Spark Zone

Hi everyone. Like many of us here, I am just trying to become familiar with my new Spark amp. Having searched the ‘10,000’ tones in the cloud, I was somewhat surprised with the poor results. I searched for ‘Chris Squire’ to see if I could find what is quite a unique bass sound and came up with no results. Searched for ‘Dave Gilmour’ and also got no results. But if I search for ‘Gilmour’, all is good. So my question is, does anyone know how the search mechanism is set up ? What is the best approach for searching for a particular sound ?

It is not the same as Google. Basically, all the words you type need to be found, and typed exactly as they are (though not case-sensitive).

dave gilmour > will find nothing because they are all stored under david, not dave
david gilmour > will find a bunch of tones, however none of them have "david", nor "gilmour" in the preset name - they are found because the person who created the Preset added so-called "tags" (see explanation below)
gilmour david > will find nothing because the order of the words is not the order of the words like they can be found in the preset description (if you ask me, this is actually a bug)

What are tags?

When you create a new tone, or change an existing one, you can press the three dots at the right top of the app (next to the Tone Cloud icon). Here you can choose "Overwrite" (this overwrites the Preset you have in your local storage of the app), "Save as New" (creates a new preset 'slot' in your app's local storage), "Share to ToneCloud" (which will upload it to the Presets accessible to everyone worldwide), "Delete" (...) and "Save to Hardware" (where you can specify one of the four channels by choosing the proper one in the "Genre" box.
When you choose "Share to ToneCloud" you have an additional possibility to add six or fewer tags that help other people find it. In your case, that is what they did with "David" and "Gilmour" in the case of Presets that do not have both those words in the actual title. Each tag can only consist of one word. Making it longer by adding underscores or dashes between the words helps because the search algorithm does not need whole matches (searching for dav also finds the david gilmour tones). Adding periods or commas doesn't work in the tags.

Wow, Richard, thanks for the explanation, very useful. I will go and explore again.

I really being able to test drive the sound before downloading it.

But I am disillusioned by ToneCloud... most sounds are not too great. There should be a rating or downvote option instead of only a like button. or at least a ratio of likes or downloads vs tries/views.

Or more official PositiveGrid tones with a way to filter to only those...

My thoughts...

- The presets coming from PG are mostly good.
- Many presets from the Tonecloud are not really useable.
- If looking for a sound the best is to search the artist name ore the song name.
- Uploading a preset under a fantasy name will later nobody find.
- The top hits from a tone search are often not the best because
- They are from other software of PG like jamup and not built with the spark app.
- a good jamup preset must not sound good with the spark.
- Presets with dozens of hearts and thousends of downloads are often not built with spark.
- Presets coming in the ranking after the first favorits are often the better.

Class is more important than mass. The TC should be thinned out. No one needs 10,000 sounds.
 

J.C. wrote: ↑Sat Jul 25, 2020 8:38 pm Class is more important than mass. The TC should be thinned out. No one needs 10,000 sounds.

I guess many people agree on that.

Are you sure Jampup presets automatically don't sound good on the Spark? If they both use the same ToneCloud (do they?) then it stands to reason that the preset file format is the same, with the same possibilities, on all Positive Grid devices.

 
I don't want to go as far as to say that all sounds in the tonecloud, that come from other software of PG are bad.
I think I was able to remember, having communicated with PG a few years ago and they had explained to me at the time that Bias FX has a different, more advanced sound technology than Jamup. As far as I know, Spark has more to do with Bias FX than with Jamup.
When I got my Spark many weeks ago, there were only a few Amps delivered but jet more than 10,000 presets in the cloud. Even then, the favorites had thousands of downloads, significantly more than the amps delivered.
Then I looked for Pink Floyd presets and found a preset that bore my name. As Jamup says, I uploaded it exactly 56 months ago. So there are definitely jamup presets in the Spark Cloud. Probably Bias FX too.
This one sound of mine sounds OK with Spark but changes have been made by PG, which is why the preset can no longer sound the same. The settings of Noisegate, Tubescreamer and Delay were still applied 1:1.Since the Hiway (Hiwatt) 103 was only available from Jamup / Bias but no longer from Spark, it was replaced by the Lux verb. The settings were applied to the same knobs, but presence no longer exists and instead of bright volume there is now gain. The EQ has completely disappeared. And the Hall reverb has now become a Chamber reverb. The settings were not applied to the reverb either. There are now 6 buttons where there were 4 before.
So PG had to provide a tone cloud right from the start, but there were no Spark user presets yet. PG had to fall back on other sources and has also made an effort there. But for the reasons just mentioned, the old presets of other apps do not sound 100% as they were originally.
So be careful of the top favorites with hundreds of loves and thousands of downloads, which are mostly not built with Spark.
And the thing with the Noisegate ... there are many presets in the cloud that kill the tone immediately with no sustain. Jamup's NG also worked when Threshold was set higher. But Spark's NG kills the sound in this setting.

Thanks for that explanation with its detailed background.