Gift of Tone... why only Firmware 21?

moregear

moregear

Inspired
I am on Firmware 15.0 because updating ruined my tones for live metal band. Excursion bias or some such... I used several GOTs and enjoyed them on FM9, which is up to date. (I use it for a different rock cover band). What would I have to do to my presets to keep Firmware 14-15 tones in order to get back up to date? I used to love new firmware day, now only lamentations. And why can't I just import and tweak these gifts on any firmware ?

Thor
 
moregear said:
I am on Firmware 15.0 because updating ruined my tones for live metal band. Excursion bias or some such... I used several GOTs and enjoyed them on FM9, which is up to date. (I use it for a different rock cover band). What would I have to do to my presets to keep Firmware 14-15 tones in order to get back up to date? I used to love new firmware day, now only lamentations. And why can't I just import and tweak these gifts on any firmware ?

Thor
Click to expand...
I think this is an instance of "you can't have your cake and eat it too". A lot has changed since FW15. Maybe look at the blocks on the FM9 GOT and just copy settings but again it probably won't sound the same due to updates
 
moregear said:
I am on Firmware 15.0 because updating ruined my tones for live metal band. Excursion bias or some such... I used several GOTs and enjoyed them on FM9, which is up to date. (I use it for a different rock cover band). What would I have to do to my presets to keep Firmware 14-15 tones in order to get back up to date? I used to love new firmware day, now only lamentations. And why can't I just import and tweak these gifts on any firmware ?

Thor
Click to expand...

When we get so many improvements, upgrades and additions (for free), how could anyone make a preset compatible with the past with new features? I think it's great we retain compatibility with our old presets and don't have to start over every time a great update comes along. You could load the preset in Fracpad and copy/approximate settings and rebuild the presets. Probably won't sound the same though.
 
Presets are not backwards compatible in terms of firmware versions. Any preset made on a newer firmware version than you are running will not load. Firmware updates are the price for admission. The longer you put it off, the more you'll have to adjust once you finally do. If you keep up with updates, you'll have more incremental changes that are far less drastic each time.
 
As we all recall,16.0 was drastic. I know longingly what I'm missing. I found Cliff's possible remedy on page 59 of that thread. I'll give it a shot this week.
 
Trust me brother, there's no shortage of awesome metal tones to be had in this thing in it's current state. It only got faster to get there. It might benefit you to just start over from scratch, in a lot of cases for me it took less time to dial something in from scratch than to figure out how to get it back to what it was. I'm doing far, far less tweaking these days to get what I want than I was before.
 
That's the trade-off basically. If you want the new features you might have to rebuild your presets after some major firmware updates. Some don't have a problem with this. Heck, many say their rebuilt presets sound BETTER. But it can be time consuming and if you're happy where you're at, don't want to deal with it, and you actually use the unit for work you might just wanna sit tight and just use your FM9 for messing around with Fractal freebies.
 
moregear said:
I am on Firmware 15.0 because updating ruined my tones for live metal band. Excursion bias or some such... I used several GOTs and enjoyed them on FM9, which is up to date. (I use it for a different rock cover band). What would I have to do to my presets to keep Firmware 14-15 tones in order to get back up to date? I used to love new firmware day, now only lamentations. And why can't I just import and tweak these gifts on any firmware ?

Thor
Click to expand...

That's the double edged sword that is Fractal Audio. If you want a stable platform, stick to one firmware version that works for you. If you do that, that means you won't be able to use presets that are shared by others who are running newer versions because the format of these new presets was unknown at the time your firmware was released.

Or, keep up with the latest firmware and get all the new gizmos and bug fixes in the updates and deal with the shifting sands below your presets that require you to adjust them when you update your firmware. If you do that, that means shared presets that were created by others with older firmware versions won't sound as intended when you import them into the latest firmware.

Either way, this tends to put a damper on preset sharing and explains why there isn't as much of a preset sharing community for the Axe-FX as there is for other modelers.
 
GlennO said:
Either way, this tends to put a damper on preset sharing and explains why there isn't as much of a preset sharing community for the Axe-FX as there is for other modelers.
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There's not really a viable alternative. The cost of dragging backward compatibility behind each update is huge and grows with each update because it bloats each one. In this sort of system with limited RAM, how will it continue to grow to accommodate every previous incarnation? Quickly it'd force a company to jettison the ball and chain.

Yes, there could be a sidecar app that is only responsible for updating the existing presets in the memory of the modeler to the most recent version, but how far back should it reach? And how much time/money/energy should the company expend doing so?

They're damned if they do and damned if they don't?
 
I've seen others like it, but now I see that he added a parameter (master bias excursion) to kind of roll back the Cygnus changes. I will try out all major updates to see what I like. The problem I have is, playing songs by the best metal bands... Sabbath, Metallica, Pantera, Opeth, Mastodon, Sepultura, Alice In Chains, Sevendust, etc. all have quite different and very identifiable guitar sounds so I have a separate preset on every song...
 
moregear said:
I am on Firmware 15.0 because updating ruined my tones for live metal band. Excursion bias or some such... I used several GOTs and enjoyed them on FM9, which is up to date. (I use it for a different rock cover band). What would I have to do to my presets to keep Firmware 14-15 tones in order to get back up to date? I used to love new firmware day, now only lamentations. And why can't I just import and tweak these gifts on any firmware ?

Thor
Click to expand...
Back to the original question: the same reason they didn't offer GOT presets for the Axe 2, AX8, Axe Ultra, Axe Standard.... time and effort.
They released on their latest and greatest firmware, and to do otherwise would mean we think Fractal should spend the time to dial them in to all previous firmwares??
Like I tell my kids when they get anything - 'you get what you get, and you don't get upset.'

It also looks like you already knew about the Excursion bias adjustment, why don't you try that?
 
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