Axe Edit without Axe connected?

[chrisjnyc]

Whats the story with using Axe Edit without an Axe FX connected at the same time? This was possible with the Axe Ultra.

 

[barhrecords]

Yes it used to be possible to run the editor without the hardware connected.

The story is the editor was unstable and in my opinion a sore point.

The rewrite of the editor made it not possible to run without the hardware connected.

The rewrite also made the editor very stable.

 

[ssmorga78]

Man, how I wish that we could use Axe Edit without the Axe being connected again....... It makes it really rough when you find a tip/trick/setting advice/preset on the Axechange that you want to tinker with or look at while you are away from your Axe. I know you can't hear what the changes sound like without the Axe, but....... I still like to look at what others are doing in their presets and get ideas from them. This would allow me to be able to get ideas while I'm away from my Axe so that when I got home to it, I could get right to work trying things out.

 

[northtrader]

Man, how I wish that we could use Axe Edit without the Axe being connected again....... I know you can't hear what the changes sound like without the Axe, but....... This would allow me to be able to get ideas while I'm away from my Axe so that when I got home to it, I could get right to work trying things out.

+1

I was just discussing this with a fellow enthusiast this past weekend! I've been with the Axe-FX since 2009 and I sure miss being able to dissect and construct potential preset ideas without having to be beside my Axe-FX. I recall the 'issues' with Axe-Edit prior to the current "axe-fx as a dongle" mode and realize there were legitimate reasons behind the change (even though the issues never surfaced in my use of Axe-Edit back then).
It would be great if there was some kind of "offline" mode that could be injected into Axe-Edit. A mode that would ignore any connected or not-connected Axe-FX and allow you to create and manipulate presets but only allow them to be saved to your computer. Would something like that be possible?

 

[s0c9]

Yes, it's possible, but I don't see it going back to the old way.
Each new firmware brings changes and enhancements, that an offline mode would require AE being firmware version aware.
Say you're on the latest firmware and you open AE. AE starts in that firmware mode.
You then open a preset from an earlier firmware that didn't have feature X.
Does AE now re-render its UI back to the firmware under which the preset was saved or upgrade the old preset to the new firmware version?
What if you want to save that preset? How you would do that depends on the answer to the 2 questions above.

The "old" AE used to support that by using a local database to store and track firmware versions, mappings, etc. It contributed to the instability and required tons of extra coding for the offline mode.
The decision was made to move away from that spaghetti code and to the "polling" method to deliver a clean efficient app that didn't require changes for each firmware Cliff released.
The upside is you get the "blocks updating" after a new firmware as AE now polls the device for settings.
The downside is there's no offline mode...

 

[northtrader]

Thanks for the insight s0c9.

I can see the 'cleanliness' of the 'poll the axe-fx for current settings' method. Perhaps there's a user selected option to save the currently polled information for offline usage? You edit offline, save the preset to one of your preset folders and, the next time you connect to your Axe-Fx and it re-polls the unit, you have to 'open' the preset you edited and save it to the Axe-Fx while you're connected.

With respect to opening older firmware presets .... we do that already. Yes, firmware updates percolate through the presets on the Axe-Fx but we still have the ability to find that 'v16 preset' that we want to revisit and open it up in AE. The ability to 'save it in a prior firmware format' isn't really necessary.

 

[unix-guy]

If I have the FX 3 screwed into a rack unit downstairs and my PC is upstairs it would be very nice to be able to do the following:

1. Select the firmware version in Axe Edit currently active on the FX 3 and/or provide sync info from the FX 3 via a USB drive
2. Create scenes and other configurations, download and use presets and get everything set up on the PC
3. (Optional) Provide an emulator mode such that Axe Edit can take short, unprocessed guitar riffs as input to the software and send output to the PC speakers to hear (more or less) what it sounds like (not usable for a recording input)
4. Export to a USB drive to upload into the FX 3 to make minor updates and tweaks using the actual unit.

This functionality would be very helpful to those of us that have no intention of ever using the FX 3 in a studio environment.

This thread is about Axe Fx II...