There is a significant desire within the NC community have have more flexibility, access, and creativity in the utilization of Neural captures. While the NC does allow capturing a full physical chain, not everyone has access to all the pedals and amps of their dreams. While there are many pedal and amp captures in Cortrex Cloud, there are far fewer “full rig” captures available, and even within those, the odds of finding just the right combination of devices and settings YOU want would be like winning the lottery 3 times in a row.
What would be ideal is unlocking access to the full breadth of pedal, amp, pre/power-amp, cab captures in Cortex Cloud, and then allowing the user to mix and match, to assemble their ideal processing chain and settings and then capture that setup as a full rig.
While some requests already exist (Add another neural capture slot option to the chain?) requesting for more flexibility in slots on the NC itself, they do pose the challenge of significantly altering the on-device UI and control schemes. But the desire expressed there is clear - unlock the full power of Cortex Cloud for the NC.
I propose a different track, create a new desktop app (or enhance Cortex Control) called Nano Lab.
Nano Lab, once a user was logged into the Neural account, would let you search and filter Cortex Cloud to easily find captures of all kinds. You could then import 2-3 captures (OD, amp, cab or OD preamp, poweramp or OD, amp, cab, etc.) into a QC grid-like UI. A dedicated IR/Cab block loader should be the 3rd/4th slot respectively always and would have a toggle to include it in the capture or not (when just used to audition the chain).
Users would fill up the Nano Lab slots, click on each block, adjust parameters as desired, and once everything was sounding great, click “Send to Nano” and a capture of the current chain would be taken and pushed to the Nano Cortex as a single 'full rig" capture. Given that the NC can act as an interface, it should be viable to do the signal routing to plug into it and audition the capture chains before initiating the “re-capture” process and sending it to the device.
Sample Nano Lab Default UI
Users would click the “+” to search and add a capture from Cortex Cloud
Example of a pedal and amp rig, with a cab block capture being used only for auditioning
Using an IR and having it be included in the capture process
This allows access to the full power of Cortex Cloud and provides unlimited creativity in combining all of the content available there, without requiring any rework of the Nano hardware UI/Control system at all. And of course users can then publish their Nano Lab full rig captures to the cloud as well for others to make use of. In this way there’s a natural inflow of many more full rig captures for all following NC users to pick from and get great tones as soon as they unbox the unit.
