This Week’s Preset: BigSky – “Ever After”
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We are pleased to present a public beta of Nixie, the graphical backup librarian, organizer, and creative preset editor for TimeLine, BigSky, and Mobius.
Use it for instant, easy backups of your pedals, to organize and prepare for gigs, and create new presets and preset collections. You can drag and drop single presets or entire preset collections into the Nixie interface, and you can even drag presets directly from a web page into Nixie.
When editing or creating presets, Nixie gives you real-time feedback: turn a knob on your pedal, the same knob updates in Nixie, and vice versa. You can also have all your compatible pedals connected simultaneously to Nixie, so no re-patching is required when moving from one pedal to the next. You can even explore pedals not currently in your possession by using Nixie’s offline device feature.
How to Use Nixie
To connect your TimeLine, BigSky, or Mobius to the Nixie preset editor and librarian software, you need a MIDI to USB interface to connect from the MIDI IN and MIDI OUT ports of your pedal to your computer.
For more information on what Nixie can do and how it all works, read the Nixie FAQs.
Download
Nixie version 1.0.0.3 is a free download.
Mac – Download
Windows – Download
System Requirements:
Mac 10.11.1 or higher
Windows 10
Get Support
If you are having trouble using Nixie, or would like to report any issues you may have run into when using the software, we are here to help. Please send an email to [email protected] that includes the following information:
- Your computer make and model.
- Your computer operating system version.
- Version of Nixie you are using (found in the About Strymon Nixie dialog box).
- MIDI Interface make and model.
- All connected Strymon pedals.
- Details on how your pedals are connected to your computer.
- Details on what you experienced and any steps you take to reproduce the issue.
Drag and Drop
Just for fun you can try dragging presets from this blog directly into the Nixie interface. Below are links to the Sysex (.syx) files for just about every This Week’s Preset we’ve created up until this point. Just drag the link into Nixie’s Preset Collections pane, and from there, drag into the Preset Table, and then Write to your pedal.
BigSky – This Week’s Presets:
Bloom – Late Bloomer
Bloom – Bloombient
Cloud – Ghost Town Intro
Cloud – Random Cloud
Cloud – Star Cloud
Hall – Rhythm
Plate – Ghost Pre-Chorus
Shimmer – Ever After
Shimmer – Falling Angel
Shimmer – Starlight
Swell – Ghost Town Swell
Mobius – This Week’s Presets:
Autoswell – Fast Swell
Chorus – Pure and Simple
Filter – Lion Babe Jungle Lady
Filter – Lion Babe Wonder Woman
Filter – Square Funk
Flanger – Zero Plus
Formant – Jabber
Phaser – Second Phase
Quadrature – Freak Minus
Vintage Trem – Starlight
TimeLine – This Week’s Presets:
dBucket – Analog Slap
Digital – Color 1
Digital – Dance
Digital – Color 2
dTape – Lion Babe Impossible
dTape – Lion Babe Jungle Lady
Dual – Flange Delay
Duck – Touch Sensitivity
Filter – Float Around
Filter – Lucid Dream
Filter – Synthy Triplets
Ice – Hell Float Trip
Ice – Random Iced
Ice – Thanks A Million
Lo-Fi – Corrupted Flowers
Lo-Fi – Crush’d Guitar
Lo-Fi – Passenger
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Ethan Tufts
Ethan Tufts left Strymon in early 2021.
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62 Responses
Wow! I just started playing with the beta and am thrilled! I use a Disaster Area DMC-XL3 (gen2) to control a TimeLine and BigSky. I play in a gigging band, and Sundays at church and I update my presets at least every week to match setlists. I just loaded and sorted my presets for this week in a 1/3 of the time it usually takes me, and that’s with it being my first run with Nixie. This is going to significantly improve my workflow.
Thank you!
I have been waiting for this since I first bought my Timeline years ago. Such a great tool and it already looks and feels very polished for a beta application. I am using the MAC ver and its been great making my own collections and organizing everything. Thank you to all your devs for their hard work on this.
-Cody
Great! At least a great app for some great pedals! Thanks!
Might want to consider not forcing people to use on the latest version of OSX though; most of us aren’t real fans of 10.11 fyi. this would be akin to forcing everyone to use windows 10, and we all know what a dog that would be..
