Had a rough Axe night

Pinkycramps

Pinkycramps

Experienced
Ahhh.. computers. At some point they will do some wacky crap to you.

No real reason for this post. Not sure anything can or needs to be done... I think it was just one of those things. I'm simply sharing the story. By now you all know that I'm pretty regular on here and I love my Axe and the guys who made it. It's a fantastic tool, and the best gear purchase ever. It just kind of let me down the other night. It has happened before, but it's rare.

Like many on here, for me the Axe FX is a working tool, and I use it almost daily.
At practice on Monday we played a full set "show style". My XL was in a bad mood I guess, and I had to stop and reboot it twice in an hour's time. My band was looking at me like "WTF?"
The first time the MFC and AXE screens just went blank. It stopped responding to any inputs. Thankfully it was between songs during preset change.
The second time the screen was there, but sound stopped coming out, and it would not respond to any inputs.

It was not connected to Axe Edit - there was no USB connection to the Axe.

One thing I can think of is that I am sending it midi via the midi jack (from Ableton Live) I am having some inconsistent results with that right now. I'm not sure that is related to the crashes though. It's something I am keeping an eye on.

Reliability is a big thing, and I've had a number (like - 15 I'm guessing +/- 3) of issues with my rig in 2 years. (mainly random preset jumps, crashes, sound drop outs)That said, I have had far less issues with it than I did with my old analog rig and it's rack full of gear and cables and switchers. Overall it's a pretty consistent performer, and I've never had an issue I couldn't solve within 30 seconds or so.

I'm big on quality cables, double checking connections, and trying to "keep it simple", or at least as simply as I can (saying that, I realize I have one of the more complicated rigs on this forum.) Sometimes, ANY rig is going to give you a headache. You just need to stay calm, and work the problem.

I think I'm going to reload software tonight, just int he name of a "tune up". I'm still on Q1.something, (didn't want to change my sounds in the middle of a project) so I guess it's a good time for an upgrade to Q2.
 
Have either one of you contacted support? If this was happening to me, I'd want to see what they said about it.
-
Austin
 
atquinn said:
Have either one of you contacted support? If this was happening to me, I'd want to see what they said about it.
-
Austin
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Well, if it happens again I will. It was kind of odd and out of the blue, and I don't want support chasing ghosts (nor do I want to chase them.) It's kind of hard to "troubleshoot" when everything is working fine. It may have been just a couple of oddball glitches. Rest assured I am monitoring though, and if this continues I'll be in contact with them.
 
Same here just goes blank on my MFC had to reset 1 time at a gig last week and about 3 times in practice I was just about to post. To see if any one else had probs when I had a little time .
 
Matt is looking into it.
I'll try to re-innstall Q2.0 since it never happened there.
Have gigs comming up so I can't risk freezes now.
Too bad since I am loving this beta firmware.
 
Had very similar issues with my XL connected to the MFC-101MkIII. Twice in one show I believe I was on Q1.00 at the time. I contacted support and they were very courteous and as helpful as they could be but unfortunately it's not a problem I was able to recreate at will. A reboot always solved it until the next occurrence. In my case the Axe-Fx screen went blank and locked on whatever preset is in use at the time. I still have sound so I can remain playing but can't switch scenes or presets. If I tried to switch, the MFC screen then went blank. Haven't seen it since going to the latest version of Q1 and now I'm on Q2 and have the Axe-Fx and MFC powered up for many days straight so with any luck your issue will also end when you upgrade the FW.
 
Sounds like this may be a bug that has been brewing for a while. For me, it was never an issue until 2.01b. I'm sure they will get it sorted out.
 
This may be what I'm experiencing with the AX8? Dunno, but does sound similar.

