gchiaren's forum posts 789

I emptied my wishlist a while back and yet the counter still records there as being 20 items on it 🫤

This issue was flagged a good while ago so I'm guessing it's not an easy fix?

Fixed!

Update: custom ordering is back, and it's now the default sort on your wishlist.

Your existing order has been preserved. So whatever arrangement you had before should still be intact when you load the page.

If you want to rearrange, there's a Reorder button next to "Add gear" that opens the drag-and-drop view (same one as before). And the sort dropdown still lets you flip to recently added, oldest, or by price if you ever want a different angle.

Thanks for the nudge, it was a fair miss on our end.

Appreciate the feedback. We can bring back the custom ordering! Stay tuned for updates...

Can you tell us what mobile device you're browsing on? Also, where in the world are you? :) What region?

so i have been dealing with this one for many years. I want to change my rating but i have memorized four star rating from an old review of mine i cant chage - stars blink and go blank - so either four stars or no stars at all... Can you make it one star please (link below, i friggin hate this "amp")??? On a side note - how do you rate an item without a written review??? i see many ratings with no reviews but cant do so!!! https://equipboard.com/items/orange-amplifiers-micro-crush-pix-series-cr3-3w

Hi! Hmm I tried to fix it for you, check to see if your rating looks correct. Also, look for the "+Add Review" button in the reviews section on the product page for the Orange amp. Click that button, and you should be able to adjust your rating, as well as write a review.

And yes you are able to leave a 1-5 star review on any gear in that same way. You don't have to write a written review if you don't feel like it (but we love it when people do!) :)

Hey everyone,

We just shipped a big update to the wishlist. Quick rundown, then we want your input before we ship the next pieces.

WHAT'S BETTER

• Every store and price on one card - compare new vs used at a glance.
• Price drops shown inline - previous price struck through, savings amount, all-time-low flag when it hits.
• Group your wishlist with labels - home studio build, pedals for church, whatever organizes it for you.
• Add gear and set alerts in one flow - search and save from the wishlist page itself, with price-alert preferences baked into the save process.

WHAT'S COMING NEXT

The big one: price-drop emails. The data, UI, and your alert prefs are all ready - we just aren't sending the emails yet. That's deliberate; we wanted the wishlist itself be in good shape first.

(After that, more save to wishlist shortcuts across the site so you can stash gear the moment you spot it.)

WHERE WE'D ❤️ YOUR INPUT

1. Anything missing from the wishlist gear cards? Info you'd want at a glance that we're not showing?
2. Store muting - would you want to opt out of alerts from specific stores you don't buy from? (EU users skipping US-only stores, or just dodging a marketplace you don't use.) Or overkill? 🧐
3. Anything else - roast us. Better to hear it now than after we ship emails. 😅
   

Thanks!!

We'll absolutely look into this. Would love to see screenshots if possible. Would you be able to upload via Imgur or similar?

Hey pkennethk - really appreciate this.

Great report. We shipped fixes for #1, #2, and #3:

1. Search now covers all deals, not just what's loaded.
2. Load More preserves your active search.

3. Store filter auto-applies, and there's a Clear link so you don't have to awkwardly uncheck your way out.

4. We did some manual cleanup. But bad data can slip through for two reasons: a buy link gets matched to the wrong item, and sometimes the store's own feed lags behind what's on their site. Less of an issue over time, but expect some noise. We have some lightweight AI that tries to determine whether a buy link from a merchant matches correctly to the product on Equipboard, I'm thinking we can lean a little harder on that 🤔

Thanks for the thorough report. Keep it coming.

ps. How's that Model D treating ya 😂

Great question! We'd love to work with any store - big or small - as long as they offer a solid experience for musicians. The way our deals page works is different from traditional editorial roundups where someone manually hunts down deals (which is why most deals pages go stale).

We ingest product feeds directly from retailers, which is how we're able to surface price drops automatically and keep everything current. So the main requirement for adding a new store is that they can provide us with a data feed we can work with.

If there's a store you'd like to see included, let us know. We're always open to adding more.

Hey everyone,

We just revamped our equipboard.com/deals and wanted to share it with you all since you're the community that would actually use it!

What it does: Equipboard already tracks buy links across Sweetwater, Guitar Center, Thomann, Amazon, and other major retailers for every item in our database. We're now surfacing price drops automatically - when something drops in price at any store, it shows up on the deals page. You can filter by category (guitars, pedals, synths, drums, etc.), filter by store, and sort by biggest dollar or percentage drop.

Why we built it: If you've ever tried to hunt down deals and low prices across multiple stores, you know it's a pain. You'd have to check Sweetwater's DealZone, Guitar Center's sale page, Amazon, Thomann, etc. separately. We figured since we already have the pricing data flowing in, why not put it in one place?

