Any improvements or planned changes to managing amps and cabs?

laxu

Fractal Fanatic
As I was playing my Axe-Fx 2 today I started to think how the way amps and cabs are managed on Axe-Edit is unwiedly with the sheer number of options available. Unless I use the color coding feature I constantly have issues finding the amp model I want when I can't always remember what the model of a specific real amp is called especially when they are not consistent (e.g. not all Marshalls are Brit <something> and Fenders are all over the place). Likewise each amp channel is its own model.

While I understand that initially the Axe-Fx 3 will be in many ways just a port of the Axe-Fx 2 UI, does Fractal have any plans for making finding the right amp and channel any easier? Many things could be done here such as:
  • Consistent amp names based on what brand they are based on.
  • UI change where you select an amp model and then its channel or variant if available.
  • Sorting and filtering based on e.g. expected gain range or tonal similarities (for example "find all Marshall-based amps" or "find all high gain amps"
Cabs are a bit more difficult as there is more user control in naming there. Maybe ability to define some metadata like "this IR is a 1x12 miced with SM57".
 
I would guess that “find all Marshall-based amps” wouldn’t be an option due to copyright issues.

But apart from that, I would welcome improvements in this area for sure.
 
I would guess that “find all Marshall-based amps” wouldn’t be an option due to copyright issues.

What about a search field for amps into which the user could type descriptors (e.g. 'clean'), with each amp model internally tagged by various descriptors? This way Fractal could include manufactures' names among these tags without it being visible to anyone, yet when one searches for 'Marshall'... voila!

(I know absolute balls about copyright law, so perhaps this is just as bad legally.)

Preferably such a system would allow users to add their own tags if they wish, so perhaps some of the tags would be visible to and even editable by the user.
 
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A full tagging system for amp models, cab IRs and presets would be a great addition. I use the color tagging for now and with creativity you can use it to differentiate manufacturers or manufacturer styles (e.g. all “yellow” amps are Marshalls or similar).
 
I often like to use a Marshall style amp, with the gain down, for clean tones, but someone else might think of that amp as a high gain rock amp, because that is how they use it. So how could a tagging system work if the category is subjective ?

I could see listing cabs by 1x12, 2x10 etc's as that is an absolute value, but subjective terms like clean, chimey, etc seem like they'd return variable results
 
Tags or flags for each Amp, Effect, Cab, preset would make such searches easier. But not a deal-breaker for me ...... I'd sacrifice this for offline editing ........ :D
 
How about tooltips that show up when you hover over a control? Something that describes what that control is used for (say for brightening/tightening the sound etc). Cliff has series of excellent articles (not to mention the manual) but you need to piece that all together. The feature may be disabled thru the menu not to irritate people who really know what they’re doing. Just a thought...
 
My vote would be for an amp tagging system in which the user could define the tag values.

Step 1. highlight all Marshall amp models.
Step 2. right click > new tag > type “Marshall” etc.

Even if this was only made possible in Axe Edit i’d still love a feature like this.
 
How about tooltips that show up when you hover over a control? Something that describes what that control is used for (say for brightening/tightening the sound etc). Cliff has series of excellent articles (not to mention the manual) but you need to piece that all together. The feature may be disabled thru the menu not to irritate people who really know what they’re doing. Just a thought...

I was thinking the exact same thing the other day! Just having a description from the manual pop up would help a lot. Again this could be just an Axe-Edit feature. I do understand that this is a big undertaking - the feature itself is easy to implement but it's a lot of "monkey work" to match the control and the description for the hundreds of parameters in the unit.
 
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