Changelog

What changed, newest first. You are running version 1.0.0 — the exact build is in the footer.

Notable changes to Helrig, newest first. Dates are when the work reached main, which is what helrig.com serves.

Reported bugs are credited where the reporter said something publicly (a YouTube comment, a forum post) or asked to be named. Everything else stays anonymous — the report still shaped the fix.

3 September 2026

Share a preset with a link

There is now a Share… button beside Save. It puts the preset in your library and hands you a link you can post — on X, Facebook, Reddit, in an email, or just copied and pasted wherever you were going to paste it anyway.

Opening the link puts the preset straight into the editor — no landing page to click through. Paste it into a chat or a forum post and the preview shows the whole signal chain, laid out in the same block colours the editor uses, rather than a bare URL.

A link points at the save you made it from. Edit the preset afterwards and the link keeps showing what you posted — it does not quietly turn into a different tone under someone who bookmarked it. Share again after an edit and you get a second link for the new version, with the first one still working.

Some things it deliberately does not do:

• Your library stays private. A link exposes that one preset. Not your name, not your other presets, not your labels, notes or setlists.
• Nothing is browsable. There is no directory of shared presets, no feed and no profiles. The links are unguessable and are kept out of search engines. The only way to reach a preset is a link somebody handed you.
• Nothing is shared until you press the button. Saving to your library still does not share anything, and neither does opening a preset.

You can revoke a link at any time, from the same dialog that created it. Deleting a preset revokes its links too — and restoring it from the trash does not bring them back, so a delete means what it looks like.

1.0 — 27 August 2026

Helrig started as a way to look inside a .hlx file. With 1.0 it is an editor you can actually work in — on a laptop, and now properly on a phone.

This release adds undo and a full edit history, an overview that fits your whole signal chain on one screen, MIDI CC control over block bypass, tap tempo, importing straight out of a device backup, a cloud library organised by setlists, and a rebuilt mobile interface, along with a batch of reported bugs fixed.

Works with Helix (Floor, LT, Rack), HX Stomp and HX Effects.

Undo, redo, and a history of every edit

Every change you make is now a step you can walk back — Ctrl/Cmd-Z and its redo pair, or open the history panel and jump straight to any earlier point.

The history is written in plain language: "Add Deluxe Comp", "Bass Big Muff · Sustain". Not forty rows of "Edit". Turning a knob or typing a name records one step for the whole gesture, not one per pixel or per keystroke, so stepping back undoes the thing you did rather than a fragment of it.

Jumping to an earlier step keeps everything after it as redo. Nothing in the history can lose your work.

Your history stays with your preset if you wander off to another page and come back. It lives only in that browser tab, for that session — close the tab and it is gone, and nothing about your presets is stored or sent anywhere.

See your whole chain at once

An eight-block Helix path is wider than a phone screen, so reading the shape of a chain — or screenshotting it to show someone — meant scrolling and stitching together what you saw.

The new Overview button scales the whole chain to fit. On a phone, block names drop away but both paths, the split, the parallel branches and the block colours all stay legible. On a tablet it reads completely.

It is an overview and a screenshot, not an editing size — press it again to go back. The button only appears when your chain is actually too wide for the space, and it steps aside on its own if you widen the window enough to hold the chain. You can still drag blocks around while you are in it.

Bypass can answer to a MIDI CC

Your hardware lets a block's bypass be driven by a footswitch, an expression pedal, or a MIDI CC. Helrig showed the first two. The MIDI option was in your files all along, just invisible.

Now the bypass row has a MIDI CC control beside the footswitch picker and the snapshot camera. A block can have a footswitch and a CC at once, and setting one no longer wipes the other. Bypass assignments show up in the Controllers card alongside your parameter assignments, so you can see every CC a preset responds to in one place.

If a preset used MIDI-only bypass, Helrig used to draw it as a footswitch that does not exist — a phantom "FS 19" on an HX Stomp, a pedal with three switches. That is gone. Converting a preset between devices now carries these assignments through untouched, instead of turning them into footswitches and eating a switch slot something else needed.

