Device Details

Anything "native" that can produce better sounding amps compared to Live's Amp is already a big success, and in that sense (even though I only played with Amp Modeler for a couple hours or so) Amp Modeler is a win, congrats!




But for a M4L device, this one's price is rather on the pricey end of the spectrum, and I personally expect something very polished at that price, and I think that's where Amp Modeler is lacking:




- here on Mac the provided installer command didn't work. It failed at popping up the expected dialog window after entering "n" in the Terminal (as my User Library is not in the default direction). I tried multiple times but to no avail.




So I placed every files where they belong manually, which is frankly not an issue (and I actually rather having to do this than launching a Terminal command from an "unknown" source, ideally)




- BUT these files can't be placed everywhere actually and that's another real hassle. Specifically the Models and Cabinets folders HAVE to be at the root of the User Library...
For the sake of keeping my precious User Library organized I would highly prefer putting every files/folders (models, cabinets, .amxd) into a dedicated "Live Amp Modeler" folder somewhere in my User Library. This is not possible at the moment, I'd need to edit the .amxd to "fix" this.
Not a terrible deal if you know a little bit of M4L patching... but even then, this would have to be done every time Amp Modeler gets an update.
So this is definitely something YOU as the developer should make possible.
I suppose that's why the provided installer should allow for, right?




- it's very nice that you provide capture files as that's not something very user friendly to have to deal with, find, download etc (at least that's not something I enjoy at all) BUT unfortunately these are not "normalized" volume-wise and it has to be manually adjusted every time with the input volume knob. Some discrepancy would be acceptable, but here this feels quite all over the place tbh, especially for such a "premium price" (in the M4L world).
I understand this is just how the captures where captured, not your fault. But I'd have expected that on your side as the device's developer to patch something to help with this automatically (or did you captures selection by taking this into account maybe?).
At unity gain on the input side, we should get a somewhat similar volume no matter how clean or distorted is the captured amp.




Anyway, from the time I had to play with it I already know I can finally ditch Amplitube, so THANKS !
Not saying your Amp Modeler is better in sound and UX compared to Amplitube, but as someone who tries to stick to native Live + M4L devices only (and don't enjoy over-complicated amp simulations) a few captures sound good enough for me to stick with it. 
Live's Amp is horrible (at least if you try to get realistic guitar amp sound) and it's the first time we're finally getting access to something that works and is not a 3rd party plugin. Congratulations to you!

Hi Crampe. I'm glad that, despite a few hiccups, you're getting some good value out of the devices.

Since you had a technical issue with running the install script, can you respond to your purchase confirmation email so we can debug it?

I've also included manual install steps in the User Manual (more in line with other M4L devices).

You're clearly knowledgeable, so here is some info about your other points.

The fixed folder locations are a trade-off to guarantee that the devices integrate well with Live, while avoiding excessive complexity. Although Live's indexing system tracks various file types (such as audio samples), extensions like .nam aren't treated as first-class citizens. Extra care is needed to make "Collect All and Save" work with them, for instance.

Recent NAM captures include loudness information, which Amp Modeler reads to adjust gain before hitting the amp. However, some captures are just intended to be hotter than others, since they reflect different amp settings. There is no well-defined way to adjust their output in real time to match some desired level, without altering the dynamics.

The included captures are a starter pack, but you have thousands of models to explore (both free and paid) within the NAM ecosystem. You might want to curate your own library to prioritize volume consistency.

You're welcome to elaborate more on your ideas. Perhaps shoot me an email?

Hey Nyquist, thanks a lot for your feedback.
Sure I could email you directly, but in the meantime I'm pretty sure the extra informations you're providing here will be of great interest to other people.
But I'll email you regarding the install script issue, if that can help changing things for other users maybe.

I'm not aware of any reason why "collect and save" would ignore any "unusual" file type, but you obviously did test it. Or maybe you're talking about excluding some specific file type, i.e .nam files in this case?

I didn't know Amp Modeler is already taking into account loudness infos from the .nam. Then, we're definitely facing the beauty and inevitable anarchy that emerge from thousands people collaborating and sharing works over the internet without clear "best practices" standards. Because, sure you might expect, in front of a real amp, to get your overdriven sound louder than your clean tones, but that's very idiosyncratic and there's actually no very good reason to "port" that over a digital capture I think.
"There is no well-defined way to adjust their output in real time to match some desired level, without altering the dynamics.": that's why there should be some shared guidelines on the capturing process. But, are you sure you're not anyway altering the dynamics once it's loaded in Amp Modeler? It should be possible to have enough headroom at the input stage before any compression/saturation gets applied due to increased volume, no?

Thanks for that curated captures "starter pack". My musical journey started with the electric guitar into an amp quite some time ago now 😔; I'm quite a sound design nerd and love spending hours tweaking parameters on synths and effects, but with the guitar I just grew up in a plug'n'play world and hence never enjoyed the endless options guitar amp emulations offer (or should I say  "impose")... so less is definitely waaaay better for me in that regard.
In a way a capture offers just that simplicity: it's printed and you cannot tweak it a lot. But in the meantime it also means thousands of captures being available, which is the total opposite of plugn'n'play.
TLDR; that's why it's very nice of you to offer that curated collection, even with its flaws.

But, wrt to the install directories: what if that curated collection was stripped down and the files directly embedded into Amp Modeler and Cab Modeler? Or maybe you already tried that but it impacted too much the devices loading time? I doubt it would impact it too much with a smaller number of captures. And TBH, even if it's a "starter" pack there's definitely a lot of captures that could be removed, some models have way too much captures that are not really relevant imho.
You'd still have the option to drag'n'drop downloaded ones.
Just thinking out loud here.

I'll take a moment and add parameters so that we can browse the files from Push, that's definitely needed (I'm talking about Push as a controller, the Standalone cannot run Max externals unfortunately so Amp&Cab Modeler don't work in Standalone). I'll email you this if you think it'd be worth sharing as an update to everyone.