Line 6 GuitarPort

The interface is well thought out and it's very easy to dial in the tone you are looking for. I give it an 8 only because it takes a little PC knowledge to keep everything running tip top. A PC novice might have problems. But, I assume that since you found this site, you would be capable of using this product. Be sure you have plenty of RAM. You really need a minimum of 512Mb to run the riff tracker smoothly. I had to upgrade and it fixed a "dragging" problem between riffs. Other than that, it's a piece of cake.

I run my Ibanez Prestige RG and S series into a Crybaby from Hell, into the GP. On my PC, I upgraded to a 24 bit SoundBlaster sound card and got a Logitech 5.1 system from Sam's. Both items, combined, cost under a hundred bucks. If you are using the crappy speakers that came with your PC, don't be surprised they sound crappy. Since configuring everything about a month ago, I have yet to plug in my plexi., and my pedals are all in a box. I can go from Randy Rhodes to CCR to Angus with a click. No cords, no batteries no shaking walls, no pissed off neighbors, just good tones, even at low volumes. The GP puts you right in the mix and with the tweeks they provide you can dial it in, balls on. I agree with previous posts that the dirty tones sound better than the clean ones.

In my opinion, the riff tracker is not worth the extra hundred bucks. Spend the money to upgrade your soundcard or speakers. The GP website has many cool backing tracks you can jam with, but RT will not allow you to record the mix from GP because of copyrights. RT will only lay down your guitar signal. If you are like me and don't want to waste hours trying to record a song a riff at a time, just get the GP and then download a shareware program called Goldwave. I found out about it, oddly enough, from the GP message boards. It works great and records the signal from the sound card, not the GP.

Definatley not for gigging. The box itself is nothing to brag about, but the volume knob works. The software runs pretty smooth but will crash every now and then. (fixed witrh a re-boot. I've left it running for days at a time with no problems. I'm able to run other programs at the same time with no problems. I have found Line 6's website down a couple of times. Other than that, I'd say it's reliable enough for a hunderd dollar hardware/software bundle.

Who cares! It's a hundred bucks. Do you really send in your warranty cards anyway? To the people that are having problems: I suggest you go to the place you purchased it and get them to take care of you. Most dealers are there to make you happy. If you can't get GP to work on your PC, take it back to where you bought it and buy a POD. It has many of the same tones and you?ll get to use your cables and batteries again.

Seriously though, any questions I had were all answered by posts on the message boards at the website. Line 6 techs monitor the site and try to answer questions there. My guess is they would rather handle customer service for a product like this with message boards than to field 100 calls a day from people saying "Why don't I get sound from my speakers?"-Just guessing...

Ok- here's the skinny- Buy this- you will not be disappointed. I have been playing for more than twenty years, I love it! The wife loves it! (she hates the plexi:-) I can play the lead to "I'm Tore Down" record it, rip it, burn it, email it, etc... All within about 5 Minutes. There is nothing else on the market that will allow you to do that. It is simply the best practice tool I have ever used! Lessons, books, videos...Nothing comes close. If you are thinking about getting one, just do it! I guarantee your playing will improve overnight.

At a hundred bucks, it should be the cheapest piece of gear you own. The seven bucks a month for the website is worth it as well. I guess if you are cheap, you could join and download the entire site, then cancel. But for the price of a pack of smokes and a beer at your favorite blues bar, you can log on every day and jam. Hum?

Piece of cake, so much fun trying different effects amps etc.

I use strats, les pauls and PRS all sound excellent.
Cant say if they sound like the originals but they do sound good, especially considering the price. Remember this is good fun not professional quality recording kit.

Not gone wrong yet, easy set up. Home use only.

Poor response from online support.

All sorts, lots of rocky blues.

Just trying to shed some light for people who are about to get it. I spent a better part of yesterday morning reading GP reviews on Harmony Central. I bought it during my lunch hour @ local Guitar Center.
Some people had various issues installing the product on their PC. Notice that most of them either had a POS pc or started playing guitar before computers were invented. No disrespect intended whatsoever. The whole install took about 7 mins. Yes I did have a USB driver snag, which was resolved by Windows XP prompt within 20 seconds. So if you have a Pentium 3 or 4 + XP don't even concern yourself with all those negative "setup" reviews.
Its hard to think of software that incorporates some many options/possibilities and is as easy to use, especially the online portion of it. BTW, no connection lag at all when you have cable - really good server.