Built for phones and tablets

The interface has been rebuilt for touch rather than shrunk to fit.

• Hold and drag works properly — reordering blocks, and dragging split and merge handles, without the page selecting text underneath your finger.
• Bigger targets everywhere — knobs, switches, dropdowns, tabs, block cards and library rows are all sized for a thumb.
• The path and DSP headers stay put while you scroll a long chain, so you always know which path you are looking at.
• Dialogs scroll properly instead of the page sliding around behind them.
• Filters open in a sheet. In the library, setlists and filters used to push the results most of a screen down before you saw a single preset. They now slide up over the list, which never moves. Whatever you have filtered by shows as chips above your presets, each one naming what it is — "Helix" on its own never told you whether it was a device, a label or a block — and each removable with one tap.
• A redesigned header, restructured menus, and consistent styling throughout.

Import from a device backup or a setlist

Helrig can now open HX Edit's .hxb device backups and .hls setlist exports, and pull individual presets out of them.

That means you can get at a preset from a backup without having HX Edit in front of you — browse everything in the file by setlist, search it by name, and open the one you want.

In the cloud library you can select many at once and import them in one go, and Helrig will rebuild the setlists the backup came with. Re-importing the same file refills those setlists rather than creating duplicates of them.

Encrypted premium and commercial setlists are recognised and named as such — Helrig cannot open those, and now says so plainly instead of failing in a way that looks like your file is broken.

Tempo, and tapping it in

The preset tempo is shown next to the device badge and is editable, to the same one-decimal precision HX Edit uses. It can be stored per snapshot with the camera toggle, exactly like any other parameter, and a snapshot-controlled tempo is listed with your other snapshot assignments.

And you can tap it in. The "Tempo" label itself is the tap target: first tap starts the count, and it keeps settling as more taps come in. That is how tempo gets set on the hardware, and it is the only way to match a tempo you can hear but do not know — a record playing, a drummer counting in.

A fix worth knowing about: Helrig previously refused any tempo below 40 BPM, but the hardware accepts 20. Because every tempo write ran through that limit, opening a preset stored at 30 BPM and touching the tempo at all — even just the snapshot toggle — quietly rewrote it as 40. Presets like that are safe now.

Your library, organised by setlists

The cloud library is no longer one flat list.

• Setlists are how you move around it — the same grouping your device uses, and the one a backup file already carries. They sit at the top of the sidebar with a count each, above the filters that narrow whatever you are looking at. Open a setlist and any filter you had set is dropped, so you never walk into a setlist and find it empty because of something you filtered ten minutes ago. Deleting a setlist deletes the grouping, never the presets in it.
• Cards or a list, whichever you prefer — Helrig remembers. Cards are for browsing, the list is for scanning and finding, with columns you can sort by. Sorting covers your whole library, not just the presets currently on screen.
• Find a preset by the gear in it. Search now matches the blocks a preset contains, by the names you actually use: "tube screamer" finds a preset with a Scream 808 in it, "mxr" finds one with a Gray Flanger. It also searches your notes and your snapshot names.
• Labels and notes. Label presets however you think about them — "church", "drop D", "needs work" — and leave yourself a note. Labels stay with the preset, so restoring an older version never restores an older set of labels. Renaming, labelling and note-taking do not create a new version or count against your quota.
• The trash now really empties. Deleted presets have always been restorable for 30 days; from now on they are actually removed once that window passes, rather than sitting in storage forever.
• Add presets to a setlist in bulk, filter by hardware with device icons on the chips, and see your storage bar update as soon as you upgrade rather than after a manual reload.

Convert between devices

Converting between Helix, HX Stomp and HX Effects is out of beta and on by default. Helix ⟷ HX Stomp ⟷ HX Effects, in either direction, with a dialog that shows you exactly what changes before anything is written.

The dialog that shows what has to be dropped now gives you a real decision to make. Each block appears the way it does in the catalog — its proper name, what it is based on, mono or stereo, and what it costs in DSP. Choosing what to cut to fit a smaller device is a choice between a 38% amp and a 2% gate, and the old list showed neither the cost nor even a readable name.

