I’m way more interested in everything else that’ll be going on in the axe4 than just a NAM player. But the fact that it’s going to be there is the cherry ontop. It gives people more incentive to buy it which means more sales which is a good thing.
There’s a mild undertone of NAM disdain from some people for some reason. Who would have guessed that giving people free profiling tech would be so triggering, but here we are. I imagine most of the people who are vocal naysayers probably don’t use NAM at the moment so of course they don’t have a need or want for it. The good thing is that with NAM in there we’ll naturally see more and more users which fosters the ecosystem which also inspires new things to come out.
For me the only thing special about NAM is that it's open source. But at the same time, it allows for subpar products like all those devices that rely on converting the data - they tap into the content pool but can't produce the correct end result.
I feel like IK Multimedia already won a lot of the game with Tonex by being able to provide capture hardware that does also work with a high quality result, and for little money too. The software can be frustrating but it's something you can live with if you can find the content you want, or make it yourself.
The next step is making the discoverability of captures less awful. Every single platform just plain sucks at this in their own way, so there's lots of content but finding quality in a sea of shit is pretty annoying. The capture process itself also needs to be more fool-proof so the ability to make bad captures is much harder.
That's why to me full modeling remains the superior option because I don't need to try to trawl through other people's attempts as much but have basically the pro-grade solution from the start, that I can dial myself and it will work exactly like the real thing.
With Fractal's 300+ amp models covering over 100 unique amps, there just isn't any tone that isn't available to you already in the current products.
I certainly didn't have NAM support on my bingo card for Axe-Fx IV so it's interesting Fractal has chosen to add it. Maybe they feel that with Line6 bringing in Proxy, it's going to be table stakes for modelers to have some sort of capture tool. So why not implement an existing, open system than try to invent your own ecosystem.
Still, the things that I want to see from Fractal are all workflow, usability and form factor related. Having NAM support doesn't mean I'm more interested in buying it over the competition.