Concerns around how captures work on Cortex Cloud

Quad Cortex
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As many of you know, one of the standout features of the Quad Cortex is its support for captures, which users can upload to the Cortex Cloud. This wonderful feature allows us to share our sonic creations and benefit from the collective genius of the community. However, my experience over the last couple of years has been marred by a recurring issue – numerous presets with missing captures.

Initially, I speculated that these presets might predate the feature which bundles captures, leading to their absence. To better understand this conundrum, I experimented with a fellow QC user. They created a capture, which I downloaded and used to create a preset. After uploading the preset to the cloud, I asked them to delete the original capture. As I half expected, my preset flagged the capture as missing. The preset can be found here.

The preset functions perfectly if the capture remains on your local device. However, the capture vanishes into the ether should you delete it or perform a factory reset without restoring a backup. This poses a significant problem for anyone downloading the preset who doesn’t possess the capture, as they’re left with a gaping hole in the preset’s architecture, potentially losing an essential element of the sound.

Neural DSP appears to be merely linking to the original capture rather than creating a copy within the preset. While I understand this might be a measure to save space, captures, to my knowledge, are relatively small in size. So, could it be that the implications of not duplicating the captures weren’t fully considered?

This approach, in my opinion, slowly erodes trust within our ecosystem. I’ve become reluctant to use captures I haven’t created myself due to the fear of losing access to them if my current QC were to fail or if I had to perform a reset. While I acknowledge that this could be an issue of ownership rights, one can’t help but wonder what the future holds if the cloud becomes littered with essentially incomplete presets due to missing captures.

I haven’t seen this raised before, so maybe I’m the only one that feels iffy using community-created captures in any serious preset. But for creating presets I publicly share for others, it’s quite a big thing because the QC doesn’t have everything, and sometimes there’s a capture that does what you want.

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Definitely a problematic issue.

The flipside to it may be that the user that originally uploaded the capture has since redone it and believes the new version to be better and therefore deletes it.

Another problem is… who owns a capture?

  • the person that created it?
  • Neural?
  • someone else?

Therefore who has the rights to delete it, or make it private, or even sell it for profit?

I assume currently the model is based on a user “owning” it, therefore Neural cannot do anything around backing it up, or permanently storing it. Otherwise, people selling captures will get very annoyed when they all get uploaded to Cortex Cloud for free.

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A question: if I create presets using a capture, backup these presets, factory reset and then restore the backup… if the original uploader delete the capture would I still have in my backup and thus on the QC?

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Definitely want an answer to this. All my day-to-day presets are based around captures that aren’t mine.

@dan ?

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Well I’m thinking if not… disaster! Imagine I base all my sound on the captures. If I have to perform a factory reset and restore a backup only to find my presets are “broken”… I can’t imagine it works like this…I surely hope not…

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Another potential issue: someone sells you a capture, then deletes it.

(Just further reinforcing how much I hate the whole practice of people selling captures, but I don’t use them, so :person_shrugging: )

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I completeley agree. In fact, I would go so far as to say that my trust was next to zero from the beginning. I’d never base important presets on captures uploaded by others as long as it works this way.

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Good question. I forwarded this thread to the NDSP support. Will post here when I receive an answer.

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No news regarding the subject?

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I also linked this topic on Discord. If someone replies I will post here.

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they usually discourage us from pinging specific employees or official reps, but sometimes that might be the only way to attract attention.
Last time official input was ‘summoned’ around here, it’s because things were getting kinda ugly

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You’re right. The correct option is to contact support directly.

Thanks!!

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I think this has been answered, there is a nascent marketplace for IR’s. Why not just mention in the summary where it is from and how to get it?

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there’s not an official marketplace for any QC content yet.
To what are you referring?

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well … things like amalgam IR’s or York Audio, I always presumed it’s the reason for them not showing up in peoples presets on the cloud.

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NDSP support has replied saying they will answer here. So we should know more soon and hopefully this problem will be addressed.

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Thank you @747 !!! :pray:

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One option, and there will be those who are not a fan of it, is to disallow the deletion of a capture, and potentially presets as well, once it has been made public on the Cortex cloud. I have seen other repositories where deletion (usually of presets rather than captures) is not allowed. If the creator has improved on it, they have to upload a new renamed preset, hopefully versioned, or at least mentioning it is the improved version.

If deletion was disallowed, this might mean having to upload a new preset in addition to a new capture(s) if, going forward, you want the preset to point to the new and improved capture.

Also, obviously there may/will potentially be different rules for public presets and captures, versus those that have been purchased in an effort to protect intellectual property.

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Conversely, I think a good solid compromise is the capture becomes unavailable for new presets, but for any existing presets that used the capture, they get to keep a copy of it somehow. Or maybe a rule: if your capture has been used in other presets, you cannot delete it.

If I knew that captures would always be available somehow, I would use captures in my presets from other users, no worries. But right now as someone who creates tones and makes them public, the concern is I link to my presets from my YouTube videos or wherever and some users get the preset with the capture available and others download my preset and get an error.

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No official word yet? Someone had indicated there would be some input from the higher-ups here. Maybe NAMM slowed it down?

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