Line 6 Helix Stadium Pre-Launch Discussion

It happens. No big whoop. 👍🏻
Mike Myers Reaction GIF by Saturday Night Live
 
That'll be an incredible step forward, but once you use any hardware device, the struggle is still real again.

This is where I see Proxy to have an incredible advance over anything else. Load things straight to your DAW, fool around in Stadium Native, drag the finished tones straight to the hardware, do some switch assignments, done.
If there’s a stadium vst that will play proxy captures back then that will really be the best of all worlds.

The tone3000 plugin will still be incredible for anyone to have access to all those tones in a daw for basically free (not sure if they’ll charge for the plugin, more than likely free but not sure)
 
If there’s a stadium vst that will play proxy captures back then that will really be the best of all worlds.

I'm absolutely sure there will be (at least at one point in time) as for many folks one of *the* big deals with the HX ecosystem would be the plugin-hardware compatibility. I'm not even using that functionality too often, but it's still more than worth the asking price just because of it.
All they should possibly add is an integrated online file browser (both for entire patches and the Proxy files), so you don't need to deal with logging into their website. Ideally, as with the QC, that'd be available straight on the hardware as well.
Personally, I likely wouldn't use the "shop" functionality much (just as I never use premade patches), but I'd take a bet that a whole lot of people would just love it.
 
I am enjoying that me joking around is getting calls of “tribalism” while someone else is near a coronary because captures are stupid.

You're assuming that I was talking about you...

Tribalism is what makes sports fans crazy when you trash talk "their" team. It's something embedded in our DNA, and sometimes it manifests itself in strange ways.
 
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Fwiw, re: compatibility between the hardware and native versions, there should be a better way to synchronize loaded IRs (and Proxy captures). Ideally, those would be automatically copied with the patch, possibly along with some dialog that would pop up in case the required files already exist on the target (and another one in case the storage memory is maxed out).

IR/Proxy management should be improved anyway. In case there's a missing file, there should be an option to a) identify which file is missing ("missing IR loaded into slot 5" is completely meaningless, all it's telling you is that the patch won't work anymore) and b) to search your computer for the missing file, just as each and every software sampler even remotely worth its salt is doing in 2025.
 
With the inflationary amount of NAM files (and we're likely only at the beginning), this will possibly become the same as it's been with IRs, namely an endless rabbit hole. Which possibly is the positive aspect of proprietary formats a la QC and KPA - you do at least need the hardware, so not every single hack on earth can upload and share their captures of whatever it might be on Tonezone3000.
That has not stopped anybody. Kemper, QC and Tonex are littered with enough bad content each. It's not surprising "trusted vendors" (free or paid) are a thing on all of them.

With IRs it's the same, many people rely on e.g York Audio mixes as shortcuts to having to figure it all out.

Captures have a major content management problem on all platforms where metadata is not sufficient to really find what you want, which makes it a chore to go through packs of files on any platform too. Doesn't matter if it's dumping files into a folder for NAM or loading them on device via some cloud service or computer app.

Captures have very low value just like individual mic IR files. It's hard to get excited about captures you didn't make yourself because they are basically "I like this / I don't like this" and then you move onto the next file. That's different from having an amp or fx model that truly works like the amp or pedal - allowing you to refer to e.g videos of that amp to figure out how to work with it instead of going through someone else's work and hoping it works for you.

I'm interested to see if Line6 manages to do something different in this nook of guitardom with Proxy. But with no more information than "it's captures for Line6" it's the new feature I'm least interested in.
 
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