, phones and just about everything else.

    How true!  Garmin from a few years ago is a good example.  They hinted that they would provide Apple Macintosh capability for their GPS products for several years before they finally got around to it.  Garmin was a pretty big company at the time with a lot of talented engineers on staff, but the reality is that providing a reliable interface to all of the different phone and computer operating systems is a huge task that sucks up a lot of good engineering time.  I'd assume that Line 6 is a bit smaller than Garmin, although Line 6 clearly has some digital signal processing genius people. 

    At one time I carried three different laptop computers to do my job.  (Windows XP Service Pack 2, XP service pack 3, and Windows 7)  None of these machines were ever connected to the internet, and each was for use with a software package that would not work quite right on the others.  It is a real pain to design software for your customers only to have somebody else (Microsoft, Apple, or Google), make a change so that your software no longer works right.  It is also a lot more fun to concentrate on your core business which in the case of Line 6 seems to be DSP and audio. 

  17. Full windows support would be great. 

     

    I just bought a used V60 for over $100 less than the price of a new one at my local music store.  I wondered why the store had two new looking  but used V60s on the floor?  Had the previous owners traded in these amps for some reason?    Now that I own one, I can see that the capability of the Spider V is just amazing, but there is a learning curve that goes with all this tech.  I'm an old guy.  I have a one year old Android smart phone, but I never do anything smart with it--it is just a phone.  According to the Google Play store, my phone is not compatible with the Spider Remote App.  No worries--I'll buy a cheap used phone that is compatible and duck tape it to the amp with no SIM card in it.   

     

    Even without using downloadable presets, the capabilities of this device are wonderful.  Perhaps this is a good thing?  I can play with various combinations of compression, noise gate, chorus, and reverb to create my own sound.  For those who just want to play instead of tinker, the Spider V may not be the best choice right now. 

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