Wish Proper browsers (for presets, IRs, and blocks). And Set Lists

GlennO

Axe-Master
The Axe-FX (and FM3 and FM9) was primarily designed for live use. However, it is increasingly popular to use it for recording. Unfortunately, its legacy as a device to be used on stage makes it awkward for use in the studio. Here are some preset management suggestions to improve the Axe-FX for use when recording.

When used on stage, you only need access to a relatively small number of presets and the limited number of slots in the Axe-FX is sufficient. On the other hand, when in the studio, you often need access to a larger number of presets and the limited number of slots can be a problem. As you prepare to record a track, you want to search through a preset library to find the right preset for this track. That library may need to contain a large number of presets, more than the number of memory slots in the Axe-FX, which means the presets should be stored on your computer, not in the Axe-FX.

Also, in order to perform this search efficiently, you want the library to be categorized and tagged. You want your search to be filtered and sorted. You want to be able to easily manage and re-organize your library. Again, this dictates the library should be stored on your computer, not in the Axe-FX.

While "Manage Presets" can be used to access presets on your computer, it's rather limited. It's time to bring rich browsing, like can be found in software synths, to amp modelers. You should be able to use Axe-Edit to browse categories of sortable presets, blocks, and IR's. Other features would include: sorting, filtering, tagging, boolean expressions, finding similar presets, locking of parts of a preset as you browse, searching, adding notes to a preset, etc. See the screen shot below for an example of a modern preset browser. The same ideas could be applied to browsing blocks and IR's.

One barrier to making this happen is the way Impulse Responses are currently identified in a preset by memory slot number. This basically means every IR you will ever use needs to be stored in memory on the Axe-FX where they can't be organized or categorized, making it difficult to browse IR's when editing a preset. Further, it means you can't move an IR to another slot without breaking any presets that use it. It also means the size of your IR library is limited by the number of memory slots.

This problem was solved long ago in samplers. In a sampler, the sample audio is identified in a preset by a path. That means when you load a preset from your computer, the sample audio is automatically loaded into memory. The same principle could be used in the Axe-FX: any IR's used by a preset would automatically be loaded into the Axe-FX memory when you load the preset. There would be no need to manually make sure the IR is stored the Axe-FX before loading the preset. Instead of storing your entire IR library in the Axe-FX, you would store it on your computer where it is easy to organize and manage without any limits on how many you can have in your library.

This also means loading a "set list" of presets for a gig would automatically load all the IR's needed by those presets.



IMHO, in the next couple of years the competition among amp modelers will change. The pursuit of the faithful emulation of tube amps will become less important. There simply isn't a lot of room left for improvement in this area. Instead, the attention will turn to improving the user experience. For example, making it easier to navigate through a large number of presets. Imagine if the AxeEdit browser looked like the example below.








browser.png
 
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You read my mind! My axefx is almost always connected to my computer and having easy access to a larger variety of presets would be awesome.
The austin buddy pack alone made me wish i could just have the packs addressable as their own bank of computer-based presets so i could sample them without a massive overwrite or a day of selective updates.
 
+1
That would probably require just a small text within the preset syx file, to write the preset attributes

BTW: can you play preset 84 of that old synth? The title is suggestive :D
 
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You read my mind! My axefx is almost always connected to my computer and having easy access to a larger variety of presets would be awesome.
The austin buddy pack alone made me wish i could just have the packs addressable as their own bank of computer-based presets so i could sample them without a massive overwrite or a day of selective updates.

Yes...anybody who is using AxeEdit has a 100.0000% chance that they have a computer attached to to their AxeFX :). It seems silly in that case for the browsers to browse presets and IR's in the AxeFX instead of on the computer. I bought the Austin Buddy pack, but it sits unused since it's so awkward to try to use it. The preset slots on my AxeFX filled up long ago, so it's a pain to use new presets now.
 
