![]() ![]() The benefits of running this unit over the Real Tone are: This USB audio interface has 2 microphone-in (one of which can be instrument) gain knobs for each mic input selectable 48V phantom power for professional microphones 4 line-out channels (channel assignment software configurable) 1 independent headphone-out (with dedicated volume control) MIDI in and MIDI out. The unit that I chose was the TASCAM US-200. ![]() In this post I will give a rundown of the rationale behind my decisions and highlight the differences between the two approaches. With the success of that experiment I went ahead and bought a proper audio interface. Why this isn’t a prominent option available through the in-game menus boggles me – but then anyone who’s played the PC version probably knows it’s best not to get started on that infuriating menu system…!Įarlier I posted a guide to using a Real Tone cable (which comes with the game Rocksmith) to connect to Guitar Rig 5. But I’m confident that you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what a difference it makes. It’s not complicated or time consuming, and if it doesn’t work out then just bump the numbers back again. I encourage all owners of Rocksmith to give this a go. Clearly those default settings are very conservative indeed. In one step this reduces latency by a full 50% and I found it to be the difference between a noticeably laggy, somewhat annoying in-game experience and a very playable, acceptable one! And to put this in perspective I don’t have an epic gaming rig, yet making this change improved gameplay without degrading the sound at all. Looking at the maths of it all, simply changing the value for LatencyBuffer is going to make a big difference so I started by moving it down from 4 to 2. So the first thing to do is to set both variables to their default states of, respectively, and then work them down until clicks and other artefacts start appearing. The purpose of the buffer is to provide uninterrupted sound when the processors cannot keep up and it does this by introducing a lag (hence, buffer) allowing time gap in which everything can catch up before you hear an interruption. By default LatencyBuffer is set to 4 and MaxOutputBufferSize is set to 0 which means automatic, although in practice this almost always ends up being 1024 for pretty much all standard motherboard soundcards. In effect, the resulting latency of the system is proportional to LatencyBuffer x MaxOutputBuffe rSize. The two key variables here are LatencyBuffer and MaxOutputBufferSize. And it would seem that these are set by default very conservatively (resulting in high latency). The file that you’re looking for is rocksmith.ini located in your Steam/steamapps/common/Rocksmith directory. Thankfully however, there are some configuration settings that can be tweaked to improve the performance of the Real Tone cable. But I’m loathed to hack about my game in a way that could make it look like I’m pirating something on Steam that I totally legitimately own, just so that I can use some hardware that never would have been considered when they designed this game for console (grrr, console-ports). There are No-Cable hacks which allow you to play the game using your on-board soundcard (which presumably would suffer from high noise issues without the proper pre-amps of an instrument specific interface), and this hack should allow me to use my hardware instead of the Real Tone (one should imagine). Ideally I would like to be able to use my new TASCAM audio interface as my guitar input, but Ubisoft also use the Real Tone cable as their form of copy protection. What I haven’t discussed much is using the cable for what it was originally designed for: playing Rocksmith! Plenty of criticism comes from the latency present in-game – and I agree, it can be distracting. However, once it climbs too high it becomes unplayable. Lower latency of course is always desirable, but a little latency can be lived with without ruining the experience. One of the areas that I noted a large difference was that of latency – the gap in time between plucking a string and having the computer emit the sound as a note through the speakers. I’ve also been comparing its performance with a proper audio interface. Recently I have been posting about the Real Tone cable for use as a guitar audio interface for amp modelling and other Digital Audio Workstation duties. ![]()
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