+1 for agreeing about the ridiculous clickbaiting. There was one video recently by KDH on YouTube and his ENTIRE video was based on unfulfilled promises without ever having or trying a QC. It was like a child pitching a fit because “you promised to buy me a pony”!! I unsubscribed and I will never watch another of his videos.
I’ve been fairly active in the Facebook group regarding my opinion that you do not NEED a desktop editor with the QC due to the ease of programming ON the unit. The ONLY reason I might use an editor is so I don’t have to bend over to program on the floor. If you don’t mount your QC on a ginormous pedalboard it’s easy to put a 4# unit that is the size of a US letter-size piece of paper on your desk/table. Plus my experience working with other products the editor looks nothing like working ON the unit, so I don’t need another interface to learn. I LOVE my QC and I have been able to get better sounds of it than anything else I have owned, and I THINK it’s because the interface has allowed ME to program it better, not necessarily because it sounds better than everything else. You see comparison videos all the time between different modelers/profilers and they don’t sound that different. I got more out of my QC and I did it without an editor, so I don’t care if they ever release a desktop editor. Why don’t the clickbait YouTubers say THAT?
What WILL sink a product is unreliability and I’ve had issues. I experienced the static problem some have had. I had to ship my QC in for repair, and all they would say is, “Your Quad Cortex has been repaired and it’s on the way back to you”. They refuse to respond to my request to know what the problem was and what they did to fix it. I have lost confidence that I can rely on the QC for a gig, so I am now also taking my old Kemper Stage to gigs, which worked flawlessly for 3.5+ years. This is the same as if your car stranded you on a trip and all the mechanic would say is “I fixed it”. OK, well what went wrong and how do I know it won’t strand me again?? My QC has worked flawlessly since I got it back, but it’s going to take months of flawless operation before I will trust it again. Because of this, I’m going to buy a Tonex and pair it with my HX Stop as a backup. I thought about selling the Kemper and buying a 2nd QC, but I changed my mind after they refused to tell me what they fixed (hardware? firmware? OS corruption? etc?). So, IMO, not having a desktop editor or porting plugins won’t sink th product, but unreliability could. I still want to know what went wrong.
One last thing. While my QC was gone, which was only 6 days, I used my Kemper Stage for two gigs. I worked on it for an hour THREE different times trying to make it sound as good as my Quad Cortex, and I just couldn’t do it. THREE hours of fiddling with the Kemper and it NEVER sounded as good as my QC. The experience of working with Sweetwater and NDSP to repair my QC was fantastic and I won’t abandon the QC unless it just becomes so unreliable that it affects gigs.
I think that is a massive minus point for those that keep complaining about the desktop editor:
The QC is so easy to use, and sounds so good that you don’t really need it.
Sure it would make things a bit easier when I’m setting stuff up at home, but I do most of my deep editing in the practice room where I have no computer and the QC is on the floor anyway.
Plenty of examples of NDSP implementing features into the QC that people have voted on in this forum. They are paying attention to what’s going on here. To what extent, I don’t know. But keep voting on the stuff you want to see happen.
Agreed. I would not trade the ease of editing ON the QC for an editor. I can’t tell you the number of times while using the Kemper when I wanted to make a change at a gig that I would forget how to make the change. It’s like you have to practice your on-board editing skills with other units. There is NO scrolling thru pages of options to make an edit on the GC.
Yes the onboard interface is fantastic but that doesn’t mean you don’t need/want a desktop editor. Agree, if you are going to use it solely in the studio and want to park it on your desk the touchscreen GUI is so easy to use you might never “need” a desktop editor.
What if you have the QC mounted on a pedalboard? Potentially wired up to quite a few other devices. Pretty inconvenient to do all your editing bent over, or to put a full pedalboard up on your desk. Maybe your workflow is to switch scenes or other activities you prefer to do with your feet. Preset and scene names will always be easier to type in on a keyboard. The QC does have the benefit of the touchscreen which cuts down on switch/knob twiddling but editors also cut down dramatically on knob and switch usage. Editors can significantly extend the hardware’s error-free operating life.
Different strokes for different folks and different logistic and ergonomic requirements depending on how your QC is set up in your space. Sure, I look at some feature requests and think they are extremely niche, but I think fundamental ones like an editor are extremely reasonable and bound to be heavily used.
Mine is on a pedalboard with a load of other pedals. I leave it on the floor and do my editing there.
I’m not saying an editor wouldn’t be good or useful, but the amount some people complain about it, you would think the QC is impossible to use without it.