A few things to know:

• Prices come from store feeds and are updated regularly (usually nightly). Occasionally a deal may no longer be available by the time you click through - that's the nature of price tracking.
• Equipboard is community-curated, so you may occasionally see a duplicate listing or an item linked to the wrong product. If you spot something off, let us know
• This is v1. We have ideas for where to take it but want to hear from you first.

What we'd love to hear:

• Is this useful? Does anything feel off or confusing?
• What would make it better? More filters, price history charts, alerts?
  
• Any categories or stores we're missing?
  

Check it out: https://equipboard.com/deals

Appreciate any and all feedback!

Dont get rid of the no-frills old search bar though. 9 times out of 10 I just need a quick hit. I start typing, the drop down pops up with predictions and I get where I'm going fast.

Definitely not getting rid of that! Most people search that way also. The full-page search experience is more for deep diving, filtering through gear more carefully, etc.

Band results need thumbnails

Agreed, will add that.

Add album results.

Yes! We will, this is a big one.

The Top Matches results could use thumbnails of some sort.

Okay, will try to make top matches more obvious.

Glad you're liking it overall! :)

We've rolled out a new search experience on Equipboard! 🚀 The previous search results page was okay, but there was lots of room for improvement.

Nailing down search on an app like Equipboard is challenging, because users can search for many types of things - gear, artists, brands, etc. We took inspiration from websites we're fans of that have a similar challenge, like Tripadvisor and Huckberry.

The new search features a tabbed layout, gear filters, and improved result cards.

We hope you like our re-imagined view of it. Like all new features, we expect some bugs and quirks and things we may have overlooked, so please, all feedback welcome!

Jim, you write as much as you want 😆 This is every time Jim contributes to EB:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0HuQ1ep260

Also, we spruced up the similar item submission form, and lowered the character limit to 30. As always, we welcome and and all feedback!

Just tried it out. FWIW, it's a bit strange to require a decent-sized sentence of notes when you're tagging the original hardware.

GREAT point! I had the same thought but needed to hear it from someone else, so thanks :) We should relax that requirement. Also, this particular form is still on the old Equipboard layout and somewhat convoluted, let us see if we can't sexify it a bit... 🤔

Thanks guys! And being ass-deep in plugins made us realize we probably need this 😎

Hey everyone! We just added two new tags to the Similar Items section:

• Software Emulation - for when a plugin is modeled after a piece of hardware
  
• Hardware Original - the reverse, linking back to the original gear

A huge category of plugins out there are digital recreations of classic outboard gear (compressors, preamps, EQs) and synths. Until now there wasn't a clean way to connect those on Equipboard. Now there is.

Example: The Brainworx (Plugin Alliance) Friedman BE-100 Amplifier Plug-in is a software emulation of the Friedman BE-100 Guiar Amp Head. You can see the connection in the Similar section of the page.

If you know of any hardware/plugin pairs, feel free to add them! Just go to any item's Similar section and click Add recommendation.

Wow that was a mess!!

We're down to just a handful of items that are legitimately Plugin Alliance brand. The plugin world hasn't decided on one clean standard, so we did the best we could with naming and re-branding. Not perfect by any means, but way better than what it was.

We're fixing it now it'll just take a little while. I think for the purposes of Equipboard something like this is the solution: Unfiltered Audio (Plugin Alliance) BYOME

Keeping "Plugin Alliance" in the name helps with de-duplication, places like Thomann and Plugin Boutique use PA as the brand, whereas Sweetwater prefers the actual manufacturer of the plugin. This covers us in most cases (and we have an internal tool that judges the "correctness" of the buy links, this helps w that as well)

Plugin Alliance should NOT be a brand on EB.

Alright thanks guys we'll need to get that cleaned up and do some consolidation.

also, plug alliance isnt the ONLY source right, many things on there you can also get on Plugin Boutique and other places? it would seem that way

ok cool. and is this true about them?

Plugin Alliance actually owns Brainworx, which is the engineering team behind many of the plugins on the platform.

Can someone help me understand Plugin Alliance? Is it a marketplace, and not a manufacturer/brand?

Like, are these duplicates and should they be merged?

• Unfiltered Audio SpecOps

• Plugin Alliance Unfiltered Audio SpecOps

• Bettermaker Bus Compressor Plug-in

• Plugin Alliance Bettermaker Bus Compressor

Oof, re-reading what I wrote yesterday... definitely a situation where taking the time to say something simply/succinctly might have been a good investment. I was really shooting from the hip under time pressure. If I were in your shoes, I'd file most of that feedback under "yeah whatever, buddy... let's see if anyone normal agrees". lol.

