Now that the Axe-fx 2 has been released... we probably will never see the Axe-PC

mortega76

mortega76

Fractal Fanatic
Now that the Axe-fx 2 has been released... we probably will never see the Axe-PC, especially that re-amping is much easier with the Axe-fx 2 and with all the possibilities of VST plugins with and without hardware "dongles" get cracked all the time... unless the Axe-fx 2 becomes the dongle... thoughts?
 
It would be great to see a "final answer" on this subject. Other than the demo in a few weeks message from Cliff about 2 years ago it seems there has only been speculation and no definative answer either way. It would be nice to know if it is even on the roadmap or totally scrapped at this time. I would would be interested in such a product even if uber costly provided the payload was at least the same as Gen1 stuff.
 
Until PC architecture and/or processing power can handle it you won't see AxeFx PC. I thin the lack of information on this is key.
 
With the new Axe Edit released today I don't get the point of having the Axe Fx II in vst or au format with the hardware acting as a dongle.
I mean, what are the benifit of using it inside the daw or outside it with the Axe Edit? Nothing more then other headaches caused by incompatibility, software writing, vst and au format etc.
Time that can be spent to improve the unit and add new amps/fx/updates
The Axe PC stand alone, as being said before, will be cracked and reverse engineered in a couple of weeks. Sure at 101%
 
Pod Farm was never cracked when it used the Line6 interfaces as a dongle. Either it was very hard to crack or it wasn't possible to crack. I looked all over the internet for one because my AU didn't work and Line6 support couldn't find a fix for my problem until the eventually god rid of the Line6 dongle. Now 2 years after buying pod farm it works but it has also been cracked. If the axe was the same as the line6 dongles I think it would be safe enough but as the saying goes "everything can be cracked". I don't think a PC would have the processing power to handle several instances of an Axe Fx vst/au, its better to have the axe handle all that outside of your computer.
 
I long time ago I would have sworn to you over and over that I wouldn't have purchased an AxeFX until it was in plugin format. Today, I'm not as picky b/c the sound of the AxeFX has overridden the convenience of a plugin.

I would like to see AxeEdit running as a plugin - wait - before reacting and understand what I mean by that. It would help if AxeEdit could run as a plugin so that all settings can be saved with your DAW's project and so that they share key shortcuts. It would NOT need to process any sound. It would simply be a AxeEdit as is wrapped in a VST3 plugin.

Turning AxeEdit into AxePC (with audio) was done about 2 years ago I think but CPU performance wasn't good enough. I do wonder how the fastest quad core Sandy Bridges fair against the 2 chips in AxeFX II. Even if it were close, it's still a hard sell to go from dedicated hardware to software. Going the software route virtually eliminates the hardware overhead (unless hardware is used for copy protection) but severely increases the testing costs. Cliff is able to do what he does b/c he's dealing with an extremely small number of hardware/software combinations. With software, the number of combos is huge when factoring os (osx/windows), DAW(well ok, VST/AU would probably be standard but still need to be tested across Cubase, Logic, Live, etc.), CPU's (we aren't off of 32 bit machines yet and there are several intel/amd chips out there), hardware, etc.

We may say that AxePC is inevitable at some point but what happens when a more modern Sharc chip comes out that completely blows away what any desktop PC can handle? The current chip is actually fairly old. I think Cliff would opt for that instead of going down the AxePC route. But who knows.
 
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Once you go into the PC software world tech support issues become a fully staffed, 24/7 type issue because any idiot can own a computer and not need to know how to use it. Nothing against anyone, but I've spent more than my fair share of "right click on ____" and waiting....and then asking them if they did it or not only to find out that they're looking at something completely different. As long as Cliff keeps it all inside his own box he has the ability to eliminate buggy drivers, incompatible hardware, viruses, bloat, stupidity (well to a point) and just about everything that inflicts PC's with problems.

Plus it would be cracked within hours and half of me says that it would be out of spite from the haters out there.

Zero frickin' upside for AxePC in my opinion.
 