What do you get for $99??? Not much, one good pedal if you're lucky. I used my John Petrucci Music Man (amaizing instrument) through a regular sound card and my trusty Senheiser HD-580 headphones. I must say, I was very much impressed by the quality of the modulation and its realism. And it gets 10 times better once you download actual artist's tones from their well arranged server. You'll never feel like your guitar doesn't sound right when you're jamming along with a song. I tried Clapton, Petrucci and Ty Tabor with their tracks from both the server and my PC library and their tones were there. Not 100% of course, but it made me realize how much $$$$$$$$$ you'd have to spend to get their tones in real life/gig situation.
Once again, you'll never get 16 different stacks in your house for $99, but sh*t, what you get here is great. Every tool must fit its purpose, so just ignore the people who expect this soft to sound like their $3000 Boogie stacks.

Physical reliability - well, it will collect dust by your PC and I don't think it will hurt it. Must agree with everybody here - definitely not for live gigs, not much flexibility. Although, I did see John McLaughlin play a show with Variax and a laptop, as he was seating in a lotus position for about 3 hours straight. Not much different from your home practice disposition.

Absence of a paper manual and multiple complaints of reviewer would suggest that it simply sucks.

Overall, you get what you pay for. I've seen those cheezy GP's for years and thought that it was another $99 piece of garbage for kids. Not true at all. Perhaps, its finally those initial steps the industry is taking steps to combine technology with mass rpoduction and still make some money off of us. In my opinion, its worth paying $100 just to access their online database with tonns of info, lessons and tones and other downloads. Its a great practice tool for many of us for the fraction of the price. Just think of how much $$$ you have spent on guitar teachers who ask you: "what do you want to do today?" when you come to your lesson. BEWARE, RiffTracker is only demo for $99.
So if you want to learn the instrument, lay off the rock star dream and a hundred bucks, get it have fun as you're learning.

For recording this thing is a snap. Unfortunately, I can't get it to connect to GuitarPort Online, a problem that several other users have discussed on the Line 6 message boards.

I play a mid-90's Japanese tele with Barden pickups. The sound modeling is extremely good for something so cheap. The presets are reasonably good and can be edited easily. The distorted tones sound better than the clean tones. You can get surprisingly good bass sounds out of it too.

seems reliable, but of course you would never use it for live purposes

The absolute worst, even worse than the guy from Nigeria who promised to send me all that money. Go to the Line6 message boards and see the thread titled "Guitar Port server down?" to understand what I am talking about. If you have a problem, don't expect to get any help at all. I would give it a negative 10 I I could.

The sound is very good, it is easy to use and makes sense as a very affordable option for computer recording. But I am giving it a 1 because the customer support is so terrible. Good luck trying to get a response out of them if something goes wrong. If it broke I wouldn't replace it and I will never buy anything else from Line 6.

The installation was very easy, just follow the steps. I also downloaded the latest version from their site (2.51) which added a few extras

I use Kramer/Steinberger/Epiphone plus an acoustic guitar with GuitarPort. The noise gate is working very well. I record the guitar using Cakewalk - very simple and the sound quality is amazing. The presets are not bad, although you have to play with them a bit in order to get what you have in your mind. What I did not like is that the effects provided were very few. I give it a 10 not because it is as good as the real thing but because you can have so many alternatives to record your music by paying almost nothing!

Not for very heavy duty use I guess, but who cares :)

I've been playing guitar for 17 years. I own many different amp modelling boxes (Genesis 3, Boss GT3, Zoom) and I decided to buy this just because of the price. I am very happy with my decision. The rest of the pedals are now somewhere hidden. This is because I mainly use the computer to record music and with GuitarPort this is so simple and the sound is good enough for my purposes.
I think that I will upgrade it soon (they have different pack) in order to get the extra effects/flexibility that I need.

Recommended: 100%

The install was fairly painless and the software/hardware worked fine. Let me mention that I installed both the Guitar Port and the RiffTracker software.

I want to mention that the install process seemed to take a fairly long time. In fact, for a while, I thought the process hung but it installed okay.

After an initial run thru of the tutorials, I was off and running with the Guitar Tracker software initially and then I fooled around with the Riff Tracker software.

I ended up having to re-review some of the tutorials again but this software is fairly easy to use. I mean, try using Cubase sometime.

I am disappointed that there's no hard documentation nor is there a "soft" manual available. It would be a good idea if Line 6 spent the relatively small amount of effort/cost and included at least a "soft" manual. What is there is a series of videos that walk one through the various processes.

I've run the output to my mixer and have the PC output connected to a cheap pair of Dell speakers that came with my system. I'm also using a Behringer UB2442FX-Pro mixer, an Alesis RA300 amplifier and a pair of Event 20/20 V2 reference speakers.

