I’m asking for opinions and suggestions. Right now the QC is the most flexible unit when it comes to capturing / profiling due to its ability to not only capture amps but also (drive) pedals. However, the process of finding and comparing captures of a particular amp or pedal can be very cumbersome because some captures are lacking a description and names like “Klon_a” “Klon_b” etc. are not self-explanatory.
Would it make sense to establish a naming scheme for captures in order to make the process of searching and cataloging captures easier with less trial & error? It could be a reference for capture creators to refer to in order to make their captures more search-friendly.
In the last development update NDSP announced an automatically calculated gain indicator for captures and the option to assign a capture catagory like “amp head” “combo” “pedal” etc.
A naming scheme for captures could additionally include the name of the captured device and settings of the most common parameters, represented by the first letter of the original parameter followed by a number from 0 to 10 with 5 being the center or noon position. For a drive pedal it could look like this “BOSS SD-1 D1 T5 L9” for drive set slightly above 0, tone at noon and level almost 10.
User @Beggars already created a QC wiki: Quad Cortex Wiki
It could be a suitable place to describe a naming scheme for captures and make it available outside of this forum as a non-official reference, similar to the Fractal Audio Wiki which is also not officially supported by Fractal Audio.
Currently, I use a similar naming convention (e.g. Dual Rec with 4x12 and SM57 = MBDR_412_57 etc.) plus I usually add verbiage to describe the capture(s) but I assume all of that will likely be resolved with the 2.0 release.
This would work well with the new 2.0.0 update in that it could ask more questions when naming a preset. For example, when saving a capture it could ask What amp, what cab, what mic, drive amount. And then it can save the capture with that naming convention.
If that isn’t implemented there isn’t really a way to do this unless the community agree on a “best practices”.
As far as I understand the drive amount will be calculated automatically but it would make sense to prompt the user with input fields for several infos about the captured object. In this case, a naming convention would be less relevant though because these infos could be saved as metadata (similar to ID3 tags in mp3 files) and then filters could be provided in the search function.
I guess it’s more likely for a naming convention to be accepted by the community when the naming convention is worked out by the community, too. However, any good idea in this thread could also have a positive impact on QC development.
I would be a fan of this however, being the cynic, it seems the users that already have loads of captures have already got their own naming convention so I’m not sure how or if it’s possible to get widespread buy-in to a specific convention. Just being cynical
