Rig Manager = Disappointed ?

  • Hi all,


    After some days of using the rig manager, i'm a little bit disappointed. First of all, I know this is a Beta (so some bugs could appear), i know it is "just" a rig manager, so it is not possible to remote control the kemper, or editing profiles (changing stomp parameters,...). But after such a wait, i would like to get something better than just a rig list :(
    - the search function without filter is almost unusable (search "marshall" or "mesa" and you get 1/4 of the rig exchange profiles)
    - Why only two levels of folders ?
    - if you use the second level of folder, you cannot make a serach on the upper level
    - unable to save/backup stomps settings ?
    - unable to edit or save/backup performances ?


    Now, I'm waiting for the Rig Manager 2.0 ;(

  • Raoul, i don't want to come over as an ass :) But you sure go out of your way to convince everyone that this is better then sliced bread.


    One thing of making something amazing is to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses. And the rigmanager sure has both. But could improve allot!

  • Quote

    Raoul, i don't want to come over as an ass :) But you sure go out of your way to convince everyone that this is better then sliced bread.


    One thing of making something amazing is to acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses. And the rigmanager sure has both. But could improve allot!


    No offence taken :) but in my situation its saved me alot of time. In studio sessions I've done recently RM has been a god send. We can preview profiles with ease now. I make a folder, name it the band that's recording and all the profiles we end up using I place in there. So when they come back again we can save time hunting the required profiles down :) Kemper stated we were getting a Librarian at some time but never an editor. For me its awesome and yes there could be minor improvements and I'm sure they will come.


    Just remember its free ;)



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  • I agree with the 'don't look a free horse in the mouth' thing.


    But then again. There some serious flaws in the software that should have been spotted at alfa/beta testing. And somethings that just should have been handled better.


    The RM is great, but it still needs some work. And only positive feedback can make this truly amazing.
    Not saying every time that this is the greatest thing ever :)


    Again, no offense ment!


  • What flaws are you experiencing ???





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  • Importing subfolders not working.
    Some folders i can't import.
    After one preview i can't preview anything else (have to restart). Could be because he is stuck on importing a folder.
    No more then 2 subfolders can't be made
    The RM does take over your folder structure from your hd.
    Double clicking to close a parent folder opens a new window (sometimes, sometimes not)
    I get very weird messages after importing (4224424245244 rigs have been imported)
    Deleting the text from a newly created folder and clicking on something else crashes the program (no try catch? SG :))



    And this is from playing with it for one hour (baby's pfff, they never let you play guitar :))


    disclaimer: im using it under parallels. So please test these things on a windows system.


  • The Preview thing is a bug. This happens to me aswell and I'm on a windows machine I've let the kemper team no about this as it didn't happen on a previous beta I was testing


    The idea of folder was discussed and because the KPA doesn't do folders they wanted to stay away from that maybe they will change this


    I too also get a new window when I click to close/open a folder


    I've never had it crash at all on me and I haven't seen anyone else who is using parallels mention a crash




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  • It doesn't crash, i displays a crash message. And i can then continue or quit. This is the generic error handling from .net. it means some method does not have a proper error catch setup :)
    I already showed the screenshot in one of my previous threads.


    The folder i can understand on the profiler. But you should be able to just link to a dir and the directory structure should be taken over in the RM.
    This has nothing to do with folders on the profiler. But common housekeeping. I like to keep things clean :)


    But even remaking the directory structure does not work as you can only go 2 levels deep. And importing (aka dragging) to the folders seems like a hit and miss thing.
    some work, some don't.


    I'm sure with all the feedback that allot of these bugs will be handles soon.


    I'm very eager to see how they will handle the OSX version as .net will not work. So basically we will have to do this all over again.

  • I am disappointed. There is only one thing I really like about it - the ability to communicate with the KPA via USB, even if the communication is very limited. Everything else is preferably done using Excel and the unofficial TagEditor software. So far my main use case was to more quickly edit tags. For a single rig it works ok. But to do a bunch is simply painful. And there are bugs that make even such a simple function difficult. For example, sometimes a change won't appear to register. The text appears to loop - if I hold the left key, the cursor goes to the left-most position, then wraps around to the end of the text - I can hold the left key and watch the cursor move positions infinitely.


    But it's not just the bugs. Whenever I go to edit a tag, the default behavior is to highlight all the text. Then if I press Home or End, nothing happens. I have to use the left/right keys to move the cursor, then I can use Home/End. If I forget to press left/right before I start typing, I accidentally overwrite the tag. If I hit enter or leave the rig before noticing what I've done, the text is gone forever. Ctrl+Z does not undo the change. If I just want to append or prepend some text, I have to press way too many keys. Which means editing a bunch of rigs is a complete pain.


    Here's the big kicker for me. There needs to be some way to identify PROFILES. Currently there is no way to do that. I mean I want a hash of the profile, if all rig-level settings are turned off or set to 0. If I change a single tag, adjust gain by 0.1, or make any of the most minute changes to the profile, now this is a "new" profile, and if I re-import, I get two copies of the virtually same rig. Of course there are plenty of cases where I want two different copies of the same profile, but there are other times where I know I want to import a bunch of rigs, for instance from a backup, and I don't want a duplicate copy just because I already edited a single tag on the copy already in Rig Manager.


