AmpliTube 5 Max

Unfortunately quantity over quality is the motto here. For example most bass amps sound to dark and mushy or they lack mids to the point where you have to heavily make use of an EQ to get some kind of usable sound out of it. In general there are much better and cheaper alternatives on the market. Moreover, the fact that you always have to install the complete package wastes disk space when it's completely not necessary. The CPU load is pretty intense, about the double of other plugins with the same or even better quality.

Apart from that, their licensing policy is pretty puzzling. And if problems occur the customer service, especially when dealing with problems of licenses, acts more than ignorant.

So, all in all please stay away from Amplitube and other IK Multimedia products.

Despite of a lot of improvements still not really convincing in my opinion.

A lot of the amp models still seem to have been unmodified overtaken from Amplitube 1 to 3, and so they unfortunately also sound.

The AC-30's sound much too clean, the Fulltone OCD, which in reality is nicely adjustable from decent, almost clean crunch to lots of gain produces too much gain even if the gain control is at 1, most Orange amps do not sound very convincing, if you know the real amps, even worse, the Tiny Terror in version 3 sounded nice, but the "improved" handwired version now has little to do with a Tiny Terror in my opinion, produces too little gain and all the typical dirty is lost.

The Amplitube Marshalls, if they are Plexis, JCM's or newer Marshalls simply sound disappointing, if you ever have played a real Marshall, the Jet City amps rather sound like transistor amps to me, but hardly like tube amps, completely scratchy tones, but also newer models like the Soldano or the Pink Taco do not really sound very convincing to me, to be honest.

I have some better, more naturally and authentically freeware amp plugins meanwhile, commercial ones from competitors even more, so theoretically the Amplitube package has a lot of features, unfortunately practically most of these sonically for me is outdated or badly programmed garbage, if you know the real gear.

Some of the newer models like the Mesa/Boogie II or the Leslie collection sound good, but they rather are an exception. The Fender Tweed amps rather - apart from some few exceptions - sound very disappointing to me.

A Copicat or Echorec still is not included in the pedal section, as little as eg. a COT50, Zendrive or Zenkudo, much less a Timmy, Okko or SHO / Box of Rock, a Jen Wah with selectable, different Fasel coils (white, red, green) or a Maestro, in the speaker section legends like a Goodmans Audiom or Axiom are missing, but also eg. a Celestion Blackback.

In the amp section also still a lot is missing, eg. an old Gibson or National amp, a original Vox AC-4 or AC-10, a WEm Dominator, Echolette or Dynacord, some more Diezel, a Dirty Shirley, Trainwreck or Fuchs, Dover, just to name a few.

On the other hand, if they do not sound much better than the typical Amplutibe amp simulation, they also will onyl disappoint me. Maybe some more talented and skilled programmers would be helpful, but obviously these are hard to find.

I personally meanhwile get better sounding results, if I breadboard a low voltage tube pedal and record it directly into my DAW and add a good cabinet IR of my choice.

Most of all, if the older components will not be updated to 2022 / 2023 standard, I personally find it better that they are removed from this - at the moment and in my opinion - bluff package of outdated, bad sounding tones.

Luckily there meanwhile are more than enough alternatives available. Maybe not so extensive, but much better and much more authentically sounding....