For me it's the worst. They're sooooo reliant on the touchscreen that basic operations become very cludgy, and the rotary encoders on top of the footswitches all feel quite different from one another; different amounts of wobble, different indentations, different ballistics.. that's quite hard to get fluid with the unit.
I just bought a Waldorf Iridium synth, now THAT is the way to use a touchscreen in a MI product. IMHO, YMMV, m2p, etc etc etc....
The one I had was a pleasure to use. For me the knob/switches had the best feel I've had on a modeler with just the right ballistics to make them feel natural to turn. Fx block editing was very easy to do, just managing captures and presets was crap.
That Waldorf looks really cool, though I don't really love the "big knob surrounded by buttons" that Fractal also does. The encoder values are a bit small looking for my liking but probably work fine in reality, otherwise lots of nice practical touches there like showing saved preset value etc. I think there's a lot happening in synth user interfaces that guitar modeler makers should look at to offer better on the fly control.
I love how easy my ASM Hydrasynth Explorer is to use where it's small LCD screen with four knobs surrounding it works generally better than doing anything on my Axe-Fx 3 because the Hydrasynth knob and button placement is better so it's much faster to change between sets of parameters, toggle things on/off and so on.
You said this on the other place, and I didn't really get it then either tbh! I find it very intuitive to use, the only thing I would like is a batch way to remove all of the IK captures/profiles, and only have my own in there. But generally I think it's really well thought out, and very beautiful to look at.
Then we will just have to agree to disagree. I found it frustrating when it doesn't present info I would need to make educated decisions on what to pick and puts a lot of stuff in non-obvious places.
Whoever made the UI is just reinventing wheels. Like why does the way sorting works change if you go to Tone.net where it's now a dropdown on the left instead of just clicking the column, with far less options too? Why is expand list button a column header? User interface design uses tried and true conventions for good reason and you start breaking them when you know you can do better. ToneX developers clearly don't.
The pretty graphics for amps are just fluff so you might as well just have a generic amp graphic when all of them have the same controls. I don't feel it adds anything to the user experience but it does take a lot of screen space so you cannot have a larger list of models open with amp controls.
Overall using the Tone.net stuff is just slow as it will constantly interrupt you with a loading screen which is another bad design. Scroll too far? Loading screen. Select any model? Loading screen.
Then you have some real practical issues like not being able to lock the cab sim so you can switch between amp only models without blowing your ears off in between.
. By that standard it's not half bad, especially for a v1. It needs some obvious enhancements, but you can search/sort/filter tonenet and you have even more options for your local tone models. It does make one reflect on how the Axe-Edit picker and browser could certainly stand some improvement.
