SaschaFranck

Wrong thread...

Sure, any time. I didn't start all this. So, when?

It is not about all those places (and fwiw, I didn't know about them until some minutes ago). It's about this very place. Which should be the first stop to communicate with anyone from Line 6, regardless of the subject (support, discussion of ideas, whatever). Business as usual. If you want to do that with Fractal, you go to their forums. If you want to do that with Kemper, you go to their forums. But if you want to do that with Line 6, you need to look wherever.

Well. You don't seem to get it. Not that I'd care much, but I'll explain it. If I wanted some "supportive bits" and maybe the occassional chat about certain features and what not (which I enjoy quite a bit, having 20 years of audio software betatesting on my belt for quite some reasons...), what would be the place to look for those very activities? Some random places somewhere on the web or the company-based community forum? I'll leave the answer to yourself.

Well, how would I know which are the partys you're joining? I only know of TGP and FB.

Well, haven't we done that ad nauseum already? And well, it seems as if the feature set of 2.9 is pretty much done.

Which would be what? Like asking for "when"?

First off: I don't care whether you make a big fuzz about updates here or wherever. But you and your users at TGP and FB make a big deal about how great Line 6s support and the public interaction with their users has become. However, thing is, in case you're not on TGP and/or the big FB group, there's no support apart from opening a support ticket. And there's even less public interaction, in fact pretty much none. So, to enjoy your public efforts, I would either have to join TGP or the big FB group. Fwiw, I don't have any issues with the way you spend your spare time. But then, people should not mistake that for great support. Because it simply isn't.

Fwiw, one of the reasons why they're doing that would very likely be that they're getting plenty of attention from non-Line6-product-owners, whereas over here it's almost exclusively folks who already bought some stuff, so there's not much new customers to attract. It's why they're praised for their outstanding support, too. And fwiw, they're doing *direct* support work there, so I don't exactly (or at least not completely) buy the "we're doing it in our spare time" thing. But each to their own. However, considering their very own forums, Line 6 support is abysmally bad.

I have already been requesting modulators on TGP (go figure...) - when I was still allowed to be there and even before I owned a Helix myself.

It's pretty much comparable with an LFO in a synth. No idea why, but Boss is looking at it as if it'd be another pedal, secretely AI-operated behind the scenes. But in a nutshell, as said, it's just an LFO (well, maybe a mixture between an envelope and an LFO). And fwiw, if there was anything I'd love to see in FW updates beyond usability stuff (which will likely remain to be my top 1), 2) and 3) for a whole while), it'd be modulators - basically LFOs, envelopes and input level. Once you've fooled around with Native Instruments' Guitar Rig, you just know how much fun these can provide.

Defenitely. I for one don't want to deal with the TGP hobbyist dictators (I think they call themselves moderators) as they're dealing with their rules in a random fashion. Same goes for the big FB group. In case Mr. Boston doesn't like you, you're out, even in case you didn't post a thing.

Well, that's knowledge from the past, when dealing with plenty of analog devices. Digital devices (and most modern analog devices, too) don't suffer from turning them on and off. Ok, when do you start to consider something as being "that much"? As a rough estimation: When all of Germany would turn their TVs off instead of having them on standby, the yearly savings would be around a small towns overall electricity consumption. The Helix should consume much more than a TV on standby. Apart from that, everything saved is something saved.

See, I wasn't talking about a testing environment. In any such environment, longtime stress tests are required. But there's no need for a normal user to keep a device such as the Helix switched on for days. It's just a stupid waste of energy.

Excuse me for the OT post, but sorry, leaving any kind of electronic device on for days is possibly as bad as it gets in terms of environmental caretaking. Things such as that really don't go well with me at all. Call me an old hippie (I sort of am), but you don't even have to be an old hippie to understand how bad this is.

You're welcome. As said, this technique can be used for a plethora of things. For instance, I also used it to create an IR out of a mix of an acoustic guitar IR and a match EQ (with a great sounding nylon string as the source) to enhance my cheesy nylon strings piezo. Or, as a more simple thing, I lowcutted pretty much all my live IRs drastically, even if I didn't do much else to them. I'm also experimenting a bit with pickup modifying IRs and such. Plenty of options, plenty of fun.

