Rig Manager Feedback

Hey Kemper Team,

I was holding off for a while before trying the Rig Manager until it seemed reasonably stable. So when the rev 4 Beta was released, I decided to give it a try. Here is some feedback for you.

Overall, this tool has a lot of potential, and even now it’s strength lies in the ease of accessing the RE and auditioning large numbers of profiles with just the up and down arrow keys on the PC.

First time install and setup was easy.

The network connection to the RE is smooth and fast.

I quickly discovered some areas that need some improvement. Hopefully you are aware of all of these issues and are busily working on them, but in the event that you are not aware of them, I will highlight them here. The first is the tag editing section of the tool.

When one edits a tag in the inspector, sometimes the delete key works, sometimes not. Sometimes the backspace key works sometimes not. The enter key is required to save the change, but just clicking on another tag will not save the edit, even though it looks like it is modified, until you hit enter on another field, and then the first one reverts back to its previous state. This is confusing. If you highlight a field, then copy it (say you want to paste is somewhere else) after you click on the new field, it will prompt you with the “are you sure you really want to change all of these profiles” even though you haven’t modified the original field (you just copied it). This whole inspector editor is cumbersome because of the “edit in place” strategy that is used. I think a better model is that used by a free program called TagScanner (one of the best free mp3 tag editors out there). This program allows you to edit all the mp3 tag fields and then when you are ready to save them you hit the save button. This strategy would eliminate the constant prompts one gets whenever they change single tags on multiple profiles.

The default columns widths are not optimal. You can do the old excel trick where you double click on the separators, and it tries to resize the column for you but not very effectively. I found that if I manually try to adjust the column widths, this works best, but it’s hard to nudge them because the mouse drag seems to require a certain minimum movement before it actually works. Very frustrating. Also it is impossible to make all your folders have a consistent column width from one to the next.

Let’s talk about the folders in your local library. I realize there are two competing paradigms here. One school of thought is to have a single folder (your local library) and when the user wants to look for say a Marshall JMP, they would query the database for tags that contain these strings. The other method would be the user organizes all their rigs into folders and this organization allows good searching since they can name the folders anything they want. For example Local Library -> Free Profiles -> Marshall ->JMP->

Right now neither of these is functioning well. Folders only have 2 levels, and there is no connectivity between them. For example I can’t audition from one folder to the next with the arrow keys, and I can’t search or order profiles across multiple folders (you can only search and order within a single folder). As an example, if I have all my rigs sorted into folders, and wanted to audition all the clean rigs in my collection, I can’t just arrow, arrow, arrow. This is a show stopper for ease of use.

The database method might be better, but there is no query other than the ordering of the columns. Currently I can search for a JMP string in the tags of rigs in a single folder, but I can’t assign my own tags for searching (for example say I wanted to look at all the amps I have found that have a good crunch tone, ones that I found that work great with my Strat, or are tagged with Set1 or Set2, or if I wanted to find all my ambient profiles) none of those tags exist. Is the thought that the user might use the “Comment” tag for their own organization? If so, that would wipe out any comments the original author had, and is quite restrictive (one field to hold many user defined tags). I also think you should expose more of the profile parameters (creation date and modified date, definition and clarity, active stomps and effects, etc). More complex queries should also be possible. For example, show me just the clean tone profiles for all the fender amps in my library. So I’m not sure what the path forward is here, but I hope the manager part of Rig Manager gets some love soon.

The rig manager get slow and eventually crashes sometimes (not sure why). Usually this happens when editing, and then it reverts back to an older database. I end up closing and restarting it frequently to avoid much loss. It would be nice to have a “Save All” or “Verify DB Integrity” button so you don’t lose your work in the interim until you get this sorted.

Sometime RM doesn’t come up on the first double click (particularly if you just closed it). If you wait about 5 min, it will start the first time every time. Not sure why this is, but it’s disturbing.

Edits are not always saved on closing. Sometimes I will copy a number of rigs to a new folder, and then when I close and re-open, the folder is there, but the rigs are not, i.e. the count shows (0).

Sometimes it gets confused when copying and pasting. You can have rigs highlighted and tags highlighted. What happens when you hit Ctrl C (what gets stored in the clipboard) is undefined.

If you are planning on supporting and improving the folder organization paradigm, I think a great feature would be the capability to drag a folder or folder hierarchy out of the Rig Editor local library and drop it on the hard drive.

If you are planning on supporting and improving the database paradigm, I think a good feature would be to allow rigs with the same name and same time stamp to exist in the same folder if they are different profiles. Real life example… I made some profiles of my amp and brought them into the Rig Manager, let’s say these profiles are called BlackstarClean, BlackstarCrunch, and BlackstarRock. Now I play with these and save a copy of each. One copy has been tweaked for my les paul, and one for my strat. So I edited the tag for amp pickup type to tell me which profile goes with which guitar (now I have three versions of each profile – original, HB, and SC). If I then edit all nine profiles and set the amp model tag to “HT Studio 20”, they will all get that model name, but more importantly the same date. Now if I copy and paste them into my favorites folder I get an error that says it only imported 3 rigs because the other 6 were duplicates. This is not correct. They were all unique profiles and even had unique tags. Yet the Rig Editor thought they were the same because they had the same name, and because I edited the model all at once, they had the same date.

And lastly, I really recommend the devs play with that TagScanner application I mentioned previously. It’s been evolving for 15 years and I find it to have a very professional and efficient workflow.

Hope this feedback helps you guys make this a better tool.

Ah, ok, that makes sence. I thought it might be something like that. A better approach for that might be when the user hits exit, keep the application open and on-screen until the database is written and flushed. If it's a really long save you could even put up a message that says "Saving Database" with a little progress bar or swirly rotary animation so the user knows it's not hung or anything. Once saved and flushed, you can safely close the app and the user can open it back up instantly if needed.

I've been playing with it more since I wrote this original post, and it seems like a lot of the crashes happen when you make some group edits, then copy those profiles to another folder, then come back to the original folder. About 10% of the time that results in the entire RE window going grey, and Windows 7 pops up a dialog box that says something like "The program Rig Editor is not responding, close or keep waiting" and if you pick "keep waiting" it will never respond. At this point if you tell windows to kill it, none of the edits are saved, and all your work since the last time you ran RE are lost (except making new folders, they seem to be created on the fly).

I also have a theory on the long sync time problem from another thread. This happened to me where the KPA would take 20 minutes to sync with RE, and then put up the green error screen. The instructions in that other thread solved the problem, but what might have caused it was a timing issue. On that day, I wanted to do some managing of my rigs, so I powered on my KPA. It was about halfway through it's startup when I realized I didn't have RE up, so I started that too. They probably both came up at nearly the same time, and there may have been some sort of confusion between the two which resulted in that sync problem. So there may or may not be a clue there, but I would take a look to see if there isn't some sort of momentary blocking that should be done in the event that they are both coming up at the same time.

Nice talking to you Arne, and thanks for replying, I know you guys are super busy. We appreciate knowing that you all are actively improving this tool.