You can also remove more blocks than the minimum required, which Helrig used to refuse.

Converting to a smaller device drops what will not fit — snapshots beyond the target's count, controller assignments it has no switches for, amp and cab blocks on an HX Effects. All of it is reported in the dialog rather than quietly rewritten. Back up your device before converting, as you would before any change you cannot take back.

Reported bugs, fixed

A batch of bugs came in from people sending preset files and screenshots, and they are fixed.

The one most likely to have affected you: some presets carry stale values in their snapshots. A snapshot stores its values under the parameter's name, and that name outlives the block it was written for — so swapping a block into a slot can leave the old model's value behind, under a name the new block also uses. Those values can be well outside what the parameter can hold; one reported preset had a reverb Dwell of 7 for a parameter that runs 0 to 1, which Helrig displayed as 700%.

Helrig now handles those the way the hardware does, tells you when a preset contains one — naming the block and the parameter rather than quietly showing a number that is not in your file — and offers to repair it. Nothing you hear changes.

Parallel paths are drawn correctly

Four fixes to how forked chains are drawn, all reported from real presets:

• A split and a merge stored on the same column drew one handle exactly on top of the other. Only the top one could be grabbed — and pulling them apart was the only way out of that shape. They now sit either side of the column, like HX Edit draws them.
• Where the fork and merge cables overlapped, they ran through the same pixels, so one cable looked like it arrived from two places. On one reported preset that was nearly 300px of overlap.
• A merge that sits to the right of where the lower path ends is now drawn the way the signal actually travels — along the lower row and up once at the merge — instead of cutting through the fork's lane.
• Two cables sat a pixel or two off their own line, which showed as a visible step where they met another cable.

Everything else

• Your snapshot selection survives a conversion. Converting from a Helix (8 snapshots) to an HX Stomp (3) left the picker pointing at a snapshot that no longer existed. The visible half was a wrong name; the quiet half was worse — parameter edits, bypass toggles and tempo changes on that snapshot appeared to work, went nowhere, and were gone at the next switch.
• A privacy policy that describes what the app does, written from the source rather than a template. Your presets are parsed and edited in your browser; Helrig sets no cookies of its own; analytics record that something happened, never what is in your preset, and are processed in the EU.
• No more browser pop-ups. Every confirmation is a proper dialog now, which means it can say what the buttons do and tell you what actually happens — that the presets in a setlist survive deleting it, that a deleted preset is recoverable for 30 days. The safe option is focused, so a stray Enter never deletes anything. On the desktop app this was more than cosmetic: those browser pop-ups never appeared at all, so some buttons silently did nothing.
• Blocks look the same everywhere — the same solid fill in the chain, the catalog and the conversion dialog, so a WhoWatt 100 is the same red wherever you meet it.

Good to know

• The cloud library requires an account.
• Back up your device before converting a preset or writing anything to hardware. Good practice regardless, and Helrig will remind you.

Thanks

Several of these fixes exist because someone sent in a preset file and a description of what looked wrong — including the two biggest ones in this release. If something in Helrig does not match what your hardware does, that is worth telling us about.

11–22 August 2026

Two weeks that took Helrig from "views a preset and edits its blocks" to "edits the routing too" — and fixed a lot on the way.

Highlights

• A preset-corrupting bug is gone. Helrig could write controller IDs meant for a different device; one user's Helix Rack hung on "Rebuilding Presets" after HX Edit crashed importing the file.
• Parallel paths work properly — nothing is silently dropped, and splits/merges are editable by dragging.
• Preset tempo is shown and editable, per snapshot if you want it.
• HX Effects support, alongside Helix and HX Stomp.

