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today i got my zoom ms-80ir+ ampsim pedal and i am so far very happy with it :)

physically speaking, it is just wonderful. it has a very cute form-factor and the beautiful all-metal construction makes me very very very happy

more importantly though: so far it does exactly what i wanted and needed, and it does a good job of it

i walk into the room, i plug in the usb-c cable to my laptop, it powers up (it has usb bus power!), i plug in the guitar and stomp to activate the tuner, i tune the guitar, i plug in my headphones, i play, i hit record on my laptop (it's a usb audio interface!). peak convenience

i was worried that the headphone output might not work properly with my earphones, like on my “consumer” audio devices. nope, no problems. no noticeable noise. the digital volume control is sufficiently sensitive to avoid killing my hearing too. excellent!

because it's in stomp pedal form factor it keeps your hands free and you can do many operations with just your feet, even adjusting the output volume. if you aren't wearing shoes, then the only thing you'd have to actually reach down for is turning the virtual knobs on the amp/fx

it also HAS A SCREEN so you can SEE WHAT YOU ARE DOING and you DO NOT NEED TO USE AN APP

speaking of the screen: contrast is ok, the pixel art for the various amps/fx/ambiences is very cute and the way the backlight changes colour when switching between categories is cute too

i don't have enough familiarity with guitar amps to tell you if it “sounds good” by guitar amp enthusiast standards, but i will say that i have enjoyed browsing the built-in patches and observing how varied the tones can be. i don't have to worry i've got the wrong amp i suppose

it has a few dozen ampsims and you can even load IRs but that's not for me. i'm probably gonna pick one favourite out of the built-ins, tweak it how i like it, and use it for everything? variety per se is not why i got it, but i do like that i can choose tone after buying

with that said the variety in available like, genre, is valuable so i will probably make use of it sometimes if i don't end up sticking to one genre (it is actually very implausible i will stick to one genre no matter how good of an idea that would be for improving skill)

stereo delay my beloved

‪the fact the ms-80ir+ is a usb audio interface is extremely convenient too because i can plug my earphones into it and hear both my guitar playing (as processed by the pedal) and my laptop's audio output simultaneously, both in full stereo and high quality (it's not noisy yaaay)‬

‪this in particular has been such a godsend for me you have no idea. i am usually in the zone and just want to play guitar, but occasionally i need to consult a youtube video, or play back what i just recorded, or i want to listen to music, and i can do this without unplugging‬

‪(i love this thing, but it is easy to love it when my previous setup was so incredibly painfully inconvenient and every single feature of this device is solving a specific friction or pain point i had before ^^;)‬

sometimes a girl just wants to play nothing but tritones into a simulation of a high-gain amp in the middle of a empty chapel for two straight minutes

@hikari Nice and heavy but needs just a touch more distortion, it's thick and growly enough to make the empty chapel rumble but not quite enough to cause small chunks of rubble to fall from the ceiling in a chaotic pattern around the guitarist as the song progresses until at its conclusion she finishes, miraculously unharmed, directly beneath the now open sky

@hikari does it have a way to disable loopback? i could see (possibly kind of bad) reasons to want to do that in software instead

@leo i'm not using loopback here, my earphones are connected to the pedal's output and the pedal is receiving audio from my laptop and simultaneously processing guitar input

not sure if it has a loopback function for the audio interface, wouldn't be surprised if it does though

@leo if i wanted to, i could connect my earphones to my laptop's 3.5mm output instead, and then have my laptop do a soft-passthru of the audio output from the pedal output (received via usb) to the laptop output, which would produce a similar overall result to my current setup except having worse latency and more noise (laptop's 3.5mm output sucks)

@leo oh, wait! do you mean having the normal pedal output be suppressed for the headphone output, and instead it only outputs what is received via usb? i think that'd be called disabling monitoring rather than disabling loopback. i would have to check the manual…

@hikari yeah, i was calling it loopback bc of the pulseaudio module name lol

@leo i checked and there's an option in the pedal's settings to adjust the monitoring balance, by default it's 50:50 incoming usb audio vs pedal output, but you could set it to 100:0 for the use case you envision

@leo “loopback” is fun because it's both a thing you might want a computer to do (mix microphone/guitar audio with outgoing computer audio and send it back to the audio interface for listening) and a thing you might want an audio interface to do (mix microphone/guitar audio with incoming computer audio and send it back to the computer for recording), and indeed both kinds of loopback exist!

@leo (i don't think this particular audio interface has this latter feature though. i know of two others that do.)