Saturday, October 26, 2013

Ubisoft Rocksmith Real Tone Cable and How to Kill Lag (PC)

It turns out I've been living under a rock for the last year but I've just discovered the Ubisoft Rocksmith Real Tone Cable and this thing is Awesome!



It's a cable that is simply a 1/4" jack (guitar end), some sort of Analogue to Digital Converter in the middle and a USB connection on the other end.




The cable runs for all of $38 at JB HiFi and is available at pretty much all decent video games stores.

You can also purchase the cable with the Rocksmith game which is available for PC, XBox and PS3.

My purpose for this cable was to simply be able to plug my guitar into my PC, fire up some effects software with some degree of recording capability and also bang my headphones on so I can jam away as loud as I want and not annoy the neighbours.

Well, after some stuffing about, I'm there :)

When you first plug in the cable (Win7) it's automatically recognised.
Nice.

Then you go into your sound properties in Control Panel, select the rocksmith device, bump up the level so it's a bit louder and enable "listen to this device".

And then you (might) start getting mad (depending on your soundcard).

I started strumming away and noticed a good 1 second of delay between my guitar and what was coming out the speakers.

I've had this issue with using a 1/4" to 3.5mm cable in the past.

As always, there's always a way to fix things on Win7.
Thank christ I'm not using a mac.


Step 1 - Download and install ASIO4ALL

ASIO4ALL is a (free) driver that takes over some parts of your in / out audio from your soundcard driver.

Once you've downloaded and installed (and said yes to the gazillion driver install requests) there's no shortcut to the application.

ASIO4ALL requires an application to be running that talks to it, and then the ASIO4ALL menu appears in the system tray.

Also - make sure any application that uses your soundcard (my culprits were Chrome and my Webcam app) are closed before you use ASIO4ALL as it requires exclusive use of your output device.


Step 2 - Download and install Guitar Rig 5

Guitar Rig 5 is a great free effects, recording and playback suite.
You have to signup (*cough* mailinator *cough*) to receive a free serial but that's about it.


Step 3 - Fire up Guitar Rig 5 and configure ASIO4ALL

Once you've fired up Guitar Rig 5, you'll notice ASIO4ALL come to life in your System Tray.

All you need to do now is define your input (Guitarsmith) device and your output (most likely 
stereo speakers) device.




Wait a few seconds and you short start hearing delay-free audio cranking out your speakers.
Plus you get some free sweet effects.

Winning.




6 comments:

  1. Took me a sec to find the proper place to use the inputs and outputs (also to find the tuner) but it worked perfectly. Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is freaking awesome; it really made my day. Thank you so much for sharing about these 2 pieces of software!!! I recently bought my first electric guitar and the Rocksmith game, and the initial lag was saddening. This fixed it. thank you!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. so...does this fix the latency in the game?

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