At Musikmesse 2014, Line 6 today introduced AMPLIFi FX100, an iOS enabled, ‘cloud-enhanced’ multi-effects pedal. It lets users wirelessly control every detail of the effect.
The AMPLIFi Remote iOS app lets users control the pedal from an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch*. With the Remote app, there’s no need to navigate through tiny screens and complex menus. Users can create, share, download and rate tones with a cloud-based community of musicians.
Users can play along with tracks in their music library, via Bluetooth streaming audio, and the device’s tone matching technology can automatically match guitar tones from your music library.
AMPLIFi FX100 will be available May 1, 2014. See the Line 6 site for more info.
Will patches be interchangeable between AmpliFi FX100 and the AmpliFi amplifiers Line6 introduced recently?
-han
I’d really like to see more effects devices like this directly targeting keyboard players instead of guitarists. Sure, a lot of them work fine with both, but a dedicated keyboard effects box should handle line levels and stereo, which most guitar pedals don’t do.
Line 6 M9 supports stereo ins and line levels.
-han
Let’s hope the bluetooth connection between the pedal and the ios app works better than it does with the Amplifi amp and the app. The connection hangs, and then you have to do a full power shutdown of the ios device to get it to work again. Really wonderful if it happens while you are in the middle of a jam.
The other annoying issue with Amplifi devices is that there is no master preset list. The only way to access pre-built presets is to do a search by song title in the cloud. Most of the time what gets returned is nothing, or a preset that is not close to what you would like to find. It really dumbs down the device.
Having used both a line-6 pod and Amplifi, i find the pod infinitely more usable in real world musical playing situations. Amplifi seems designed to be a karaoke guitar effects device, where people will use it to play along to songs in their iTunes library, end of story.
It’s actually pretty good! I used to have a Digitech iPB 10 that worked with an iPad. Not bad. Gigged with it. This device allows for quick song-specific tone matching. It may be dead on or in need of tweaking, but the more people who buy and buy into the concept, the better the data base will become. I don’t see it as a problem for using live as it has 100 presets and changing among them is virtually instantaneous. The one thing it is lacking, however, is intelligent harmony. Use it in the clean channel in any amp and get an Eventide stompbox for intelligent harmony and you won’t be disappointed. I use it with a FRFR QSC K-10 speaker and I’ve got a super portable rig with high power.