At this point I would love to see a VST plugin for the Axe to manage your presets. Something that saves the current preset inside your project and loads it when that track is selected. Or something along those lines. Let the Axe to its thing but have something that preserves your presets in case you change something later on.
 
Jack Napalm said:
At this point I would love to see a VST plugin for the Axe to manage your presets. Something that saves the current preset inside your project and loads it when that track is selected. Or something along those lines. Let the Axe to its thing but have something that preserves your presets in case you change something later on.
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Nice idea, but like a lot of things there are work-arounds that produce the desired result. Save the preset to you proj dir. Load it up when you play/record that project. True, not fully integrated, but sometimes a little effort is not a big deal.
 
Believe me, you don't want to be playing live and get your AxeFx restarted in the middle of your best solo because Windows has updates.... LOL.

Not very usefull in a multitask enviroment. The only way I see it's posible is launching it as stand alone, no O.S. involved, but maybe the big problem there is to fight with the different sound interfaces out there, unless it comes with his own "FA sound card" to guarantee nice communication between the soft and the soundcard...

About the piracy.... it's not the same being good in assembler and have some spare time to spend cracking some software than having to crack code that makes continuous calls to a dongle hardware with complex algorithms in the dongle itself.... a big task to do only for "cracker communtity appreciation". Unless there's some money to earn. But if you are so good cracking that, it's easier to start your own company and software.....
 
charles5150 said:
Believe me, you don't want to be playing live and get your AxeFx restarted in the middle of your best solo because Windows has updates.... LOL.
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That's a 5 second tweak to the Windows Update environment to *not* do auto-updating. ;)

charles5150 said:
Not very usefull in a multitask enviroment. The only way I see it's posible is launching it as stand alone, no O.S. involved, but maybe the big problem there is to fight with the different sound interfaces out there, unless it comes with his own "FA sound card" to guarantee nice communication between the soft and the soundcard...
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Why? Lots of people gig with Amplitube or rely on their PC for backing tracks, MIDI triggers, etc. I don't think this would be any different. Yes it's a multi-tasking environment, but you can create a boot scene dedicated to whatever you want and set process priority to be high for whatever is your primary program.

charles5150 said:
About the piracy.... it's not the same being good in assembler and have some spare time to spend cracking some software than having to crack code that makes continuous calls to a dongle hardware with complex algorithms in the dongle itself.... a big task to do only for "cracker communtity appreciation". Unless there's some money to earn. But if you are so good cracking that, it's easier to start your own company and software.....
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USB encryption dongles that do 128-bit encryption are actually pretty cheap. And they can be the mini form factor as well so they can be unobtrusive.
 
s0c9 said:
Nice idea, but like a lot of things there are work-arounds that produce the desired result. Save the preset to you proj dir. Load it up when you play/record that project. True, not fully integrated, but sometimes a little effort is not a big deal.
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No doubt. That is what I do now. It would just be a nice to have.
 
mwc2112;525163 Why? Lots of people gig with Amplitube or rely on their PC for backing tracks said:
Simply, because you are playing live, you don't want to check your email, or write about your playing in your facebook while you are playing ( but I know a lot of people that would like to). It's a waste of CPU. Even if you create a boot scene, Windows itself eats your memory and cpu cycles.

Of course you can use Amplitube, Revalver, Overloud.... there's a lot of them out there, but AxeFx is playing in (fortunately) another league. As far as I know, most of them are convolution-based instead of circuit emulation. That's the main reason Axe II is born, complex software evolved to a point that needs a more powerful machine than the Ultra was.

Anyway, the question here is if a pc+soft solution price could beat the actual system (without pirating the soft, of course) and if it's worth to have this forum flood of "my pc restarts in the middle of a solo" or "axe-pc doesn't work with Word at the same time " questions
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Most software is cracked very quickly after release, even that which requires dongles, it's also very easy to stop software from phoning home. The only way to make it 100% crack proof is to make it hardware specific, I.e. UAD cards.
 
We will have to agree to disagree. If distributed correctly it's not cracked and there is little incentive to do so.
 
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