Molekiller said:
Ive got a Roland FC 200 that I'd like use in cc mode for a volume pedal, wah, maybe dedicated looper functions, and other stuff. I'm having trouble so I wondered if anyone has tried connecting a third party MIDI device like this to the AX8?
To start, I am trying to use the expression pedal to control the level of a volume block. I assigned modifier source to external control 5, changed the cc # on the FC 200 exp pdl to 20. The pedal moves the dot on the modifier graph but in an erratic way and doesn't always go to the extremes(sound matches graph) then within a short period of time, the AX8 freezes (screen freezes and no response from any front panel knobs or buttons) then works fine after power cycle and disconnecting the midi cable. I only have one midi cable so I'm planning to buy another to try and also try hooking the FC 200 to an old Roland modeler to see if it works as intended there. In the mean time I wanted to check the knowledge base here to see if I'm missing something.
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Have you guys checked to see if perhaps you have a bad preset? It might be worth re-downloading the preset you are on when it happens just to rule it out. Sometimes they go bad and create oddities such as this.
 
Johnnyh64 said:
Have you guys checked to see if perhaps you have a bad preset? It might be worth re-downloading the preset you are on when it happens just to rule it out. Sometimes they go bad and create oddities such as this.
Click to expand...

Good thing to check. In my case, it had the problem not only on different presets but also different banks.
 
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Pinkycramps said:
Well, if it happens again I will. It was kind of odd and out of the blue, and I don't want support chasing ghosts (nor do I want to chase them.) It's kind of hard to "troubleshoot" when everything is working fine. It may have been just a couple of oddball glitches. Rest assured I am monitoring though, and if this continues I'll be in contact with them.
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Do you run any power conditioning?
 
Similar thing happened to me on 2.0, but I'm lead to believe it's a corrupt preset.

Twice during a live set the Axe Fx stopped outputting sound and when I looked down the Axe Fx screen was blank and the MFC displayed "Axe Fx Name Timeout". It's also happened since when connected only to Axe Edit.

I have been using the same preset for a while now, but it's still annoying that I have to rebuild the preset. Even more annoying that several presets are based of this preset, so I will have to rebuild those too just to be safe, even though I haven't experienced the issue specifically on those presets.

It's just odd that this preset has been fine for ages and suddenly on 2.0 and up it's having similar issues to what others seem to be having too.
 
Johnnyh64 said:
Have you guys checked to see if perhaps you have a bad preset? It might be worth re-downloading the preset you are on when it happens just to rule it out.
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Can you just redownload it, or do you have to rebuild it from scratch?
If it's just a matter of redownloading it, then that's not too bad - but imagine having to rebuild an entire collection of presets!
 
dbun said:
Can you just redownload it, or do you have to rebuild it from scratch?
If it's just a matter of redownloading it, then that's not too bad - but imagine having to rebuild an entire collection of presets!
Click to expand...

This relates to a question that I've never had answered: if I back up to FractalBot and restore from it, is the corrupt code going to be part of the backup and restore, so I would be better off not doing so? Or putting it another way, is there any action that really does kind of clean up a corrupt preset short of starting from a blank preset in a different location and trying to create the same blocks and all settings?
 
greiswig said:
This relates to a question that I've never had answered: if I back up to FractalBot and restore from it, is the corrupt code going to be part of the backup and restore, so I would be better off not doing so? Or putting it another way, is there any action that really does kind of clean up a corrupt preset short of starting from a blank preset in a different location and trying to create the same blocks and all settings?
Click to expand...

I think if your last backup included the corrupt preset, it will still be corrupt when you load it back into the Axe. I keep all of my backups over time just in case since the files are so small. Just sort them by date & choose one other than the latest.
 
notalemming said:
I think if your last backup included the corrupt preset, it will still be corrupt when you load it back into the Axe. I keep all of my backups over time just in case since the files are so small. Just sort them by date & choose one other than the latest.
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Yeah, that makes sense. Wish there was a way to have the Bot do a checksum or something of each block to give one an idea of what the corruption is, and ideally how to deal with it.
 
i had a similar issue but turned out to be another (empty) track in my DAW somehow ended up on the same midi channel as the AXFX. caused all kinds of craziness til I found out what was going on.
 
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