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Post subject: More than one amp connected to FUSE in Windows
Posted: Sat Apr 06, 2013 11:02 am
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Hi all,

this issue may not affect too many users of FUSE but each of us who has more than one amp may be bothered by the limitations of FUSE as much as I am. In short terms: it is not possible to have two or more amps connected to the computer at the same time and manage them separately. FUSE only connects to 1 amp and you cannot select inside FUSE to which one. The recommendations from the Fender staff to overcome this is to unplug the amps you don’t want to edit and plug in only the one you want to work with. And if you want to change the amp you need to unplug and reconnect again! Welcome to the computer stone age...

Someone in this forum was thinking about using an USB A/B switch. I am not sure if this is working at all but from my point of view this is not a good idea. These switches are used for connecting 1 peripheral device like a printer to 2 computers. What we need instead is to connect 2 peripherals to 1 computer. The way to do that is simply to plug the devices to the computer side-by-side – like we do it with any other USB devices we usually use! Did you ever had 2 USB sticks connected to your pc? Or 2 printers? And did it work? For sure yes. The USB logic and the software is responsible to select the right device and since more than 15 years each software I know is able to do that – only the Fender guys seem to think that this less reasonable than the mechanical plugging & unplugging. This is a real violation of the idea behind USB. Even more since it shouldn’t be a big deal to implement it also into the FUSE software.

But no rant without a suggestion for improvement: some days ago when I was really annoyed again from the ongoing fiddling with the USB cables I thought about disabling certain USB ports separately with a software. This way I should be able to connect both of my amps to the computer and select the one I want to edit. And in fact there is a pretty comfortable (and free!) tool to do this. This tool is called USBDeview and can be downloaded from here:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html

If you start it you get a list of all connected USB devices. Each device can be disabled or enabled on it's own. If it is disabled the amp is of course not broken or something, it is just not present for Windows as if it is unconnected. This works while the FUSE software is running – FUSE realizes that, automatically disconnects from the amp and even more connects to the next amp which is present. To make it real comfortable this process can be scripted in a batch file so you can switch from one amp to another with just one mouse click!

A batch can file look like this (to create a batch file open the Notepad or any other text editor, write the commands into it and save the file somewhere with the ending .bat or .cmd. Now you can execute the commands by double clicking on the file):

Code:
"C:\Program Files\USBDeview\USBDeview.exe" /disable Bronco
sleep 5
"C:\Program Files\USBDeview\USBDeview.exe" /enable Mustang


This disables each USB device which’s name contains Bronco, waits for 5 seconds and enables all Mustang devices. This is not working if you have more than 1 Mustang amp because it will affect all of them together. In this case you need to identify the serial numbers of the devices (can be found in the USBDeview tool) and use this commands:

Code:
/enable_by_serial <serial number>
/disable_by_serial <serial number>


The sleep command is helpful to give the FUSE the time to realize that the amp has switched. To use this command you may need to install the sleep.exe first. Download it from the internet and place it into the folder C:\windows\system32.

For my purposes I’ve created 2 batch files and placed them on the desktop. One is disabling my Bronco and enabling the Mustang and the other one is doing it vice versa. As I already said this is working while the FUSE is open! After some seconds I can directly go on editing the other amp.

I’ve tested it with Windows XP and Windows 7 and the FUSE versions 2.6.0 and 2.7.0 and up to now it works without any problems. The enabling/disabling in USBDeview runs only with admin rights so if you are not the admin of the computer you may need to extend the batches somehow with a RunAs function.

This workaround makes my life way easier and if you are in the same situation like me i hope you might find it helpful as well. But I don’t want to end without emphasizing that I am still annoyed that a function like is not part of the FUSE software and one is forced to twiddle around with some third-party-tools to simulate such a simple feature.

Cheerio, Gil


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