Product Reviews by KVR Members

I owned an original 5150 amp (still kicking myself for selling it back in the day) and this one sounds and feels just like the real deal. I used both my favourite set of custom IRs (most of us will have theres by now) and also a few I made from my own 5150 cab (Sheffield speakers) and the sim worked great with all of them.

How you can give this a 1 star rating is beyond me ?!?

It can use a lot (!) of CPU if you set the oversampling to extremes but if you want it to be less demanding just use less when recording and push it to the limits when mixing;-). There's even an option for 32x oversampling (maybe best used for printing single tracks before mixing).

Yes, the grafics are basic (I would prefer to say "functional") and it can improve on a few things like more options with the gate, added delay and reverb pedals and a better interface for the IR screen (hence my 4/5 rating) but the main things - the sound and feel - are up to par with the big players on the sim market.

... and I'm an addict - I own most of them;-).

btw: One of my main want-tos with this was a standalone version but I found out that it works perfectly in SaviHost.

I reaaaaly wanted to like this (knowing their hardware from back ... in the 80s ?!? - god - I'm old !).

Picked it up for super cheap in a sale but still I think it might have been too much :-(.

I tested it (Stomp Ware) a few years back and thought it was quite decent at that time so when it came on sale I didn't test again but just jumped on it. - Big mistake.

The thing is that this one might be just the single worst aged plugins that I know of (Stomp Ware which this is based on is over 10 years old I think).

Compared to todays standards the amp simulation is pretty much unusable. Plenty of free options out there that blow it out of the water.

Not realistic at all - not sound wise and especially lacking in the feel and feedback (to your playing) department.

The stomp boxes are all on the "nahh" side and the one that was my main reason for purchase - the Maximizer - doesn't hold up to either it's hardware counterpart (I only know the 19" version though) or vs other maximizer plugins. Pretty much everything I compared it with sounded better after minimum time of tweaking (Waves, PA just to name a few options).

Sorry, but to sum it up: Year 2010 called - it wants it's plugin back :-P.

I does do what it says.

At first I thought Ghost Dog was right in that it doesn't add more than 2-4 harmonics but when I tested it thoroughly with a sine wave it showed a lot more.

Test scenario was melda sine wave generator, voxengo span pro, cubase 9.5, win10 pro. - I have to say though that you need to send quite a volume into it (!) otherwise it just produces the 2-4 harmonics.

So just 4 stars from me. The volume thing could have been described somewhere.

The ampsim is payware now - $40 !!.

All the info I had in my old 4 star review is still valid but for a $40 sim it would have to deliver quite a bit more for that rating.

At $40 I can only rate it at 2-3 stars because there are a lot of options out there with way better dynamics, better IR handling and a better GUI in general.

Sorry, but no cigar .

...below is my (4 star) rating for when the thing was still free:

"2 five star ratings by users that are only here for less than a month ?!? - fishy :-).

...anyway...

The software itself is very good. Especially when you take the (current ?) price into account - zero/nothing/nada.

It is very easy to dial in a good sound and whoever needs a manual or instruction how to use it has never seen a amp sim before (or maybe not even a computer).

I have only played around with it for about an hour and so far I can't really say anything about stability but the rest looks like this:

Pros:

- very easy to dial in sounds
- good amount of good presets
- easy on the CPU and very fast loading times
- quite a few FX and amps to chose from
- realistic sound.

Cons:

- maybe not the most dynamic reaction to your playing
- no 5150 sim (sorry, but that is one I always love to have)
- not too many bass amps/cabs (1 each ???)
- no way to set the amount of oversampling (and no info on that at all)
-> all in all not really much that you could argue about in a free sim;-).

...after an hour of playing around with it it has replaced my goto practising sim (Audified ampLion (payed version)) and might even end up as my goto sim for composing because of the perfectly fast loading time (to be replaced than later in the process by a more sophisticated sim).

To sum it up: For a free sim this one is clearly at least a 4 (add the 5150 model and I have it at 4.5-5;-))."

No, I didn't like the way they handle their registration and installation either but it is by far not as complicated and "impossible" as the other review suggests.

You install the software and download the free presets, open the folder and find installation/registration instructions (in English+German) inside and just follow the steps.

What you get for it is a set of 26 reverb presets that show the characteristics of the full software and that you can tweak to your liking. The sound quality is pretty impressive, for the reverbs I know pretty close to how they sound and the CPU load is low for reverbs of that quality.

Overall a nice thing to have (and it's free;-)).

"Tri-Comp has been tested and works in Cubase, ..." ?!? - No, it doesn't. - Not in the latest version.

Cubase doesn't support 32-bit plugins any more and this one as afaik the rest of the manufacturers plugins is (are) pure 32-bit ! No 64-bit version what-so-ever .

For me that is a reason to rate it 1 oo 5 ! - Hey, it's 2018 !!.

(yes, I know that you could use a bridging plugin but w/o it it won't work and you can't even guarantee that it works w/o issues when you use the bridge...)

This has been my go-to IR loader for guitar and bass tracks for a long time.

Reasons for that are:

- 64-bit - which most of the other IR loaders haven't been when I checked back in the days.

- super easy to set up.

- mixing 2 IRs is possible/easy and very usefull.

- the 2 slots make comparing IRs very easy and fast.

The only reason that I'm no longer using it is that I downloaded the free "Pulse" from Rosen Digital. It's essentially the same plugin (has been created by Ignite Amps for Rosen) and in addition has a free Rosen Pulse cab IR build in for when you just need a quick test.

"AutoTonic ...goes far beyond, acting like a 'new instrument' ..."

Ok, that's the advertisement - now what does it do ?

Essentially it is a MIDI mapper and ... errr ... that's it! It's a MIDI mapper.

So what is the difference between the $179,- AutoTonic and the free Cales or the $50,- Autotheory?

The one thing you can't do with the others is mapping non-diatonic scales to the white keys of your keyboard w/o having "empty" keys in between octaves.

Meaning 3 things:

1) you can play every white key you want and it will always output a sound that belongs to your scale (...which is good ?!?)

2) it's the only program that can assign >7-note scales to the keyboard (...which is unique)

3) apart from the 1st root key on the middle c you don't have the slightest idea on which white key the rest of your scales root notes (the octaves) have ended up and most of your playing is just random. You can of course get that info by checking the display but if you change keys from - let's say - a pentatonic (5 notes) to a 6-tone scale everything on the keyboard changes again and you have to re-learn the keyboard again to play at least a bit fluently.

So ... does it work as advertised? - Yes. And that is what my rating is based on (just in case you wondered ;-)).

Which would be the end of the review IF it wouldn't have the $180,- price tag on it.

Seriously, you take the MIDI value coming from the input, change it to a MIDI value you have stored in a data base, send the new MIDI value to the output, add a fancy GUI to change the values in the database and that's it.

Charging 180,- for it and not even providing the (Windows) customer with a virtual MIDI driver that is essential (!!!) to make your program work is ridiculous.

And to then tell your paying customer to go to Google and search for a free virtual MIDI driver on the net to make YOUR software - that the customer has PAYED 180,- for - work so that you don't have to spend either time to develop a driver or pay the developer of the driver for using it is just plain shameless.

Summary:

If you need more-than-7-note-scales mapped to your keyboard (and you don't want to program them by yourself in your DAW) go and spend the 180,- on AutoTonic - there is no alternative (that I know of) out there.

And may I suggest: Send the developer of the needed virtual MIDI driver some money as well ;-).