soundog

Love is all you need. You can't always get what you want. Everybody hurts. Don't worry, be happy. etc...

1) Its like getting new stuff for free! 2) The upgrade went smooth and quickly. Updates always make me a little nervous after a cup of coffee. So I backed up my preset bundles and made careful notes of my IR slot contents. But I didn't need to .... everything was restored as is, along with the new 1.8 version. 3) I love the new Fullerton and Grammatico amps. They may be my favorites yet. The amp+cab modeling reacts realistically to my Strat and Gretsch bass. Great clean, crunch, and lead tones from a single amp. 4) New stuff for bass (an amp, a DI, and a distortion pedal). Bonus for us bass players! And they all sound excellent. 5. Native is still a bit of a CPU hog. But that's life in the fast lane, I suppose. 6) I'm using Native with Logic Pro X on a fast iMac running High Sierra. You're mileage and experience may vary.

+ the tuning capabilities. Open tunings, whole step down for metal, etc. That's the main reason I bought mine.

@zolco60: Ah ha! So you think the Line 6 driver does some sort of software sample rate conversion? That would explain things, I suppose --- it would save them the expense of a hardware sample rate converter chip doo-dad or similar. (Even though some of the marketing material at places like Sweetwater do tout its ability as a "8-in/8-out USB audio interface" I get what you're saying --- its not sold as such.)

Yes, must be Windows. Whenever I use a PC, I have the same blank stare. sorry. I don't usually like to talk politics, religion, or PC platform .... but I couldn't resist this one.

I've dinked around doing my own set-ups for some time .... it takes a lot of careful practice, some basic guitar set-up tools, and a book/videos. Its a good skill to learn if you have the time and patience. Recently, though, I took my Variax Standard into a local guy who has the best reputation around and he did an absolutely killer job for $60. The guitar never played better.

Your UR22 interface should be fine. Just be sure to set levels on the interface "line" input so the meter peaks at around -6 dB (yellow on a meter, no red!). Record your guitar "raw" and when mixing use a good guitar amp modeler plug-in in your DAW on the guitar track. I recommend Helix Native or S-Gear, but your DAW may already have decent free guitar plug-ins.

If you search through the Workbench forum (non-HD), you'll find many tales of woe and misery about ravaged musicians trying to use legacy Workbench on their Mac or Windows computer. It seems we are all left to try to keep it working, with little to no support from Line 6. You thought your old Variax guitar was a guitar, but it's really an outdated, unsupported computer. Come back in ten years and you could very well be hearing the same sad tales about James Tyler and Standard Variax owners.

Why is this such a mess, Line 6? Apple's Mac USB audio class driver supports all the usual sample rates (44.1, 48, 192k, etc) and should work with no muss or fuss if a company designs to its specs. Users shouldn't have to worry about installing a separate "driver." That's not very Mac-like, is it??

Dang! That's a shame. I wonder why??

The latest version of Native finally supports preset changes via Program Change messages. I don't think there is a MIDI "thru" option built into Native, but you should be able to configure your DAW so that a Program Change messages is routed to both Native and your Nektar controller. How that is done, of course, will be DAW dependent.

To brick or not to brick. That is the question. Or .... "are you feeling lucky, punk? Well .... are ya?"

That's funny, after reading that Sweetwater blurb I realized I'm not really all that excited about the list of new stuff, but I enjoy reading this forum thread because its so TWISTED.

Everyody's hating and yelling at each other. The Trump Effect is spreading.

I'm using UA with the latest version of S-Gear. The manual states that the plugin formats are AU, AAX, and VST3 for Mac, and VST2.4, AAX for Windows. The manual implies that all those versions of the plug-ins and the standalone version support program changes. Hmmmm .... no VST3 for Windows, so maybe PC support is a factor? Dunno.

Or go direct, then try an extreme distortion plug-in, something like iZotope Trash 2. Totally mangle the tone.

Cerberus is my second favorite bass emulation, behind the UAD. Its also very affordable, and will take 3rd party IRs.

That Beetronics thing was like bees in my brain ... I'm still trying to get them out. I've tried a lot of plug-in amp/cab sw emulations. My faves to date are the newer amps from Kazrog and S-Gear. Maybe Mecuriall if heavier stuff is your thing. I love the clean, crunch and lead tones in S-Gear, and their included effects (reverb, chorus, flanger, etc). Try demos. I think Scuffham will be coming out with an update this summer, and its free if you bought S-Gear within 1-year of the release. S-Gears on sale now for $99. I can find dial in usable tones on S-Gear quicker than Native because their are fewer options, which is often a very good thing indeed. when you're working on tracks. Another bonus is that the presets are excellent as starting points. Re bass guitar, I've also looked far and wide and the best amp/cab emulations for bass I've found (which surprised me) are the UAD plug-ins. I settled on the B15-N.

"If you have to explain why its funny, maybe its not." ~ Pete Dukovitch

OSX CoreAudio must be multiclient, so multiple CoreAudio hosts can communicate with HW at the same time. In this case, the S-Gear app and the Logic app buffers can be set independently. There is no buffer setting in the Apollo driver to my knowledge (at least in my Thunderbolt rig); it uses dynamic buffering. So maybe my method mentioned here is only good for Mac users?

Where was the funny part?

The method I'm using is beneficial because the buffer (and, hence, latency) is set independently in the standalone app (S-Gear) and the DAW. To further explain: I'm currently recording a large project in Logic Pro that requires a lot of horsepower, so I have my buffer set high (1028) to accomodate virtual instruments and plugs. Of course, if I try to record a HXN guitar track with software monitoring on, the latency is unacceptable. So, I'm using the S-Gear (git modeling) standalone app concurrently, with its buffer low (32), so getting minimal latency while playing. I monitor the guitar through S-Gear, while recording the raw track in Logic (using the S-Gear plug-in later, while mixing). This is all achieved via Apollo Twin console I/O routing.

Haven't tried VST (I'm using AU), but Helix Native simply doesn't have the chops to respond to PC#s. My S-Gear plug-in (and standalone app) does. Also, the S-Gear docs say the VST plug-in also responds to PC#s.

Okee dokee, did that. There are 4 separate suggestions for Native standalone. So vote for all. If you total 'em there are over 60 votes, so not too shabby. https://line6.ideascale.com/a/ideas/search?templateId=0&query=standalone+native