Fwiw, just to add this: A "dirac" IR is kinda like a "neutral" IR as a spike (sometimes also used to capture things in the analog world, but for these cases, usually a sweep and a deconvolving software is the better choice). When you load such a dirac into any IR block/plugin, you should notice no effect. But once you send it through whatever it might be (in our case perhaps any kind of cab sims, an EQ and what not) and do a mixdown, the sonic properties of the things you've sent the dirac through will be applied to the resulting mixdown file, which in return can be used as an IR on its own. Fwiw #2: You might get away fine with placing the dirac straight on a beat "one", bounce a very short passage from there and load the resulting file straight into, say, the Helix. But for whatever reasons, I noticed that sometimes this file wouldn't mix properly with other IRs (causing phase issues and such), so I'm now checking each and every bounced file, trim the beginning manually (just at the first sample into the first transient peak, stoie this from Ownhammer and RedWirez, they seem to be trimmed that way as well) and shorten it to 1024/2048 samples (usually just 1024), so I know it'll sound identical in the Helix, compared to an IR loading plugin in my DAW. Fwiw #3: I'm using this very method to mix my own IRs since a long time already. I usually split an "un-cab-ed" recording (from the Helix or whatever I might be using) through multiple mixer channels of my DAW (in my case Logic) via busses, each loaded with an IR plugin, EQs, exciters and sample delays (can do some wicked things when mixing IRs). This allows me to quickly blend together some single cab/mic IRs every bit the same as you'd do when mixing a multi-mic'ed take, in case the IR maker isn't supplying IR mixes on their own.

If you stay within a DAW, there's no need to use any IR creation utilities. Send a dirac IR through whatever you want to be captured, bounce it and possibly trim it. Works very well. Here's a bunch of dirac IRs in all common formats (mono, stereo, various samplerates, various bit depths): http://www.saschafranck.de/tmp/diracs.zip Fwiw, also works nicely in case you want to capture an algorithmic reverb in an IR (or mix them), just anything dynamic and modulating won't be captured.

As of lately, the forum got crawlingly slow (at least for me) as well, so I'm not wondering that there's other issues, too.

Due to no own experience, I can't exactly comment on whether a PC+ would be your saviour, so just about this: There's some mini poles, not raising it up all the way to ear level. I think some people are using them with success. Another idea might be an amp stand such as the Ultimate AMP-150, which would both decouple the K10 from the floor and also allow you to use it tilted but vertically (rather than in a typical horizontal fashion), which might help, too. Further, as you're mentioning boominess: Many people seem to suffer from this and very often the "typical" tools for patch creation inside the Helix aren't the best to adress this. The Helix' low cut slopes IMO aren't steep enough to just remove the boominess, they have a good potential to reach into some substantial sound range, which you likely don't want. Haven't tested it scientifically yet, but the global EQ seems to have a steeper slope and it's, well, applied globally (on either the 1/4, XLR or both outs) so you wouldn't have to reprogram all your patches. I think you should try these out before you shell out some more money, especially as IMO the K10 is quite a decent monitor. Fwiw, personally I'm creating my own IRs by modifying existing ones (usually my own captures, too). I apply pretty rigid low cuts (and partially high cuts as well) to them, using Logics EQ and a 48dB/Oct. cut at something around 60-70Hz (low E string is around 80Hz and I pretty much never play downtuned). So far, I have no issues with any boominess, and I'm only using a rather lowly Alto TS310 (by now, I must've played well over 100 gigs of all kinds of styles with it).

Unfortunately, the Helix has rised my guitar-GAS - quite worse than pedal-GAS. Tough to resist, but at least so far I manage rather well and decided that before making any new aquistions, I will have to sort the current mess out.

Wouldn't it be better to have a "second" function without having to hold the snapshot switch? I mean, ok, so far we have the options "recall" and "alternate" when pressing a snapshot switch. I'd like to see a third "second" option, which could just call up another snapshot. Boss does it like that with their GTs and it's excellent.

Interesting. Now expect them fights.

For reasons unknown to me, there's *huge* differences between USB cables. Unfortunately, it's quite tough to sort out the dodgy ones as they may just work fine with, say, an external harddrive, a printer or whatever other peripherals. But they may not work fine on, say, a MIDI-via-USB keyboard (which is kinda weird as there's really not much traffic happening in terms of data amount). The Helix pretty much defenitely seems to be on the more sensible side of things, requiring one of the "good" cables. So I recommend testing all kinds of cables until you find a working one and then mark that one. SImilar things go for USB ports. Some of them aren't really running straight off a USB controller, most notably those on the front of desktop computers, those usually are connected through an internal USB hub - and in the vast majority of cases, that renders them unusable for the Helix (Line6 also recommends to never use a hub). Unfortunately, this sometimes also seems to be true for some ports on the back of the machines. And with laptops you really never exactly know. Again: Time to test.

It's the result of using very cheap components. Unfortunately not exactly something new in Line 6 land. I have a Native Instruments Rig Control II that I used live for a whole number of events, a Zoom G3 that I still more or less constantly use (as an FX device for acoustic gigs), always powered through USB, and a Boss GT-10 that has seen a lot of traveling, being used as an interface for on the road via USB. None of their Type A USB sockets ever broke. But I've seen plenty of HX Stomp users reporting this by now.