App Profile: Handy Guitar Lab for B6

thegoosemonkey

Rating: 3/5

I really like my Zoom B6, and having my phone as a second screen to work with is fantastic. What you get in the app is exactly what you see on the pedal itself. Perfect. However, the app does not have a setting to allow you to set or turn off the sleep function of your phone. This means that the phone will turn off after whatever your global sleep setting is, in my case five minutes. This wouldn’t be too awful, except for the fact that when the phone sleeps it interrupts the connection to the pedal. When you wake the phone back up the app connects to the pedal, which requires the pedal to reboot. The reboot means all the audio turns off on the pedal and the CPU of the pedal restarts— very disruptive. It also takes about 20 seconds. If you’re trying to record a loop or change settings of a particular group of effects, this can be very annoying. It also means that you could never use this app during a gig. There is one caveat, and that is that you can change your global settings of your phone to never sleep. However, this seems like a ridiculous to make the app do something that it should have out of the box. I’m hopeful that this functionality will come in the next release of the software. It seems like it should be a pretty straightforward thing to add as I have plenty of apps that have this capability built into them.

maltashayka

Rating: 3/5

It’s heartbreaking when you spend half a grand purchasing a product that seems like ALL further development upon release (the Zoom B6, as well as this app) completely comes to a halt. There are so many very obvious fixes that should’ve been done with the very first revision. With each passing day, I definitely regret not purchasing the HX Stomp.