    For instance, say I renamed a profile from "01 Super" to "Super". Now if I reimport the original "01 Super", I will have two identical rigs that have very little chance of showing up right next to each other, and I have more difficulty in keeping my rigs organized.


    I want powerful tools to manage my rigs. Import OPTIONS: don't import if amp profile already exists. Maybe log this kind of stuff? Multiple Rig tag edit - not just write the same text to each rig, but the ability to put the cursor x nbr of positions from the start or end of the text. Auto-name options: similar to how programs can automatically name files based on their mp3 tags (%Artist - %Album (%Year) - %TrackNumber).


    Create Date would have been a good tag. Any modification to the rig in Rig Manager updates the last update date.


    Naming is important - you only have one choice for sort order on the KPA. Beyond that it will use the rig name.


    So for me this software is better named "Rig Loader". I don't feel like I have powerful enough options to actually manage my rigs without resorting to other software.


    And what about presets? It'd be nice if Rig Manager would not hang if you try to import them. It'd be nicer if it actually worked with presets...


    The Search is ok. It's on par with other keyword searches. The "%" wildcard works, thank god. But there's no way to do partial searches or boolean logic. No "JCM800 OR 2203" kind of stuff. The best you can do is search each individual keyword you want, then copy each result set to a new Temp folder. Maybe I'm asking too much from a simple single Search field. So include an "advanced search" page!


    The big plus here is that we now have a software means to control the KPA in a limited ability. I may take a look at the virtual database Rig Manager creates and perhaps write my own software to manipulate those files as I want.

  • It´s a beta. The chance of it not being perfect right from the start was huge. I love the RM for what it can do right now and I´m already stoked for all the features that the Kemper team will introduce in the future. For now I´m beyond happy that I have a piece of software that makes searching and sorting rigs so easy and the preview function is brilliant too. I´m not disappointed, I´m excited for whats to come :)

  • Now the USB communications are possible I urge the Kemper team to release a SDK for third parties to make librarians, editors, foot controllers, whatever...
    I am sure we'll come up with great softwares for the community at no cost and no hassle for the Kemper company.

  • Maybe you guys who are disappointed are expecting a little too much from an early beta, but I'm extremely pleased with the current functionality of Rig Manager. It allows me to easily navigate and audition profiles without the need to actually load them on the KPA. I love the time-saving aspect and find this alone to be worth the price of admission (ie: free).

  • Yesterday, after reading about the 2.3/RM on this forum, the manual and WiKPA I gave 2.3 and RM a try. Win 8.1 on Thinkpad.


    Every aspect worked as expected. I now have over 6000 rigs (3821 from Rig Exchange) with my Local Library containing about 50 folders with the balance of my rigs.


    The entire Rig Exchange download took less than 20 minutes to complete with Verizon FIOS.


    No crashes. No drama whatsoever.


    My (our) patience, knowing this was in the works, was well worth the wait. I am sure that Team Kemper with continuously work to make RM a more powerful tool. Kemper Amps and the users as well as future users will all benefit.


    Thank you Christoph Kemper and the entire Kemper team for an even better integrated organized system.

    Will

  • Well I'm just saying that for the amount of time it took to make this software and what it does, I'm not holding my breath on new features. I'm not holding my breath on bug fixes!!! I just don't understand how editing tags causes so many issues for this thing. Trebie already built a working, bug-free tag editor over a year ago...I'm looking at his source code right now, and it's not that complicated.


    But I will throw a simple request out there. KPA Rig files have tags for rig creation date, amp creation date, amp creation time, cab creation date, and cab creation time. Can we at least have the option to see these in the Rig Manager!?!?!?


    And the search on the HTML Rig Exchange works better - at least you have the option on which tag you want the search keyword to apply to. If I type "Mark" in Rig Manager, I get Mesa/Boogie Mark amps and/or cabs, MarkBass amps and/or cabs, and profiles by people named Mark and Markus.


    People keep saying the software is free. I don't care. I'd pay for something worthwhile.


    I'm not a constant whiner. This is my first big disappointment from Kemper. I still feel it is a good direction. I'm just completely disillusioned right now by how this got released with the amount of bugs that it has given the relatively small feature set.

  • I get what you mean meambobbo, I just think some of us had a good Idea of what the RM would be like and others might have expected it to be a lot better (or different?) and are now disappointed. And if you remember Brown Dog Sounds will probably release their librarian somewhere down the line, maybe thats gonna be more in the lines of what you had in mind. Then you´ll have the chance to pay for something that is worth the while. I personally love the RM, but I can see why others are disappointed.

  • When I brought the KPA a year ago I didn't even think about a Librarian I never brought the KPA with the hope that extra features or software would be developed . I paid £1300 and definitely got my money's worth as soon as I brought it. All the extras that come our way from Kemper are a bonus in my book. So happy days :)



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  • The folder i can understand on the profiler. But you should be able to just link to a dir and the directory structure should be taken over in the RM.
    This has nothing to do with folders on the profiler. But common housekeeping. I like to keep things clean


    But even remaking the directory structure does not work as you can only go 2 levels deep. And importing (aka dragging) to the folders seems like a hit and miss thing.
    some work, some don't.


    the rigs are stored in a database, that's why you cannot access a directory like a folder on your drive. you don't have to, because you can drag things from RM to the desktop and import into RM the same way. we haven't found a rig which cannot be imported so far. so please send us what you cannot import but don't send us files which are local presets (such as cabinets) - those cannot be imported.
    thanks, gs

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