Rating system for Cloud User Presets

Quad Cortex Feature Requests
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One of the greatest factors that can make the NDSP Quad Cortex wildly successful is the online community and the ability to download community created presets offered for free on the cloud.

One problem with the current community is there is no way to vet the quality, accuracy or consistency of any preset except to download it and try it yourself. While searching for presets, you CAN easily see the number of times a preset has been downloaded, BUT since “starring” a preset is needed to download, the star “rating” is pretty deceiving. Presets with 100s of stars does not necessarily mean people liked the preset but rather it was just starred and potentially downloaded 100s of times (in many cases they might not have even been downloaded, installed, and played through).

Having built and run a massive photography website myself with a super active community, I believe one easy thing that would help the NDSP community greatly would be to adopt an Amazon style rating system. Ideally it would have text reviews as well to help users understand what might be improved or what is great about the preset, but at the very least, a simple star system will 1) help users weed out bad and amazing presets and 2) help prevent the most starred presets from perpetually ranking high on the list even though they may not actually be useful, accurate, or complete.

The worst thing we all want for this amazing hardware and tech is for new and old users to complain that “most of the presets online are awful and useless.” If we can get the community to continue to graciously upload presets, allow users to download them for free, and have a solid feedback/rating system, I think the Quad Cortex will be more successful than the other guitar modeling options on the market.

If you really want to add gasoline to this community growth, adding some sort of Karma ranking that pushes successful users to the top and offers them free NDSP plugins after submitting so many uploads or highly ranked uploads would help incentivize power contributors to keep uploading their own presets. It would also be amazing to easily know if a user identifies as a touring musician, bedroom player, sound engineer, producer, bass player, etc etc but that is less of a priority right now.

I have already asked a few QC user groups on Facebook about this feature and it has been widely praised and upvoted which has lead me here. We all know how much work is being poured into this amazing product and these tasks take time to implement. I believe prioritizing this rating system into the online user preset database is a super low hanging fruit that will increase product sentiment, user enjoyment, and functionality to all your pre existing presets and neural captures. It seems like an absolutely no brainer.

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Great Idea Patrickfstoppers Love this idea and hope Neural takes this under consideration…

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This might be a bad idea. The biggest challenge I might see is poor ratings on preset that might be from inexperienced or “too” experienced user. “A good sound” might mean lots of different things to different people. I personally have found lots of great captures that have almost no DLs and the other way around. Maybe if things were split into categories of where the preset would fall as far as genre. Maybe some connection to the “star” which" is something I do look at when grabbing something.

I do like the idea and the overall concept.

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I’m not exactly sure I understand your concern. Poor ratings from inexperienced or too experienced users? Obviously sounds are subjective but I guess I’m more thinking about specific sounds that can be compared to the record. If someone uploads a U2 batch or a Money For Nothing Patch, it would be pretty easy to objectively say it sounds great or it over promises. If you are uploading a Matchless AC 30 capture then yes, I can see how that might be harder to be objective esp if you have never owned that amp. But if you download someone’s interpretation of Jeff Beck’s Where Were You or U2’s Mysterious Ways and it matches well to the recording, then that should be promoted and reviewed accordingly.

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Hi @Patrickfstoppers and welcome to the community!

I think the rating system is generally a good idea although I tend to see tones as pretty subjective with many variable determining their overall value or rank. Honestly, I have downloaded/purchased captures, presets and or IRs that were stated as the best of the best etc., only to realize they didn’t suit my taste. What has worked for me the best so far is word of mouth, demos and or using the stars/downloaded count which so far hasn’t been too deceiving for me personally. Again, I like the idea and can see where some version of it would be beneficial. Thanks for the feedback on the motivation ideas and keep them coming! NDSP development teams are currently working on CoreOS 2.0 which will include some of the most major changes and hopefully we will see some of your ideas come to fruition in future firmware updates. Thanks!

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I understand, however I still feel it might be very subjective in nature. I think I am on board with @MP_Mod that you can get “high expectation” tones and they may fall short and the other way around. Again I think this might be a good thing to work on, but to be honest I would much rather listen to the tones and decide if they work.

So currently I use just about every major modeler in my work and some places have elaborate communities to date but I still find presets are pretty much a starting place and rarely do I find one I leave as is - even based on ratings.