Yes...anybody who is using AxeEdit has a 100.0000% chance that they have a computer attached to to their AxeFX :). It seems silly in that case for the browsers to browse presets and IR's in the AxeFX instead of on the computer. I bought the Austin Buddy pack, but it sits unused since it's so awkward to try to use it. The preset slots on my AxeFX filled up long ago, so it's a pain to use new presets now.
You have a computer attached to that Axe-Fx, right? You can browse presets without loading them into your Axe. And you can laoad your favorite ones into the Axe for instant access. If you truly have every preset slot filled with something you have to keep there, then you are in a desperate situation indeed.
 
There is a browser for presets and cabs built into Axe Edit. It's not super full featured, but it's definitely easier than importing them one at a time from the Preset menu.

Go to Manage Presets or Manage Cabs and on the upper left corner click browser and select show. You can open a folder of presets or cabs from your computer to show there. Double click them in the list to audition them through the Axe FX. If you want to import it into the hardware and save it, drag it into a slot on the right.
 
It's not super full featured

And that's my point. There are 2 preset browsers in AxeEdit, but they are both primitive. By "primitive" I mean it's still early in its development life cycle.

It might be time to consider enhancing this part of product and think much bigger. Something along the lines of the browser example above. Something that presents an organized, hierarchical, and categorized view of preset files with searching, sorting, and all the other browsing features I mentioned.
 
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+2

I normally organize my favourite presets in different folders by style, type, artist, etc. But today, after spending a while with the new Austin Buddy pack and selecting my favorites, I have realized that I have such a mess of directories and duplicated presets of different versions at different folders that I am totally lost.

Having the ability of saving tags inside the presets themselves (like Omnisphere Library) would be ideal. Here is a view of the Omnisphere Tag editor:
2020-07-21 20_50_01-Omnisphere.png

The possibility of personalizing tag attributes (like Omnisphere) would be nice. e.g.: "Amp Type" (Plexi, Fender, etc)

The Patch Browser, as in the pic that GlennO has displayed above, also has the possibility of filtering the different attributes by "AND" "OR" and "NOT"

An automatically generated text attribute indicating the name of the User IRs used on the preset would also be nice. It would be very convenient while the "Save Preset + CAB Bundle" of Axe-Edit III is not yet implemented. I have many presets saved on the hard disk with orphan User IRs at the CAB block
 
Having the ability of saving tags inside the presets themselves (like Omnisphere Library) would be ideal. Here is a view of the Omnisphere Tag editor:

We worked pretty hard on that interface and did a lot of prototypes. We wanted to make it as quick and easy as possible to do tagging. Not only for end users but for 3rd party preset developers and within Spectrasonics as well.
 
We worked pretty hard on that interface and did a lot of prototypes. We wanted to make it as quick and easy as possible to do tagging. Not only for end users but for 3rd party preset developers and within Spectrasonics as well.

You work for Spectrasonics? Congratulations for the excellent work! The same as Fractal Audio made sell all my amps, preamps, cabs and effects, Spectrasonics made me sell all my hardware synths.
 
Came here thinking the same thing. The current interface for browsing cabs and presets is a big headache for me. I'd love to see a new and improved UI.

My top requests would be:
  1. A hierarchical way to browse IR's and presets
  2. A unified window for presets, cabs, IR loader, axe-change, etc. They are all inter-related and it would make sense to group them into a common interface.
  3. Vertical scrolling - I just find it much more intuitive for both mouse and trackpad. Use the additional horizontal space for more metadata like mics, placement, cab, ultra-res, etc.
  4. Tagging
  5. An easier way to load presets from the computer. Similar to what others have been saying about directly browsing from the computer. I think this is the same thing. We just want a quicker way to load and sample IRs. Having some silent conversion from WAV to SYX would be great too, now that AXE-EDIT has this baked in.
 
+1

Edit: Before buying FM3 I tried GT-1000.

The editor of GT-1000 had the option to create UNLIMITED lists with the presets you want. That was nice. The rest of the editor was more "normal", but this point was really good.

These preset lists were stored in the computer and you can import and export them.
 
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