Fixes

Preset integrity

• Controller IDs are no longer written for the wrong device. @controller is device-specific — 9 means Snapshots on an HX Stomp but a footswitch on a Helix — and Helrig wrote the HX Stomp numbering regardless. A Helix preset built from a blank template carried 12 bare footswitch records with none of the fields a real one has; HX Edit crashed importing it and left the user's Helix Rack hung on "Rebuilding Presets". IDs are now derived from the preset's own device, pinned against the controller-name table inside HX Edit itself, and verified across 1,230 files. An unambiguous mismatch already in a file is repaired rather than carried forward. Where a device's MIDI ID genuinely cannot be derived, the write is refused rather than guessed.
• Blocks stopped going missing. Presets whose lower path ran past the merge lost blocks off the end of the grid with no warning — two reported presets were dropping 2 and 5 blocks. The renderer no longer packs rows into a shared column budget, and a test sweeps the whole preset corpus asserting every parsed block reaches the page.
• A split made at the end of a path collapsed the whole chain into a flat, position-colliding row (reported by mikehguitar).
• Exports are blocked over 100% DSP instead of handing you a preset the hardware will not load, and the DSP coefficient itself was corrected.

What you see on screen

• Boolean switches show what their two positions actually are. Reported on YouTube: the LA Studio Comp "had no way to switch from Limit to Comp". The switch was there — it just read Off/On. The catalog names both positions of every one of its 491 boolean params, and about 90 of them say something other than Off/On — Compress/Limit, Chorus/Vibrato, Low/High, Slow/Fast, Triode/Pentode, 9V/18V, Ducking/Gating. All of them read as Off/On until now.
• IR slots show their number. The IR library's 128 slots have no names in HX Edit's control spec, so every one of them displayed as "-".
• The split marker sits in the column the file names, matching what the details panel reports. It was drawn a column early on the ~20% of forked presets whose lower path starts before the fork.
• Cab and IR budgets per DSP path are enforced in the block picker, so you cannot build something the hardware will not hold.
• HX Effects' DSP and split behaviour were corrected for its 9-slot paths.
• Preamps show what they are based on, borrowed from the matching amp where the catalog leaves it blank.

Editing

• The fork and merge can be moved. Previously the split handle could not move at all on some presets, and the merge was bounded by the wrong column so it could not be dragged left of the first branch block.
• Dragging the merge past the output releases path B into its own output, and dragging that output back onto path A merges them again.
• A path can be forked on a single block — it used to need a spare one, so the affordance was a dead no-op.
• Path B's output is selectable and routes somewhere. A freshly released path B showed "None" and its card opened no panel.
• Touch fixes — creating a split is reachable on a tablet, and dragging a split or merge handle no longer selects text.

Conversion

• Converted chains keep their order. Gappy or out-of-range positions made the target's slot grid wrap blocks out of sequence.
• A branch whose blocks you removed no longer collapses onto the merge, stranding the survivor outside its own fork.
• The preset keeps its name, Variax settings merge onto the target's node shape rather than carrying the source's, and dropped snapshots and controller assignments are now reported instead of vanishing.
• Removing more blocks than the minimum required is allowed.

New

Parallel paths, rebuilt. Split and merge are now driven by @topology — the field the device actually uses — instead of guessing from marker positions. The parallel region is drawn with doglegs the way HX Edit draws it, the two rows keep their own lengths, and a split that never merges is rendered as one, with each row running to its own output.

Tempo. Shown next to the device badge, editable to the one-decimal precision HX Edit uses. The camera toggle stores it per snapshot, and a snapshot-controlled tempo is listed with the other snapshot assignments.

Editing the chain. Routing options (input source, outputs, Path 1 → Path 2 link), split-type picker, a Variax panel, Send/Return blocks with FX-loop trails, snapshot-controlled bypass, keyboard entry for parameter values, and an accessibility pass.

HX Effects support, alongside Helix and HX Stomp.

Convert between devices — Helix ⟷ HX Stomp ⟷ HX Effects, with a dialog showing exactly what changed rather than quietly rewriting. Off by default while the last fidelity issues are worked through (NEXT_PUBLIC_ENABLE_CONVERT=1 to show it).

Exported files are stamped as written by Helrig, so a file's origin is visible.

Site

PostHog analytics with preset loaded / edited / exported events, feedback links, a back-up-your-device notice in the footer, mailing-list signup, IndexNow wiring, refreshed icons and OG images, updated About page.

Thanks to everyone who sent in a report — several of these were fixed exactly as described, and the .hlx files and screenshots are what made that possible.