I remember seeing on the forum that a plugin was being worked on to load standard NAM files, since the MOD Dwarf currently only supports nano ones.
Lately I’ve noticed more and more pedals handling NAM files really well—like the PocketGO, Hotone Ampero II series, and the Darkglass Anagram. Looks like the devs behind those managed to optimize things enough to get full NAM captures running smoothly, which is seriously impressive for some of that hardware.
Just wondering if there are any updates on that front for the MOD Dwarf, especially since this seems to be the direction a lot of pedalboards are heading. I love my Dwarf and really want to see it grow with the scene.
Any news or progress on this?
from what I’ve read about the units from Hotone is that they do a capture of the NAM model with their own capture tech, which is more like a profiler ala Kemper.
So they don’t really run NAM models they convert them to their own tech.
The Dwarf has a lot of cool features, of which the super flexible routing and custom plugin options are “sandbox” worthy.
You probably meant the Sonicake pocket master?
I consider to try it to have it upstairs some instant jams. about the modelling, there seems to be some mixed comm about that. The product page claims that you can import NAM files and even learn a model yourself. For the money it has some good “instant live usable” options and its portability is nice for travel and light boards.
A comment on a random review vid: Sonicake, Hotone, and Valeton are all the same brand. Valeton also just released a firmware update for the GP-200/GP-200LT/GP-200Jr series of pedals that also allows for NAM profile loading. I live in the area around Seattle, and know Steve, the guy who makes NAM, in real life -- super cool dude, btw - and he personally shared the announcement on his social media. Also, Valeton announced a unit called the GP-5 that is a micro-pedal sized unit with similar functionality to this Pocket Master, and it's supposed to have more NAM slots, even if it will be a bit more expensive (however much 59 Euros comes to here in US freedom dollars)
beware though, it seems like you can’t have an IR runnign when running a NAM profile
(check vid at this timestamp https://youtu.be/rSCpWB_Y3tQ?t=993)
maybe a recent firmware update fixes that OR you are confined to “cab included” sims
The Darklglass anagram is the hype right now indeed but its €1000+ and has a lot more processing power. I’m not GAS’ing for one right now but it looks very interesting…
I still need to check out that Harley Benton thing one day though
a lot of cheaper tech has nice features and better NAM options but path wise not the flexibility I love in the Dwarf.
The Dwarf design (and hence its integrated CPU) is a few years old by now. Newer pedals likely have faster CPUs which do not require the scaled down NAM models.
There might be room for further optimizations, but in the end you can only compute so much with the Dwarf CPU while still satisfying real-time audio processing needs without stutter or buffer underuns.
There were some attempts by @brummer to split the processing into 3 cycles and then Dwarf would be able to use it, but from what I understood it was a flawed incomplete test and didn’t really work out in the end.
But the idea is somewhat promising, alike a 2x “portal” approach that leverages Dwarf having 4 cores as a way to spread the CPU load. The catch is the obvious one - latency. Dwarf has ~ 8ms base latency, each “portal” takes 2.66ms more. So with this approach the latency would be 13.33ms at minimum.
Thanks! I was just wondering if standard NAM support might become available for the Dwarf at some point. It’s a bit frustrating that most of the captures I want to use are in the standard format, not nano. But I guess that’s just how it is for now.
My understanding is that some sort of a new improved NAM engine from @MikeOliphant should greatly improve the performance and perhaps let us run the Standard Captures? It is not in Dwarf yet, for some reason though…
it is a bit more performant, but still does not work on Dwarf as-is.
main reasons for not being on Dwarf are that:
doesn’t change situation regarding standard size models
the MOD builds have a custom patch for adding “buffered mode” in order to reduce single-chain DSP load (with the cost of 1 audio cycle latency, so 2.6ms on the Dwarf). I have to redo this patch to work with the new engine
I haven’t tried it on Dwarf myself, but I believe @fer got “feather” models to work - which is a pretty useful step up from “nano” (both in terms of quality and model availability). Reduced CPU for “nano” is also pretty useful.
Regarding the buffered mode, does that do anything that isn’t possible using portals?
Yes índeed! Nano and feather works with your version in dwarf. Very useful already.
In my main pedalboard, I use a nano pedal + feather amp in serial with other plug-ins (wah, delay, tremolo, reverb, looper) with dsp around 80% and no portal.
Of course standard models would be very nice,… even with some optimization that decreases the quality a bit. In this way no need to retrain as nano or feather, if not available directly.
My main reason for not really wanting the additional complexity in the nam-lv2 plugin is that it isn’t really nam-specific - it is something that you might want to do with any heavy plugin.
Seems like it could be a useful feature for mod-host - an option to run any plugin in buffered mode.
the thing is that the vast majority of plugins do not need such an option, very few are so heavy that they take the entire cpu time for a single chain.
for most setups it makes more sense to parallelize a whole chain