@cm – Thanks for the feedback! 🙂 We have listed the earliest versions of the operating systems that we have tested with and you are free to try the software on previous versions. However, if any issues arise, they will be tested currently shipping operating systems.
Perhaps its been a while, but macOS Sierra is working great for me. I have a lot of plug-ins, Apollo 16 and many other peripherals. Maybe it had hiccups in the first few weeks but its all smooth as can be for me. I am using every day for 10+ hours.
I know its bit OT, but the Notes feature with collaboration has been surprisingly useful. I do so much with it.
I use Logic Pro X 10.2.4.
So I’m really loving Nixie.
One problem I’m constantly running into while using it is that it disconnects my Timeline randomly. I know that it’s in Beta so there are bound to be bugs, but I thought I’d bring that to someone’s attention. It’s really frustrating especially when trying to write a preset and all of a sudden I lose the connection and there’s no auto save…
P.S. Definitely not a hardware issue
@Joe – Sorry to hear that you are having trouble. Disconnection problems are not something we have really experienced here with robust MIDI interfaces. Can you please tell me which MIDI interface you are using when you experience this problem? Typically, plug and play generic MIDI interfaces tend to fail with the data communication our pedals and software need to work reliably. We recommend using the Roland UM-ONE or the Yamaha UX-16. Please check out the following link to provide us with further info on the problem and write us at [email protected].
I’m using a FocusRite Scarlett 6i6. It’s definitely a robust audio interface considering it’s a box and not just a cable converter.
@Joe – The FocusRite audio interfaces are pretty robust as we have a Scarlet 2i4 that also works well for Nixie with our pedals.
Hello; I can use the Nixie with Focusrite 2i4 then?
@David – Yes, we have one working on Mac computers in our office. We have not tested on Windows at this time.
Thank You Hugo
Love Nixie so far. Of course I came across issues though as expected with a beta. Really hope you guys come out with a full version soon and not leave us with the beta.
Thanks for working on this. I’ve really started to embrace my Timeline more that is the main delay machine in my backup rig. Sounds are very very good (and close enough to my TC Electronic delay sounds in my main rig) – with the added bonus of some more experimental sounds to play around with.
Any estimate on when this is coming out of beta status? I’m a bit chicken messing with my firmware given that i need this rig to be reliable and respond correctly to midi (since the pedal lives in a rack).
The lack of an editor was always the downside of these tools. This might help move along the question if I want to add a Mobius at some point. Just saying.
@OF – Thanks for supporting Strymon! 🙂 We are a very small team and always working on our ideas, but we do plan on having a newer version available early next year.
Having trouble…every time I try and edit a patch it crashes.
@Michal – Very sorry to hear that you are having trouble with using the beta version of our Nixie software. We have seen this behavior from customers either using a MIDI interface that cannot handle the data transmission, or using computer running operating system that Nixie was not tested or designed for. Please shoot us an email to [email protected] with details on your computer make and mode along with the operating system version it is running. Also provide the make and model of your MIDI interface that connects the pedal to your computer and whether the software drivers for this interface have been installed.
Love the app, but not having a ton of luck figuring out how to drag a preset from your blog into the app in order to add it to my Timeline…?
All I get is a icon that is a black circle with a line thru it basically saying you can’t drop this here.
I was trying to download presets from The Church Collective website and import them as presets on my pedal.
Can you explain how this is supposed to work?
Also, please add features to make the ability to import presets more natural and self explanatory if you have a .syx file from someone.
@Bill – Sorry to hear that you are having trouble with the Nixie software. The drag and drop capability for links into Nixie does work when dropping the link over the PRESET COLLECTIONS window or over the pedal itself in the UI (user interface) for individual .syx files or links like from the PRESET OF THE WEEK links in this blog.
We have seen this work on Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox on Windows. On Mac computers, it works with Safari and Mozilla Firefox, however, there is a problem with this working with Google Chrome.
If you continue to have trouble, please shoot us an email to [email protected] with full details on your computer make/model and operating system version along with the web browser version you are running when you come across this problem.
Do you guys plan on releasing a patch to fix the bigsky spillover glitch? I have to turn spillover off and on again in order to get it to trail between presets. Thanks!
@Marcus Jackson – We do plan on fixing this in a future update, however, the current workaround is to roll back the firmware to the previous release. As we do not have a release date for the next update, please shoot us an email to [email protected] for details on rolling the firmware back.
