IK Multimedia StealthPlug + AmpliTube 2 Live

If you are an Apple customer and are used to buying and installing a company's products being "easy", then brace yourselves. (Better yet just stay away from IKM.) The experience of installing their products - be it on PC or iPhone - is just punishing.(If you are used to endless licensing issues with legal copies of Windows, then you may find your IKM experience just slightly less annoying.)I hear their amp sim product is pretty impressive, technically. And if I could get the right driver for mine without providing my ADDRESS and PHONE NUMBER I might be able verify this. But unless they RADICALLY improve their customer experience, IKM is not going to make it, as a company, in the long run.Why must I provide intimate personal details including my address and phone number, to get a HARDWARE driver to work?I bought the iPlug thing, and also the Stealth Cable. The latter required registering to get functional drivers for my OS. I had to enter every conceivable personal item of info (which of course I populated with bogus data - wth do they need my phone number for?).But before I even got THAT far, I had to manually enter long strings of serial numbers. But to do that, I had to manually enter a URL - which, after multiple tries, gave a 404. The page just didn't exist and it wasn't my spelling. It took me 20 minutes of angrily searching their terrible website (I'm a web designer - their site is terrible for customers).I also recently bought an iPhone/MIDI adapter. It certainly wasn't from IKM that's for sure! Not after the punishing experience I had as their former customer. It was from Line 6.If you value your time, stay away from IKM. There are just too many competent competing products out there, in every category they do business in.

I received my stealth plug and it works perfectly. You need to update the driver from the website and set the input in the settings option in amplitube 3... Other than than that its great!! running windows 7 32-bit.

This is a rather convoluted review, because it involves a long back story.I bought this thing early this year (2007) after being burned by the M-Audio Fast Track USB device. The M-Audio thing, I was told, wouldn't work with XP Media Center Edition. So, before I bought this Stealth Plug, I called them and specifically asked if it would work with XP MCE and the sales people assured me it would.So I get it home and guess what? It didn't work! I went round and round with their tech support and never got a definitive answer of what was wrong.Jump forward eight months to November. I wiped out my hard drive and installed XP Pro so I could use music hardware and software that I couldn't under MCE. Anxious to actually hear my Stealth Plug through the Amplitube software that came with it, I installed it and guess what? It did exactly the same thing as before!I contacted Tech Support and got nothing at all from them. I called, left messages and nothing. Pissed off now, I did some deep research. That is when I found out that this product does NOT work with Windows, at least not like it's supposed to. It was only because of a review posted in December 2007 that I found out that though Amplitube is supposed to be able to be played stand-alone, the only way to get it to play through a PC is to plug your computer speakers into the headphone output of the plug, or run a patch cord from the headphone output to the microphone input of your sound card!What kind of crap is that? How can it be stand-alone when it won't play through the sound card without a patch cord? Of course, it took a lot of tweaking to get it to sound right in my sound card since the headphone to microphone impedances are not quite a match. I haven't tried plugging directly into my speakers yet, but don't like reaching around behind the computer and messing with the jacks all the time.It turns out, the ONLY way to configure Amplitube so it will work, is with the ASIO Stealth plug as the input AND output. There is no option to make the input the Stealth, and the output your internal sound card. Supposedly, Windows will not allow that. Is that dumb or what?I was at Guitar center the other day, and the guy told me he heard rumors that IK was coming out with a major fix for this problem sometime in January, yet it that's true, nobody is saying anything about it at IK Multimedia.So, what does it sound like? Well, after much tweaking to get a clean sound out of my sound card, I was able to play around with Amplitube. It has clean American, British, and Bass amps. The simulations are pretty good and you can tweak the knobs and get different sounds. There is also a variety of stomp boxes including distortion (of which there's enough already just from the sound card), phaser, phlanger, etc. The stomp box that doesn't make much sense to me is the wah. How are you supposed to play and manipulate the wah pedal with the mouse at the same time? There is auto-wah, but that gives little control.So, it seems this system is designed for MAC's because in the PC world, Mr. Gates and crew do not allow multiple ASIO sound devices.As I was typing this, I finally got a return call from IK Multimedia! The service tech confirmed the problem with the PC. He also said there is no fix coming because the problem is a Windows problem and they have no control over it.So, this is not just a plug and play device like it's implied. And nowhere in the instructions does it say you have to run the headphone jack directly to your speakers or the microphone input of the sound card. Or, if it does, it is not very well stated. Tonight, I'm going to go back and read the instructions again, just to make sure.Though there is a workaround for the PC, this thing should be advertised as a MAC device, as far as I'm concerned. Yes, you can get it to work, and Amplitube does a good amp simulation, but it is NOT just plug and play. After I try recording with it, I'll edit this review with the results. This device has a lot of potential, it just doesn't live up to it, yet...

I have been using this now for about 2 months. Sometimes when I open Amplitube 2, the sound is all distorted. I can usually fix this by changing the sampling rate on the setting menu and opening and closing the software again. There is something funky about the software. I'm still trying to figure this part out. You should have the recommended half gig to run the software. Once the sound is working, I have no complaints. The sound is really good thru the speakers on my computer and the supplied patches are great. It works great with my bass and guitar. I find the loop feature a big help to figure out how to play some of the licks in songs. Using the mouse to control the amp settings is also a little funky. I would buy this again if I had to do it all over. It's a very easy way to interface your guitar to your mp3 files and play along with them.

I planned on using this equipment instead of carrying around an amp while traveling. The stealthplug itself works fine. Has a little hiss to it. But the software that comes with it does not work. I have tried several whys to fix it including tech support. The drivers do not seem to be Vista compatable. In short, if you are wanting to use the effects advertised, be wary.

Poor

mi spiego meglio: sotto gnu/linux funziona perfettamente; l'ho comprato pensando che avrebbe ridotto a 0 la latenza; invece quando ho visto che niente cambiava, mi sono un po' "baloccato" con i parametri di jack e ho ottenuto lo stesso risultato che sotto windows, cioè latenza 0, anche collegando la chitarra direttamente alla presa del microfono. aggiungo che al di là di questo è un po' scomodo. alla fine nemmeno amplitube ha fatto la differenza perché con guitarix ottengo dei suoni buoni.