Musikmesse 2014: Line6’s AMPLIFi FX100

I got a demo of this unit at Musikmesse and was actually very surprised by how well thought out it was. That probably sounds wrong. It is as I’d expect from Line6 (who made the very first MIDI mobilizer for iOS of course).The hardware is well made, the build quality is high, but I was especially interested in the integration between the device, the app, and the cloud service that holds everything together. It’s a great idea and a good use of the individual pieces of technology. I can see it being really useful for guitarists.What really interests me though is how we’ll see all these things hanging together in the future, or to be precise, the not very distant future. The use of cloud based services to hold and share presets is a great one, but so far everything I’ve seen sits in isolation. Line6’s cloud won’t talk to Positive Grid’s ToneCloud and vice-versa.What we need, and what I expect will happen eventually is that we’ll see an Audiobus for tone sharing, and possibly for more, like synth patch sharing across apps. Why not? If you can share a preset in Audiobus 2 then why not more?Anyway, that’s off the subject for now, I was impressed by Line6’s latest offering and I’ll be interested to see how it develops over time and what users make of it too.