IK Multimedia Amplitube 2 Live

I've been making music for 20+ years, although some periods other things (kids, work) asked most of my attention. Started home recording with a Fostex 4 track, about 4 years ago I went digital. I play guitar but on recordings I do drums (programming) and bass. Normally I use a Linux based DAW (ardour2, hydrogyn, Audacity) with a Behringer V-Amp2 and since a few months a Line6 Pod2.
My cousin send me a stealth plug with Amplitube 2 live and told me this was better.

I used Amplitube as a stand alone to test the sounds and how it works.

At home I make instrumental guitar music. No commercial plans, just fun and letting people know what I'm doing at the moment. My computer has a AMD 64 bit sempron, about 700MB memory available. It runs UbuntuStudio 8.10 at the moment, used to run Studio64. Soundcard is a Soundblaster Live (being replaced with a MAudio 2496 soon), Sennheiser headphones and Edirol 15W active monitors.

It's easy to set up. Coming from Linux, the messing around with serials and auth codes is a bit irritating (lost the codes), but hey, welcome to the wonderfull world of commercial applications. Besides that it was installed easy enough. Didn't have toe use the manual and getting sound was easy after I descovered you have to use the stealthplug as an audio interface and ik plugged my headphones in that little gadget.

Well, after messing around with the presets and trying bare amps plus the effects I normally use, I couldn't really get a decent sound out of it. Sounded a bit like my 10W orange crush practise amp. The high gain settings anyway. Clean it was ok, but I got a lot of strange digital sounding sounds using any of my guitars (epi les paul, Fender HM strat, Ibanez S470) which I never heared befor.

In short, the presets suck, the bare sounds are nowhere near the V-Amp or Pod 2 and the Marshall 3203 head I use live is another dimension all together.

I've always been able to get a reasonable to good sound out of anything I used but with this it was impossible. Spoiled? Don't think so. I've had some cheap stuff in the past but this gives me unusable sounds, unless the clean ones.

3 out of 10 for everything together. Only clean: 7

I got this for free. Considering the price tag (100 euro's) I would rather spent it an evening drinking in a bar. If I should make the swithc to a windows based DAW because of this kind of software, it would cost me a windows license (tried this on my kids pc which runs windows) and the cost of the software (about 200 euro's in total). Which gives me something I can't take with me, or I still wouldn't have my 'own' sounds with me if I wanted to play or record somewhere else. Buying a V-Amp and a cheap mixing panel is about 150 euro's plus I get all the other software (multitrack recording, audio editing, software synths, looping software) for free.

Personally, I think it's worthless. Maybe of use for someone who only wants to use it at home and wants acceptable clean sounds.