For those who say the tone is poor, etc. I totally disagree. I mean the damn thing sounds good through a pair of cheap-a** Dell PC speakers. And this is with a few presets that I happened to like without any tweeking. I was really amazed at the tone when cranked coming through a pair of PC speakers.

Kinda cool to jam along with Pink Floyd's "Breathe" with minimal effort in getting an appropriate tone and getting the guitar tablature, chords, etc.

Too soon to tell. I don't gig out anyway. I bought the Guitar Port & Riff Tracker as a practice aid, a learning aid and a easy way to loop and record guitar tracks.

And, IMHO, it excels in all three categories.

Well, there's a lot of discussion on the Line 6 board about the thin offerings pertaining to the Instantdrummer. Actually, I'm a little disapointed at the relatively few drum tracks included with the product. And the ones available for purchase (at $9.99) seem somewhat similar and for $10 it's unclear how many and what the drum tracks are that one is paying for.

In fact, I'm a little miffed at ALL companies that hawk products that require add'l purchases from the get-go. They should tell you up front that if you want to make good use of the Instantdrummer, you'll need to purchase add'l drums.

Others on the board complained about the 4/4 limitation of the drum sounds.

In any case, I've been using computer software and hardware to record guitar since 1985. I've owned (and still do) most of the sequencing & digital recording packages on the market. Personally, I'm tired of spending time as an engineer when I want to play. That's were the Guitar Port/Riff Tracker shine. Yeah, there may not be as many features as one would typically find on a $600 software package. But, when it comes time to just play, the product appears to let one do just that.

Granted, I've only used the software since Saturday (3/5/05) but it blew me away after playing with it this past weekend. I really like the way Riff Tracker's set up to record consecutive takes of loops or riffs. Really slick. I should mention that I've been heavily involved with various loopers for many years (Echoplex Digital Pro, Lexicon Jam Man, Electrix Repeater, Boomerang, Boss RC20XL) and I can say that Riff Tracker does a nice job in this domain. Again, it's not anywhere near as complex as the EDP, but there's a very low learning curve.

Guess I should have mentioned what kind of stuff I do. I like to work in both a standard 4/4 realm for fun and more esoteric musical realms as well. Generally, I like to build backing tracks using drums, bass, percussion, sometimes keys and solo over the whole mess. As Jeff Beck called it, "Chance music".

I will post my thoughts on the package at a later date after using it for a few months.

Set up was straightforward. Typical Windows install process. My computer recognized the GuitarPort hardware and I could use the amp modeling right away. But not everything went smoothly. The GuitarPort software failed to recognize my internet connection (DSL though a router). Tried adding line6.com and guitarport.com to Trusted Sites, turning off pop-up blockers, disabling firewalls, connecting directly to the DSL line without the router, etc. Nothing worked! I'll give it a 3 only because the modeling worked; otherwise it would be a 1.

Sounded just OK. I mean, you're playing back though a USB connection into a computer. What were you expecting, a blackface Fender Twin Reverb?

Well, since I couldn't get it to work, I guess I can't rely on it.

Oh boy, does Line 6 ever suck. CAVEAT EMPTOR. I tried getting help online and through the phone. No one in customer service took ownership of my problem. They asked me to run a diagnostic tool, which I did, and sent them the data file. Two days later I get an email asking if I'd run the diagnostic yet since they hadn't received the file -- pretty funny when you consider they were responding to the email to which the diagnostic file was attached! Anyway, I dutifully sent it again and waited a couple of days, when another email arrives saying that since they hadn't received the diagnostic file they were marking the problem solved and closing the case. WHAT A BUNCH OF INCOMPETENTS!

I returned this piece of crap. Line 6. Never again. I should have known. The Line 6 Spider 112 I bought was about the worst sounding amp I ever had the mispleasure to plug in to -- thank God for eBay!

Very easy to use, if you know how to operate knobs than you shouldn't have a problem with this product. The setup was a snap, pretty much like any other Windows application. You can also save your patches and even take note of your guitar settings so you know which settings you had with which patch. Don't Forget to upgrade firmware to latest one (2.51 at time of writting), see why below.

I run an ESP EX-400 thru a Dunlop Wah and then thru GuitarPort. Originally, I wasn't impressed that much with the sound, it was most certainly worth the price but a lot of the amps didn't sound that good, nethier did they sound that close to their real world counterparts but once I upgraded to version 2.5 I was completely blown away! almost all the amp models sound AMAZING, absolutley identical to the real thing. In fact, when I'm listening to my playing it sounds like a professional studio recording. Just make sure you have hi quality headphones, something with a range at least close to 10 to 30,000 Hz or monitors or you won't appreciate the quality of the sound. The effects also sound really good and in combination with the amps should give you almost any sound you want. The noise gate function also works very nicely and cleans out your sound without sucking the tone. My only complaint is about the Messa/Boogie Dual Rectifier model which actually sounds worse than it did in the previous version, not enough presence, but other than that all other amps sound superb.