Not at all. I literally DM'd michael about how awesome you guys are after I read your feedback. Maybe I worded it weird but I guess I was saying "Ok pile on everyone, who else feels this way, and about what things?" only because then we can see some signal of what we should tackle first :)

I'm not just blowing smoke - feedback like this is fantastic bc when we launch new pages we don't have this like 50 person think-tank panel. It's Michael and I and a whiteboard (or napkin over some delicious Austin tacos) and we do our best, but it's great to hear the immediate feedback of like, "hey when I land on this page I see a giant music player and don't exactly get what this is"

Incredible feedback PK, will definitely factor all of this in as we develop this further. Would love to hear anyone else double down on any of PK's suggestions, it would help us know what the biggest pain in the ass things are on this new page!

For now though, we wanted to present the next phase. Check out this gear geekery:

I added renowned producer Peter Katis to the site. I went to one of my fav albums, Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights and associated Katis to the album as a producer, mixer, and engineer. Then, I was able to submit his Telefunken V76 microphone preamps (found an awesome source of him chiming in a forum) and tagged Turn On the Bright Lights since he's now credited on the album.

I mean, how fun is this gonna get 😎

Album pages - BETA (lol 😅) - are LIIIIVVEEE!

Aphex Twin - Syro

Nirvana - Nevermind

We say beta jokingly, but not really joking. We realize this is just the v1 start, and we're already underway taking them to the next level. Upcoming improvements:

• Ability to associate "album credits" i.e. what non-band artists worked on the release --> For the initial list we're thinking: Producer, Engineer, Recording Engineer, Mixing Engineer, Mastering Engineer, Programmer, Session Musician
• Making them faster to load --> Aphex Twin's Syro is loading tons of gear all at once so we have to introduce some kind of pagination/loading/infinite scroll type thing to make it snappier
• Letting gear be tagged across multiple albums with multiple sources --> These days it's common for artists to put out "how I made this track" videos. Well if Marsh used Diva on his remix of Eternal Summer, he surely has used Diva on other tracks we want to annotate with gear, so we need to support this (currently an item can only exist once for an artist per source/proof). This is a more complex change, but we're on it!

For now, quietly launching in this forum thread to get initial feedback/reactions/praise/etc so let us hear it!

EDIT: Ah yes and making albums searchable, of course 👀

• Roland Cloud SH-101
• Roland SH-101 PLUG OUT

They look to be the same software synth, but it's a bit confusing with the naming. Are "Roland Cloud" and "Roland PLUG-OUT" the same thing? 🤔 Should they be merged?

...but it seems @gchiaren has found a way to tag 'em all up behind the scenes? Everything on the list is now tagged, but the 200 or so items I hadn't gotten to yet don't have any recent updates in their edit history?

Turns out, over a decade+ the community has given us this info in submissions - just in written form! So now we're able to scan submissions and if it says something along the lines of "used this gear in this album" and we're able to match up the album (or single) title, we can automatically tag! It's a great jump-start.

What's a good email to reach you at Ken?

If your email addresses associated w Equipboard are OK, I can connect you guys if you don't wanna share publicly, just lmk

Interesting discussion going on in this Butch Vig <> Neve submission but I wanted to bring it back here. So to catch everyone up:

Our vision is this - the album Nevermind gets its own page soon --> "The Gear Used to Record Nirvana - Nevermind".

Aside from the artists in the band being listed on that page, I believe we'll need to be able to associate producers/engineers. So then, since the Nevermind <> Butch Vig association has been made, Nevermind will be able to be tagged on any gear added to Butch Vig.

Pk and spruce made some good points, about being able to tag people associated with the album in various roles. Session musicians was the example used. So my question to you all is this:

If Nevermind (or any album or single) had its own page, what are the types of associations that could be made (aside the artists involved officially in the band)? I'd rather start narrow and focused so let's not go too crazy granular. Can producer/engineer be combined into one? Session musician has been mentioned. What else is critical?

We just added the ability to associate gear to an artist and band's albums, but also singles. In the rock world, it's much more common for gear to be talked about as it relates to what was used on an album, but in the electronic world gear used on a track/single is important.

We're gonna take this feature even further, and make landing pages for albums and singles. That way there's a page dedicated to the gear used on Nirvana - Nevermind, along with the people involved, an embedded Spotify player to listen to the tracks, and the gear listing. And same with singles, so like the gear used in Zedd's Clarity.

We're SUPER excited about adding this as an angle of gear exploration & inspiration. Curious to hear your thoughts & ideas!

