Mac and PC editor available here !

Just a word to tell you that I released a new version of the editor that now also supports Black Spirit 200 amplifiers : http://ctrlr.org/hughes-kettner-remote/
I will no longer maintain the old app, so I encourage everyone to move to the new one !

Fredo.

Hey Fredo, apologies if this isn't the correct place to post this but I'm having some weird issues with my GM 40 and the Mac app. I seem to have saved some bad settings to a preset stored in the amp, which now doesn't save the channel in my preset and defaults to the Clean channel. Oddly, factory resetting the amp hasn't cleared the preset or any presets I've saved in the amp, and I can't send my library presets to the amp to overwrite the bad preset either as it seems to get stuck.

Happy to provide more info/screen shots or to post this somewhere else if this isn't the right forum for this content.

Fredo is undoubtedly the man to get advice from on this but here's a suggestion.

Have you looked in the file to see whether the channel info is being saved correctly and becomes faulty on reloading, or whether it is being saved incorrectly as the Clean channel? If you set up the first preset with a different channel selected and save to file it should be easy to check. Fredo's files have always been human viewable in a decent text editor, (good decision that one). You just need to open them as any other text files and each preset is then laid out for you. I'm no Mac expert but in Windoze you can make a copy of the file on your computer (or iPad) and change the extension to .txt and it should work. It's pretty obvious once you have them open what is what. Are you able to do that on a Mac?

Turns out when you read the instructions you learn things. Totally forgot that sometime early on after getting things set up on my new computer, the app switched from GM40 mode to the BS200. At the time I tried to set it back, but as it seemed to not affect anything I gave up and just left it there. While I was scouring the documentation today, I found this in the Known Issues section of the ctrl site:

"Editor will not restore properly in GrandMeister mode putting the application in an instable state. The workaround is to start the application without connecting it to the amp, go to settings page to switch to BS200 mode and click OK, and then connect the amp (which will cause the app to properly switch to the appropriate mode)."

After restoring the app to GM40 mode, it now seems to be working in that I can overwrite my bad tones to get the amp back to "stock" and rebuild my presets. Still can't have the app overwrite all of the tones on the amp at one (it get's stuck on a random unmodified tone and then just sits there), but at least for now it's saving and recalling my presets correctly.

Also FWIW I work as a software dev and if I couldn't fix this was going to write my own midi controller app for the amp, if you're at all interested in having someone else work on the desktop app I'd love to contribute.

bordonbert wrote:Fredo is undoubtedly the man to get advice from on this but here's a suggestion.

Have you looked in the file to see whether the channel info is being saved correctly and becomes faulty on reloading, or whether it is being saved incorrectly as the Clean channel?  If you set up the first preset with a different channel selected and save to file it should be easy to check.  Fredo's files have always been human viewable in a decent text editor, (good decision that one).  You just need to open them as any other text files and each preset is then laid out for you.  I'm no Mac expert but in Windoze you can make a copy of the file on your computer (or iPad) and change the extension to .txt and it should work.  It's pretty obvious once you have them open what is what.  Are you able to do that on a Mac?

Had no idea they were just text files, I'll take a look at them in the future if I get issues to see if I can just edit them there. If I do edit the files manually, after saving them as .gm40 files again, how should I load them into the amp? I wonder if I can use that to save a preset with the effects turned off. Currently when I save a preset, the effects are always recalled as toggled on, so I have to save my presets with all of the levels turned all the way down.

bordonbert, the text file suggestion has been very helpful. It seems I've got the app and or amp in a bad state, and can't seem to reset them both to factory defaults. At this point I think that I've mixed BS200 and GM40 settings in either the app's default preset file, or the amp's storage, or both.

Because of this I can't get the app to stay in GM40 mode, and without my intervention it edits both the amp.gm40 file and the amp.backup.gm40 file. To try and reset things I do the following:
   - Factory reset the amp via the amp front panel
   - Open the desktop app without the amp plugged in
   - Set the app to BS200 mode
   - Connect amp via midi
   - App switches to GM40 mode
   - Save the current amp settings via the Backup button in the app

And that's the end of my success. If I try to restore the amp presets, if I try to send presets to the amp, or open the library editor, I get some nasty looking errors in the app. Then the next time the app opens up, it's back in BS200 mode and has edited the amp.gm40 file and the backup settings file. Comparing the two preset objects, one from the factory reset save the other from file the desktop app modified, I can see additional settings parameters in addition to the ordering of some parameters changing (pictured below).

To me it looks like the app is trying to force BS200 settings structure into my GM40, no doubt due to me having the app set incorrectly. I've tried to factory reset the app buy uninstalling it and removing and generated files in my user directory and documents folder, however after all that and rebooting my computer, when I reinstall the desktop app, it loads with the last location I set for the amp settings files. My hunch is that if I can truly remove all application settings I can start from scratch, but I have no idea where those files are.

Application state files are located in C:\Users\<your-user>\AppData\Roaming\Hughes & Kettner Remote - v1.0
Just remove this folder to start with a fresh install.
Hope this will help.
Fredo.

I'm on a Mac, what's the file path for application state in OSX?

That would be Mac/Users/<your-user>/Library/Preferences/Hughes & Kettner Remote - v1.0 or something like that

Hi Fredo. Thanks for helping out once again.

The XXX.settings file seems pretty much XML except for a few "incorrectly formatted" (their words not mine ) characters in the first line before the XML header which seem to be perhaps relevant to the CTRLR Window setup. Is that right? These prevent me from viewing it as XML and would most likely also be a complication in saving an edited file.

If I remove that line the rest formats as XML using Notepad++ XML Tools. In the final tag <panelCustomData> I can see the declaration of which ampType I am using and can manually reset that but I won't be able to resave the file in its original form without that first line. Is it possible to successfully edit the data in this file? That said, this isn't one of the situations where simply deleting it will cause it to regenerate is it? I suppose it may even be possible to somehow copy and paste that first line into the edited XML file afterwards though that won't work if that is genuinely a block of binary data.

I know this is highly "bodgering" and the file should really be left alone but there are always instances like this one where it may be helpful.