The GuitarPort hardware itself is your average paraphernalia, plastic made and not too heavy duty so keep that in mind if you're planning on gigging with this thing. The application however is very solid and stable and has yet to crash on me, it also by-passes Windows in a lot of places so that only adds to the stability. I'd say the only gigging issue would be Windows itself.

oh boy. I made the mistake of signing up for GuitarPort Online. What a huge mistake. My trial period was fun and everything, a good number of backing tracks were available online but absolutely not enough to justify $10/month or whatever they were charging. Once I tried to cancel my subscription, I realized that it can't be done online and I had to call this number and xplain to them why I want to cancel my service but interestingly enough my call was never answered and the only thing that saved me from being charged again was the fact that my card was maxed out and they stopped trying after a couple of tries. So if you ask me, the online service is absolutley not worth it, just search the web for backing tracks.

GuitarPort V2.5 is an amazing product that sounds awesome and it's worth every penny, it's stable and works great, easy to use and out of your hair.

I got the Guitarport used (traded it for a TS9 reissue) and it came with 2.0 software. I never installed that but downloaded the 2.5 version from the Line6 site. Installation was easy and also the upgrade went perfect. There's no manual which is I ususally don't mind cause there a online manual, but I also use the Guitarport on my laptop without an internet connection. I do believe there are options I have not yet discovered and a manual could be usefull for that.

I have used other modelling stuff like Digitech RP100, Korg AX100G and Pandora PX4 and this Guitarport beats all of them. The sounds are really incredible !! I even like the presets which on my other gear sounded so artificial.

The amp models sound very real regardless if I play through my headset or with PC speakers. Of course I don't like them all, I have my favourites, but they really sound good. Also the effects and cabs sound realistic.

Tweaking the amps and effect is fun. Everything looks and works like the real thing, even when mic'ing the cabinet you have to move the mic.

The thing that really amazed me was how it responds to amp settings. Turning up the gain really works as with real tube amps. If have had a lot of different amps, tubes and solid state, and I love the tone of a slightly overdriven tube amp. The GP can really nail that sound. The only other modeller that could do that is my Tech21 Trademark amp.

Trying to get the sound of your favorite guitarist is easy if you know what gear he's using. Just select the same amp, cab and effects and you have the basic sound. A bit of tweaking and you should be spot on.

Depend on it..? It runs on a Windows PC so even if I could I would never gig with this. Who would ever take the risk that Bill Gates' blue screen would ruin a gig?

I won't rate this item cause it has not broken down on me yet... but I never trust anything that works on/with a PC.

Have not dealt with them

I play a lot of different stuff and the guitarport covers it all. From blues to metal, it all sounds great.

I use it on my PC and my laptop. On my laptop I sometimes have some popping sounds because of some applications or processes running on the background and that can annoying. On my PC it works perfectly.

I think the Guitarport is THE perfect practising tool. I also have the Korg Pandora PX4 which is also a nice piece of equipment but the GP sounds so much better. I still use the PX4 when I travel but at home nothing beats the GP. After hearing the GP I just might end up selling the PX4 and buy a PodXT.

Easy as install software & drivers plug in USB cable and guitar and start playing. I had no problems at all, i did the firmware upgrade on it as well.

Im on a P4 2GHz, 786 MB RAM, using a now old Soundblaster Live card and running WIN XP Pro SP2.

You have to know a far bit about what is what whilst editing or creating patches as little changes can have a big impact on the sound.

I didnt get a manual from my friend just the guitar port i had cables myself and downloaded software from the website.

Its really not at all difficult to use.

Im pluging in a Jackson DXMG guitar into it. I ran the output from the Guitar Port into a Yamaha Mixer which is connected to some studio monitors. I must say this is the best sound quality i have heard from any digital unit both for playing and recording.

Even though i have a 17" CRT monitor after using the HUM Reducer on the software it usually gets rid of any alien/unwanted noise.

The Sound from the amps are just amazing, as good as the real thing i must say, however they could improve the effects a little.

Well this is not al all ideal for use at a gig. ( well then again i might be wrong)

Using at home i have not yet had any problems with it at all.

Never had to contact them.

If you are looking for a good recording unit or a great tool to learn with then this is it.

I have been playing for about 4 years and have had many other digital amp simulation units and nothing comes close to this sound quality wise.