I'm guessing that lots of musicians and sound engineers have experienced the frustration of trying to understand and program a complicated audio device where all of the interaction with it is through a typical 2 line display, some buttons on the front panel, and an encoder.

There's usually a lot of annoying and frustrating menu diving to get to the various spots you'd like edit, and the whole experience is often like trying to read a book while looking at it through a straw.

The PCM 81 was like that for me; I loved the quality of sound and wide-ranging scope of the unit. There were a ton of built-in factory presets; some useful, some not, and some, frankly, were a complete mystery to me.

I spent a lot of time reading the user manual, and after a while, I was able to do a bit of simple editing on the presets I liked to make them more useful to me. 

A year into working with it I had some go-to presets that I really liked, but knew that even after all of my efforts, I was barely scratching the surface of the true capabilities of the unit.

Tom has been nice enough to let me test the editor he wrote for the PCM 80/81, and I can honestly say that my understanding of my PCM 81 has grown more in the last month of using it with his editor than in the last 8 years of trying to use it on my own.

I simply cannot overestimate the value of being able to see the "big picture" of how a preset is put together, and to be able navigate quickly and easily from one section to another as you make changes to it. 

To be able to open up and clearly see the various settings of an existing preset is an incredibly valuable learning tool, and Tom has arranged the graphics of each section of the 40 (!) available effect algorithms in a way that makes them easy to understand and modify to create your own presets, whether they're useful variations of a factory preset that you like, or an entirely new creation of your own.

I found the modulation section in particular to be a key to really understanding and getting the most out of the PCM 81. With Tom's editor, it's incredibly easy to create new (or modify existing) modulation patches and be able to immediately hear the results.

 Trying to visualize and control the modulation section using the unit without the editor is almost impossible, but using the editor with its clear graphic representations of the signal and modulation paths makes its power immediately apparent and easily accessible. This amount of control is the key to making things like delays and chorus deeper and more lush, panning more detailed and interesting, and pitch shifting more nuanced and musical.

The editor doesn't have a fully-featured librarian, but it does have basic functions that allow you to load and save single presets between the unit and computer for archival purposes. This is a really useful feature since these units only have 50 user preset locations, and you'll be filling up these slots in no time at all once you begin to experiment.

Bottom line; if you own a PCM80 or PCM81, this editor will open up a whole new world of sonic possibilities that you probably never even knew existed.