Bug? AX8-Edit silently fails on presets newer than firmware

D

Dave76

Inspired
Starting around the time when 7.01 came out, I noticed that some of the presets that others have shared would not load. I'd attempt to load the preset into a blank preset and AX8-Edit would do some work followed by leaving the preset blank with no message regarding failure. I'm typically slow to upgrade so I presumed that this was because the presets were created with 7.01 and I was on an older pre-7 version -- not surprising jumping up a major release. Once I eventually updated and tried the presets again, they worked.

Now that 7.02b is out, I'm noticing the same thing happening again so I'm guessing it is the same issue where people are uploading 7.02b presets and I'm trying to load them on 7.01 -- somewhat surprising given it's a minor version change.

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a wish because I don't know what the expectation is for preset compatibility. I never noticed this in the past 10 months with the AX8 and then suddenly a bunch recently so it feels like it might be a recent bug that crept in or compatibility behavior change but maybe I just got lucky in the past.

If presets simply are not compatible on older firmware versions, it would be nice to at least get an error message when the load fails and ideally identifying the firmware required.
 
In any developers terms, it's NOT a bug. You cannot (in any software that I know of) generally load a NEWER version into an older version... Vice versa - as in backward compatible - yeah.. but loading a preset from a newer firmware version into an older one? There's no way the old version has knowledge of the new version features.
I don't recall that ever being supported.
Upgrade your firmware and it should work.

I would have expected most folks to know not to try and load up an newer firmware preset.
 
s0c9 said:
In any developers terms, it's NOT a bug. You cannot (in any software that I know of) generally load a NEWER version into an older version... Vice versa - as in backward compatible - yeah.. but loading a preset from a newer firmware version into an older one? There's no way the old version has knowledge of the new version features.
I don't recall that ever being supported.
Upgrade your firmware and it should work.

I would have expected most folks to know not to try and load up an newer firmware preset.
Click to expand...

The whole point is that the user doesn't know it is a newer firmware preset. That's why I added this part:
If presets simply are not compatible on older firmware versions, it would be nice to at least get an error message when the load fails and ideally identifying the firmware required.
Click to expand...

Personally, I keep up with the news on the latest firmware and have encountered this enough to understand what it means but from a general user-friendliness standpoint, a popup saying "Load failed. Preset requires firmware 7.02b or greater" seems reasonable.

It's a frustrating user experience to make the effort to download shared presets, try to load them in AX8-Edit, wait for the AX8 to do nothing, then guess that it is because the version didn't match. Half the time I'm doing this, I'll hook the AX8 up to my laptop, copy a bunch of presets over really quickly to try them out later and then later on when I'm hooked up to my full rig, the presets just aren't there.

When there are two recent new versions -- 7.01 and 7.02b -- you don't even know which newer version you'd need to update to for the preset. I don't have the luxury of upgrading to a beta version on a whim so this info would be nice to know.

Also, it certainly is possible in an abstract sense for an older firmware and/or AX8-Edit to know how to load a newer preset (minus the new features of course but none of the presets that I was trying used new features). FracTool seems to do exactly this. I'm not even asking for that as I know the team at Fractal has better stuff to spend their time on than that.
 
Dave76 said:
The whole point is that the user doesn't know it is a newer firmware preset. That's why I added this part:
Click to expand...
The "user" should check things like version, given Cliff's prolific release schedule. True, some may not know that - being new - but doesn't AxeChange [if that's where you got the preset] have model/firmware version on each preset?

I firmly believe that the user has a level of responsibility [FracTool aside].. you can't expect the vendor to protect you from yourself all the time.
So I view this as user error/education scenario vs a code bug.
YMMV
 
Again, I'm talking about cases where the user doesn't know the firmware version. I'm specifically suggesting that AX8-Edit tells the user the preset's firmware version (or at least vaguely that it is too new) so that the user can take a level of responsibility at that point. The user can't be responsible when minimal information isn't being made available to them to act on. AxeChange does not tell you the exact version required (it says stuff like 7.x) and even if it did, it is just one place where presets can be found.

The fact that AxeChange seems to think minor versions should be compatible -- as tends to be conventional for minor versions in the tech world -- implies that maybe there is a bug in the AX8-Edit/AX8 regarding minor version incompatibility with the new releases like I said in the original post. Either that or AxeChange is displaying incorrect information.
 
And I agree that it could just be a user "education scenario". That's why I'm suggesting a simple popup to educate the user.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom