RigSuite 0.98 Release Notes

• Smoother preset switching. Change sounds in the middle of a song without the sound cutting out: the amp cross-fades, and the delay and reverb keep ringing into the new preset.
• Graphics-card acceleration on Apple Silicon. The GPU option, on Windows since 0.97, now runs on Apple Silicon Macs through Metal.
• Snapshots. Keep several complete rigs inside one preset and switch between them from a footswitch.
• A looper at the end of the chain. Record, overdub, undo and clear from mapped switches, with the loop playing straight through a preset change.
• AFTERGLOW everywhere, as its own instrument. The freeze hold works on every delay mode now, held at its own steady level.

Snapshots: several rigs inside one preset

A preset and a snapshot are the same thing under the hood, a complete rig, so it helps to say plainly how they differ in use. A preset is the file you save, name and share; it is what you load. A snapshot is a whole rig kept inside a preset. Every preset now holds four of them, A through D. The point of a snapshot is speed and grouping: the four scenes of a preset switch faster than loading four separate files, and they travel together as one thing. A useful way to think about it: a preset is a song, and its snapshots are the handful of sounds you move between while you play it.

The controls live in the preset menu, under Snapshots. You save the rig you have set up into a slot ("Save current rig to A"), and you recall a slot to bring that rig back. Recall is built to be quick: it compares the scene you are on with the one you pick and rebuilds only the parts that actually changed, so a snapshot that keeps the same amp and only swaps a pedal, an effect or a knob setting comes up almost at once, while one that changes the amp takes the time an amp change takes. The rig each scene stores is complete: both amp slots, both cabs, the drive pedal, the reverb, and every knob, mode and toggle.

• Footswitch access. Four MIDI actions, Snapshot A through D, sit in the MIDI CONTROL action list next to the preset-bank actions, so a scene recall maps to a switch exactly as a preset recall does.
• They save with the preset. The four scenes are written into the preset file, on the end, so an older RigSculpt that does not know about them simply reads the preset without them and a newer one restores all four. A new blank preset starts with no snapshots.

Import a preset into a snapshot

You do not have to build a preset's four scenes by hand. The Snapshots menu carries an "Import a preset into A" row for each of the four slots. Pick one and a second list opens with every preset you have; choose a preset there and its entire rig, the amps, cabs, pedal, effects, modes and knobs, is read into that scene. You never leave the preset you are on, and the preset you imported from is not touched.

So the natural way to build a live preset is to make each sound you want as an ordinary preset first, get it right, then start a new preset and import your four favorites into A, B, C and D. A song's worth of sounds becomes one preset with four footswitchable scenes in about a minute. The imported scenes save with the preset like any other, so do a normal preset save once you have them the way you want.

The looper

The looper sits at the very end of the signal chain, after the amp, the cabs and every effect, which is the important part: it records and plays the finished sound, and it keeps playing when you change presets. Lay a rhythm part down on your clean, then switch to your lead and solo over the loop; the loop holds its level straight through the change instead of ducking or cutting. It gives you up to a minute of stereo, set aside when the plug-in loads so nothing is allocated while you play.

Every function is a MIDI action, mapped in the MIDI CONTROL panel like any other:

• REC is the classic single-switch cycle: the first press records, the next closes the loop and plays it, the next overdubs a layer, the next drops back to play, and so on. Stopped, a press of REC starts a fresh recording.
• STOP stops playback, and doubles as PLAY: pressed on a stopped loop, it relaunches the loop from the top. Pressed while recording, it discards the take.
• UNDO removes overdub layers one press at a time, newest first. Each overdub pass, from the moment you punch in to the moment you let go, is kept as its own layer, and the last four are held; a press peels the top one off, the next press peels the one under it, down to the base recording. Pressed while you are still overdubbing, it cancels the pass you are playing.
• CLEAR wipes the loop.

The record and overdub edges get short ramps and the loop's seam is smoothed, so starting, stopping and layering are clean rather than clicky.

The looper footswitch layer

Most boards do not have four switches to spare for a looper on top of the ones already driving your rig. The LOOPER MODE action solves that: map it to one switch, and while it is armed the switches you already use become the looper's transport, REC, STOP, UNDO and CLEAR, taking over from whatever they normally do; let the mode go and every switch is back to its day job. You loop with the board you have, and step out of the layer to play.

The rule for what a switch does is simple and needs no setup beyond the mappings themselves. A mapping that carries a looper action and shares its trigger with a normal mapping is treated as a layer override: it stays quiet until LOOPER MODE is armed, so the switch keeps its normal job until then. A mapping you dedicate to a looper action, with nothing else on that trigger, has no normal job to protect, so it fires on its own whether or not the layer is armed. In other words, a spare switch mapped straight to REC just records; a busy switch you also want for the looper only takes on that role while you hold the mode.

One switch can run the whole looper. Put LOOPER MODE and REC on the same switch, on one mapping or as two, and it works in phases: with the looper off, a press only enters looper mode; with it on, presses drive record, play and overdub. Two long presses are the ways back out. Hold a REC switch about a second to clear the loop and leave looper mode in one gesture, or hold a STOP switch to leave looper mode with the loop still playing, so your switches return to their day jobs while the loop rolls on.

A strip along the top of the MIDI CONTROL panel shows the looper at a glance: an indicator that lights for REC (red), PLAY (green) and DUB (amber), the loop's length in seconds, a position bar that tracks the playhead, and REC, STOP, UNDO and CLEAR buttons you can click on screen, which do exactly what the mapped switches do.

Entering looper mode also brings up the pad window, a small pedalboard you can drag anywhere on the interface. Its four pads mirror the transport and are clickable, a lamp shows looper mode and toggles it when clicked, and the loop's state, length and playhead read out along the top. Whenever a mapped switch fires, its pad flashes, so you can watch your controller land on the right function. The window follows the looper: it appears when looper mode arms or a loop is running, and puts itself away when you are done.

Setting the looper up on a controller is walked for you. The MIDI SETUP button in the transport strip goes control by control, LOOPER MODE first, then REC / PLAY / DUB, STOP, UNDO and CLEAR; at each step, the next press of a footswitch on your controller becomes that control's assignment, and the pad being assigned is highlighted on the pad window. Click a different pad there to assign that one instead, so you can lay your board out to match the screen. Any step can be skipped, and the walkthrough can be cancelled at any point.

Preset changes carry their trails

Until now, changing a preset cut the sound for an instant while the new rig took over. In 0.98 the change is a cross-fade rather than a cut, and, just as important, the effects that were ringing keep ringing.

• The trails ring through. The delay and reverb are not rebuilt when you change presets; only their settings move. So a chord you let ring before you stomp keeps decaying into the new preset instead of being chopped off. This is what makes changing sounds mid-phrase feel musical rather than abrupt.
• The amp cross-fades. The amp, cabs and drive of the old rig are held for a short window and mixed into the new rig's, so the amp voice morphs from one to the other rather than switching in a single step. The still-ringing delay and reverb sit over the top of the morph, so the transition lands inside the space you were already in.
• Effect and mode changes ring out too. A preset that turns the delay or reverb off lets its tail decay rather than cutting it. A preset that changes the delay or reverb type, say a ping-pong delay to a dissolving one, or one reverb to another, lets the old engine's tail finish while the new engine takes your live playing, so even a type change does not clip the trail.

This is an area still being tuned by ear across the full range of rigs; if you hear a level change on a particular pair of presets, that is on the list, and a note about which two presets helps.

Loads run in the background

A neural amp model has to be read and prepared before it can play, and at high oversampling, or on the graphics card, that preparation takes long enough to notice. Before, it happened while you waited. In 0.98 the current rig keeps playing while the new preset's models and cabs are built on a background thread, and the switch happens the moment they are ready, so a heavy amp no longer freezes the sound as it loads.

• The set steps quickly. When you move to the next or previous slot in a MIDI preset bank, RigSculpt prepares the neighboring slots ahead of time, so stepping through a set finds the work already done.
• The graphics card switches at once. With GPU inference on, a preset change used to hold the sound while the card built the new model, which was the slowest case of all. It now makes the switch immediately on the processor, correct and at the right level, and upgrades to the card a moment later in the background, so you hear the new sound right away and the card catches up unheard. Changing the oversampling rate with the GPU option on works the same way, and no longer mutes the amp for the length of the rebuild.
• The graphics card on Apple Silicon. Running the amp models on the graphics card arrived on Windows in 0.97 (Direct3D 12). In 0.98 it comes to Apple Silicon Macs through Metal: the same GPU option in Settings, the same behavior on a preset or oversampling change, and the same fall back to the processor if the card cannot keep up. Like the Windows option, it is a property of the computer, remembered between sessions and never written into a preset or project.

AFTERGLOW on every delay mode

0.97 rebuilt the freeze drone as its own voice, a held pad captured at the press and sustained without loss while the delay keeps echoing your live playing over it. It shipped on the Reverie delay, because that is where the hold was designed. In 0.98 the whole AFTERGLOW section, FREEZE, the four voices (Vapor, Vesper, Vault, Waver), SHEEN, SWELL, LEVEL and MELT | STACK, appears and works on every delay mode: Stereo, Dual, Ping-Pong and Slap as well as Reverie.

0.98 also finishes the idea that a held pad is an instrument, not an effect setting. Its volume is set by LEVEL in the AFTERGLOW row and stays put: it no longer changes with the delay's Mix or mode, and it holds through preset switches, so a pad you set at a comfortable level stays there as you move around. LEVEL now runs from a 0 dB ceiling down to quiet, with the default at -8 dB so a held pad leaves headroom, and the rest of the AFTERGLOW section (the voice, SHEEN, SWELL, MELT or STACK) carries across preset changes the same way, even onto a preset whose delay is off. Only your own FREEZE release, or CLEAR, ends the hold.

The drone was always independent of the delay's routing, so this is mostly a matter of showing the controls in every mode. The one place the routing mattered is the two modes that build a stereo image from a single line, Ping-Pong most of all: there the held pad now sits centered beneath the delay, rather than being pulled into the bounce and smeared, so a freeze on Ping-Pong holds a steady pad the way it does on Dual and Slap. The interval-shift character (the octave and fifth) still lives with the Reverie controls at the top of the delay, so a held pad takes its color from the mode you are in.