Ok, took a pass at the album de-duplication/cleanup. Results:

• 3,924 variant albums deleted (editions like Deluxe, Remastered, Anniversary, etc.)
• ~5,500 variants skipped (no matching original album with same artist)

You. Fucking. Rock. 🤘🔥

This is great, we can definitely run this process more or less, and see where that gets us. With the size of Equipboard, not only is perfection difficult to achieve, it's also usually the reason initiatives slow down or don't get going.

I believe with this we'll observe at least an 80% improvement in getting rid of the multitudes of what are essentially duplicate album entries. If only duplicate gear was this easy to resolve 😂

I was thinking you could just write some code that deletes albums with certain keywords in the title ie: Anniversary Remaster Deluxe Etc

Essentially yes, but it's slightly more sophisticated. Can't just blanket delete an album with the word "anniversary" in it bc that could be part of a legit album title. So we'll need to look at an album title and then programmatically check for variants/duplicates w the types of keywords we're talking about, hence me asking if my list is good or did I miss any.

One quick question - Regarding duplicate album pulls (I.E. Homework, and Homework 25th Anniversary Edition, and all the countless versions of RAM) is there any way to filter this down so that we dont see gear tagged with the same album twice (Or even three times!)?

Yeah I agree w this, one version of each album should suffice. I suppose we could just bulk search and delete. What types of variants exist in the album name that duplicate an album?

• Deluxe Edition
• nth Anniversary Edition
• Super Deluxe
• Super Deluxe Edition
• Remastered
• Remastered [year]
• Deluxe Edition Remastered
• [year] Re-Mastered

Is this list missing any obvious ones?

Quick update on this - album tagging is now live!

You can now attach albums to gear submissions. When viewing or editing a submission, you'll see an option to specify which album(s) the gear was used on.

Here's a quick example I just tagged up: Leo Wyndham's T-Rex Engineering Mudhoney II

The proof mentions:

"I have this, it's a new thing, it's called a Mud Honey 2 for a heavy chunky distortion sound. I use that on a song Gravity and Fade which are the sort of rockier numbers"

Those tracks are on the Palace album Shoals, so I tagged it accordingly.

What you can do now:

• Tag submissions with albums (supports multiple albums per submission)
• Filter an artist's gear page by album - useful for seeing "what gear was used on X album"
• Filter by usage context (live/studio/promo) in the same filter modal (we moved that into the filter modal/popup and out of the sidebar)

What's not built yet:

• Year the gear was used (still on the roadmap, just tackling one piece at a time)
• Timeline visualization (pk's idea - still love it)

Would be great to see some of finleygomez's Daft Punk knowledge get tagged up with albums! The discographies should be populated for most major artists/bands at this point.

Spotify added ✅

Happy 2026!

We're very excited to build this feature, happy to say it's underway. Might take a bit of time and a few iterations to get the flow just right, but we're starting with the backbone, which is populating as comprehensive of an album database as we can.

You should start to see the discography populate for bands (U2, Aerosmith, Kings of Leon, Oasis).

We'll start with band albums, then singles, then individual artist albums (e.g. John Frusciante has a ton of solo work in addition to RHCP and all the other bands he's in). Then with all that populated, we can allow for gear submissions to be attached to albums.

We'll keep you posted here along the way.

This queue isa gamechanger.

Hell yeah that's what we like to hear 🤘

Without being pedantic, I think that it would be beneficial to have both the year ('Date Owned' as a suggested heading) and album ('Albums Appeared On' as a suggested heading).

This is what I'm leaning towards as well. I can't think of any issues it would cause, since it's optional metadata and, if available, is interesting. I think it makes sense to separate dates used/owned versus albums used on and not conflate the two (there absolutely could be overlap, but they're two different concepts as finleygomez illustrated w the Daft Punk example).

If Equipboard is to be the place where tone and gear geekery knows no bounds, the addition of this metadata makes a lot of sense to me!

As far as this goes:

Would adding an album/era/date-range tag to someone's already-approved submission trigger the need for a re-review?

It's a good question and we're open to suggestions. What do you all think? Could even be some sort of hybrid, where if your GearIQ is high enough it doesn't trigger a re-review? 🤔 Just thinking out loud here...

Let me know if this is something that is doable / desirable.

This is definitely doable, and it sounds like the community wants it, so we're all ears. The challenge is to standardize the data - as in like how we structure it on the backend - to where it's specific enough and useful for users, but also widely applicable to a lot of artist/gear submissions?

So, how should we standardize it? I'm leaning towards "Dates Owned/Used" since that can be a year, a decade, or a span (and it encompasses "first known use" right?).

So it could be 1978. Or 1970s. Or 1970-1978.

As per this idea I think the specific artist eras are hard to scale across artists (I mean, relatively few artists are iconic like Prince and have eras people talk about). But one thing we have thought about is pulling album data, and then you could select what albums the gear was relevant in.

Thoughts?