Are you guys planning another update soon? Enjoy the Nixie app but it feels a tad buggy sometimes.
Also – noticing some issues with Killdry on the Timeline and Big Sky defaulting to “Normal” on power up. I have to go into the globals and change the dry signal from Kill to Normal and back again to get rid of the dry signal. Tad bizarre.
We have not forgotten about Nixie. While we do not have an exact date of when an update will become available, we do plan to have something a little later this year.
We are also aware of this firmware bug (it’s related to the spillover bug mentioned by another customer) and are working on resolving these issues for the next update.
Just a hint
I ve had some connectivity issues and was not sure what caused this my timeline was’t recognized by the Nixie, afterwards I realized that I was using a preset libraray at the same time.
Just a tip – If you are experiencing the connectivity issue check if the resource (midi adapter) is not currently in use by another process/application.
Thank you so much for this lovely software!!!
Is the plan still to have a non-beta release this year? (hopefully soon)
@RD – Yes, it has been quite some time now, but we do plan on releasing a non-beta version of Nixie for our pedals.
When I change the tap tempo settings on a preset bank it is also changing the tap tempo settings on all of my other banks.. this is causing a LOT of problems.. what do I need to do to correct this.
@John – I’m not experiencing that in my testing with Nixie and a TimeLine here. Can you please shoot us an email to [email protected] with full details on the exact steps you are taking from the moment the program starts to reproduce this behavior?
Hi guys thanks for a great editor – easy to use and easy on the eyes 😉 looking forward to the non-beta version. Saying that I haven’t had any buggy problems to date.
Just one thing for the GUI that I think would help a lot just in case it hasn’t been suggested or considered already – the ability to sort preset collections in alpha order. I have a few collections for my TL and it would help avoid duplicates thanks again!
Wanted to make a recommendation for the non-beta version.
I think it would be awesome if there was a way to save a group of presets as “song”. Each preset would be a part of a song e.g.: verse, chorus, etc.
I think it would be useful to be able to save songs and be able to drag all the associated presets to a set of banks on the pedal.
Thanks,
hope you guys still plan on releasing a non-beta version!
@Acer J – You can actually do this with Nixie by saving your group of presets for each ‘song’ as a Preset Collection on the LEFT side of the program. From there, you can drag this ‘song’ collection to the desired bank/preset location and write these presets to the pedal’s memory.
Is there any news regarding the Big Sky Spillover bug?
@Razvan – Yes, we will have firmware to address this in our pedals in an upcoming update for the firmware and Nixie software.
Ah! The suspense is killing me! Can’t wait to get my hands on a bug-free, non-beta Nixie app!
I am pretty much computer challenged and I fiqured this out in minutes.. super easy to use and I am really excited about it.. thanks a mil
Hey there! Would it be possible to add a feature to Nixie so that you could organize the presets saved in collections by alphabetical order?
I’m also wondering if it could ever be possible to adapt the way that Nixie changes the order of presets from swapping to sliding. For example, instead of swapping 1a and 3a, when you slide 3a up to the top every other preset would slide down. I realize it might add time to writing presets to the pedal, but the current process can be burdensome. If I’m developing a setlist and have 5 or 6 in place but then want to put an additional song at the top of the set, I’d have to individually swap each preset all the way down in order to keep the setlist intact. If the presets slid down in response to moving one to the top it’d be much quicker. The RJM Mastermind Editor uses this very nicely!
Thanks for putting out great products!
@Michael – Thanks for the feedback! I’ll pass it along to the team.
Nixie looks great so far. Ive been trying to get some presets using the method described right up here, dragging and dropping them directly into the preset collection pane of my Nixie, but they dont seem to appear on the list. Any idea on that?
@Mundo — Thanks! This was working at one point, but it looks like the functionality is broken. We are looking into a fix.
You can get around this, however. You can click on the preset to download it, and then you will be able to drag and drop the SysEx file from your downloads right into Nixie instead. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Hi!
https://www.strymon.net/nixie-public-beta/ says that Nixie will run on Win 7 and later.
But this page – https://www.strymon.net/support/nixie/ – says that it requires Win 10.
So…..?
That is correct. We had a previous version for the public beta, but the 1.0.0.3 version was only tested on Win10. It may work with Win7 just fine, but it just is not supported.
If you have any more questions please email [email protected]!