Acoustic Play Editor

The Editor is Going Electric

Old acoustic-only editor icon New dual-guitar editor icon

The editor now also speaks Play Electric. Same workflows you already know — fetch, sync, arranger, setlists, Stage Traxx integration — running against PE's byte layout, with the PE-exclusive Guitar Amp and Comp blocks, PE-specific style enums, and the firmware's per-style cascade defaults baked in.

Same editor, two products. The rest of this post covers how to switch between them, what changes when you do, and the rough edges still being settled.

New to the editor? (Play Electric users, welcome)

If you landed here because you have a Play Electric and you've been looking for a way to keep editing presets after VoiceSupport 2 stopped working — you're in the right place. The short version:

If you've never touched the editor before, start by hitting Launch the Editor from the homepage, connect your PE, and click Load → From device. That's the whole flow.

How to switch

There's a small ▼ arrow next to the device image at the top-left of the editor. Click it and you'll get a two-option popup:

Picking the other product reloads the editor with a clean slate so all the in-memory state (loaded presets, snapshots, dirty markers) doesn't leak between two completely different byte layouts. If you have unsaved changes you get a confirmation first.

When you connect a real device, the editor reads its identity reply and switches to the matching product automatically — the manual switcher is mostly for working offline (editing PE preset files on a machine that has no PE plugged in).

What changes when you go electric

Cable plugging into an electrical outlet

Restrictions and rough edges

Cartoon guitarist being shocked by an outlet through their guitar cable

Play Electric support shipped on the back of one external tester's data (huge thanks, fled 🎸) plus a careful read of TC Helicon's reference manual. More testing is still needed, and a few things are still rough:

What still works the same

If you're a Play Acoustic user, none of this should affect you. The editor still boots into Play Acoustic mode by default, the icon update aside. All existing features, files, setlists, and packs work exactly as before. Same hot-keys, same fetch-from-device flow, same arranger.

A note on the existing documentation

There's now a dedicated Play Electric technical reference generated from the editor's live parameter map — same shape as the Play Acoustic page but with PE's product byte, packet count, header format byte, and full byte-by-byte parameter listings. If you want the protocol detail for PE, start there.

The Manual, FAQ, and About pages are still written from a Play Acoustic perspective — examples mention the PA, screenshots show PA-specific blocks (BodyRez, the acoustic mic types, etc.). Everything those pages describe — fetch / send / save / setlists / firmware update / Stage Traxx integration / arranger — works the same way in Play Electric mode. The byte indices are different under the hood, but the editor handles that translation for you. So if you're a PE user reading the manual: substitute "Play Electric" wherever you see "Play Acoustic" and the workflows still apply.

Properly product-aware docs are on the to-do list; until then, this post + the editor's UI + the PE technical reference are your shortest path to using the PE-specific bits.

Found something broken?

If you spot an issue specific to the Play Electric path — wrong labels, missing widgets, cascade defaults that don't match what the device does — please file an issue. The PE support is still settling in and every concrete report helps it tighten up.

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