Pedals have always been a thing that you bend down to edit due to their nature. The old Boss multi effects never had an editor, my old Zoom pedals sure as hell didn’t.
My point is, that the QC is so easy to use, that any edits are pretty quick and easy. Plus it sounds so good that you rarely need to re-edit afterwards.
It’s not an AxeFX, where just the thought of editing from the unit itself causes panic attacks in people that have tried.
I hate to say this, because I love my QC, but I will be shocked if they ever deliver on the promises made. It might be easier to just design a new unit with twice the processing power, better IR function, the ability to load plugins, and a desktop editor before the competition does…. and the competition will.
This is an arms race, and I wouldn’t be surprised if IK Multimedia and UA aren’t developing this exact type of unit too…
It kinda sucks for existing users, unless we are offered a huge discount on the version of QC…
So NDSP is faced with an allocation of resources issue. Go all in on delivering promises which is the ethical thing to do, or design the next generation of QC with an operating system designed to function with these capabilities, or just create more plugins…
Hi MightyMikeAmps
Have no idea why you replied directly to me. Maybe it was a mistake, pressing reply there? Have you gone through the rest of the thread?
I think they’re working hard to fulfill the promised features, but consider how Hybrid Mode turned out-
the promised features may NOT materialize in the exact form you predicted/expected.
It’s worth investing time and effort into your own personal workarounds now, if there are any.
There’s no guarantee any upcoming features will be your ‘perfect solution’ anyway. If anyone hinges their satisfaction on UPCOMING upgrades, they may be eternally disappointed.
Same thing with how the row instead of output based global cab-bypass feature got implemented. Quirky! These firmware upgrades could use a better design review process with gigging musicians before development and implementation.
I hate to say this, because I love my QC, but I will be shocked if they ever deliver on the promises made. It might be easier to just design a new unit with twice the processing power, better IR function, the ability to load plugins, and a desktop editor before the competition does…. and the competition will.
This is an arms race, and I wouldn’t be surprised if IK Multimedia and UA aren’t developing this exact type of unit too…
It’s not so easy to build a device significantly more performant than QC in the same form factor. No new audio DSPs have been released in over a decade. UA has been using the same chips since their first audio interfaces.
A new chip doesn’t have to be designed, it could be just an additional Shark chip (or double the current amount), and then an Operating System that is designed from the ground up to load plugins and work with a desktop editor, and have longer IRs might be easier to achieve than trying to alter the existing OS.
From what I read these are the obstacles to why 3 years later, promises have not been kept because.
Speaking of UA : Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think my Apollo X4 uses the Shark chip, and is just double the amount of Shark Chips as the X2.
I have also read that they are going to have a new Interface… Not sure if it will still be called Apollo, or what chips will be used. I think they might be going away from the Shark chip.
I’m sure others with much more knowledge than me on these issues , but the existing Shark chip might be in the rear view soon.
That’s not exactly what they did in the first place
Designing your own OS is something that takes years, or even decades. Hell, Android and iOS are being altered/updated all the time and they were initially releasd about 15 years ago.
The QC will almost certainly be running a ‘premade’ OS, such as a version of Linux or ARM OS which is used as a base to run the actual device code.
That is a reason that you don’t see any/many VST hardware hosts nowadays - they are complicated AF to build, keep updated and generally ensure everything will run on.Plus you already have a perfect plugin host no doubt, it even comes with a built in screen, keyboard and mouse. You can even use it to record, go on the internet and a whole host (lol) of other things.
There are plenty of other companies out there that have not even ported their plugins to run on Apple Native yet, and that has been out for three years. So that kinda proves it’s not an easy task.
You keep saying that ‘promises have not been kept’ or that you don’t think they ever will be, but you obviously know very little about it, or the work involved.
Neural have already stated that they are looking to show off some of the desktop editor this weekend at NAMM, and that they are continuing to work on porting the plugins (most of which also require other compatibility updates) to the QC.
If you build something, anything, you won’t get it perfect the first time. You will learn from mistakes, find workarounds, and other things you wish you’d done. Then, if you make several of this thing over a matter of years, technology and tools will improve to make certain parts better or easier.
If you want to then go back and bring all your old versions ‘up to current spec’ it might require a hell of a lot of work. You may also encounter other issues, such as a part you are updating does not actually work with another part that you used just on this one item. So you then either need to update both parts or neither. Updating both parts could have other compatibility issues too and then that whole side can snowball…
I cannot distinguish them.
Although I admit that I might not be a good example, since I also cannot distinguish the Mesa 2C+ plugin sound from the JP2C in the Quad Cortex
)