But still it would be nice to have maybe to shorten the search.

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I believe there is a QC feature request for previewing presets and or captures prior to downloading which may be a good solution as well especially coupled with some kind of rating system. That would be my preference but that would also mean a complete overhaul of the cloud to integrate with the QC directly.

All excellent ideas and good conversation!

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This sounds pretty awesome if they can in fact allow the presets to work while streaming them. I just got my QC and my WIFI on the unit is absolutely horrible. I have Unifi networking hardware and my QC can barely connect to my wifi when it’s just 15 feet away. My phone has full bars of wifi but the QC is constantly logging in and out. I was going to ask the community about this and found so many people have had this same issue that it feels more like a hardware issue than a random, one off problem with my unit. That said, it was pretty cumbersome trying to download 10 presets last night and I’d imagine having to stream those presets to preview them with this sort of wifi issue would be even more frustrating. So far the Wifi issue is the only real negative experience I’ve had with my QC.

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I totally understand your concern and the issue with having high expectations with highly rated presets only to find they don’t fully reach your own standards. However, I can’t imagine a situation where you wouldn’t at least want some extra bit of community rating/input before downloading a bunch of presets. It can’t be a step in the wrong direction that’s for sure. My experience with user ratings has always been there are some outliers in both overly positive and overly critical responses but as time goes on, the general average of all reviews is usually more on par with giving an objective rating. If it truly sucks, it will have a much lower average and if most people find it to be a great starting point or even perfect, it will reflect a higher rating. It won’t be that way for everyone but in general that is what typically happens so long that you don’t get the fake reviews like Amazon is notorious for. Luckily these are all free to rating bias is probably going to be fairly nominal.

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I’m curious how many people unstar DL’s after downloading them to your QC? Can’t just be me, I’d assume

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Make sure your channel being used for 2.4g wifi isn’t saturated. I have Unify as well and no issues other than being signed out a few times every couple of months. If you continue to have issues with the wifi, reach out to support@neuraldsp.com and they can hopefully help you determine your issues.

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Let’s dispense with that all too human subjectivity and let the QC’s AI loose on the rating system… :grin:

Let the AI determine how close a preset for a cover tune is to the recorded version. How close is a pedal or cab capture to the sound of the original. Compile a database of tones that have been polled as being particularly appealing and compare them against uploaded offerings. Just kidding here but I could see something like this coming along at some point. Until then I like the idea of a carbon-based rating system, you know, people.

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It was at 80% which is strange since we only had 1 tv streaming but still strange the signal itself was low. I’d think low bandwidth would just mean a slow connection not a poor connection.

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I think, rating is generally a promising way to improve the overall quality of user experience. However, with the current implementation we have to star a preset in the app, then download it on the QC, then try it out and there’s no way to send any feedback from QC back to the preset in the cloud. So if there was a rating / commenting function in the app/cloud, we would have to go back to the app and rate/comment the preset and if it sucks, unstar it, then go back to the QC and delete the preset there. I think, most users won’t put the effort in rating/commenting presets in this way.

So, as already mentioned above, presets/captures should be auditionable without having to safe them on the QC first. And rating should be made possible on the QC already when auditioning a preset/capture.

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I think ratings is an excellent idea. I would also like the opportunity to try out a preset, but it’s not that big a deal to download and then delete if desired. I have found a very mixed bag so far. Some very good, some not. So far, the more complicated the preset the less I have enjoyed it. Too many devices and routing to adjust and tweak.
Like most of us, I can sort through comments to see see whether something will fit my needs. A simple star system would help, but not provide much overall help to users or developers.

Providing feedback to folks that make presets would help them and the users get to better, more useful results.

It shouldn’t be hard for Neural to implement this.

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Thanks for the well written suggestion. I am on the forum and ordered a QC but had it and a buch of other items delivered to my cottage in N.H. to save several hundred dollars on taxes. I’m glad I saved the tax bux but now have to wait till Nov. to get my gear… Looking forward to plugging in and experience the joy…hope your suggestion is strongly considered.

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I like to keep things pretty simple too.

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Stars + reviews Amazon style, great idea. It would be nice to post a feedback from preset users to improve them.

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this might be the only way to get some users to start posting descriptions, so I guess I’m for that.

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This would be a fantastic new feature!

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