IK Multimedia Amplitube VST PC

Windows XP SP2 with Cubase SX3 on Quadcore Pentium. Using as VST plug-in, along with UAD studio pak, Antares Autotune, Voxengo Elephant, Soniformer and Polysuasher. 30 years of multi-trak, pop music recording. Currently recording at 24 bit, 88.1.

I'm offering a reward of $500 to anyone who can install this properly and get it to launch the first time out. You'll not only hate this plug in by the time you give up trying to figure this out, you'll hate music!

Yeah. It's OK. So what? Gets a couple of nice sounds, none of which really sound like tube gear.

Don't waste your money. Too expensive. Service model is the most cumbersome I've encountered, yet. I really wanted to rid myself of all rack gear, but these guys broke the fun meter. Can you spell class action lawsuit?

Save your money and get a tube Fender or Vox amp with a 1/4" line out jack for recording.

Gibson ES-347 into a Fulltone Supatrem then through a Marshall JCM800.

Lots of fake knobs and fancy graphics!! Doesn't make up for the laughable sound quality.

Terrible!! Who are these people deluding themselves into thinking this crap software is anywhere near an SM57 in front of a cab? This stuff is too expensive for the kiddies who wouldn't know the difference.

Crappy company, mediocre sound quality within the fake amp industry, and absolutely, spine-tingling horrific compared to a real amp. Why are people buying this garbage? The people at IK Media really suck. I'm not sure if there is a crappier company. Can you tell I feel ripped off here? Despite what the amateurs and kiddies say, stay away from this overpriced, crap software.

Crap alert!!

I've been playing guitar for 23 years. Got into recording about 6 years ago. I built a DAW three weeks ago out of an old computer and parts I picked up at a computer store. I use Qbase LE as it came bundled with the sound card. I do my main recording on a Tascam MX2424. I dump my .wav to the DAW so I can work on them at home. I have only used Amplitube since I built my DAW.

I was up and running with the whole thing in one hour. I liked the sound of Amlitube from the start. My band made some recordings at another studio (non-bias third party) and the guitars didn't sound good. I dumped the .wav to the DAW and with Amplitube in no time had them sounding almost good. Then I needed Tech Support.

I've used it to save almost all my dirty guitar tracks from the outside project my band did.

IK Multimedia has the worst Tech support I've ever come across. They make you leave a message rather than wait in a que for phone support. They've taken at least to 2 days to call me back (said they would email me the fix, I never recived it). I emailed them for help. The email support comes with single line solutins to try, and when they don't work it take 24 hours to get another single line responce. Two and a half weeks of waiting to fix one issue (registering the product), and still not solved. My advice buy somting else. This review was writen in anger.

I have been playing guitar for 28 years and recording for the last five. I am using Ampilutbe with Cubase and a Tascam US224 console, my PC is AMD Athlon 1900XP, 512M RAM, M-Audio BX8a monitors. I am primarily a blues player.

It took a while to get used to it. I bought the disc from a friend who decided to stick to mic'd guitar recordings, did not get rthe manual. I can't, I have a house full of kids and a wife who is not so tolerant of loud guitar amps. I find it pretty easy to use once I got the hang of it. I mostly use the VIP presets and dotcor them to my taste.

The sounds are pretty realistic FOR BLUES ONLY. For hard rock, this is NOT the program to use. The heavy rock disrtion sounds are dreadful. As for Texas souding blues recordings... It's pretty convincing. I just had on of my live shows recorded and there were plenty of mistakes. I was able to record a separate track sync'd with the main guitar a track, then insert silence on the main track. After tweeking levels and distortion level, it's very hard to tell that I did a psuedo punch of guitar tracks.

I paid 50$ to a friend for the program. Great deal in that respect. As before I love the blues sounds that I get but the hard rock distortion is really bad. I have had zero problems with crashes or lock ups. As with most home based computer recording, you can't really do much else with the PC while recording and mastering.

I've been playing guitar for about 15 years, bass for about that long, and mandolin for about 5 years. I gig with a bluegrass/western swing band regularly and compete in flatpicking contests regularly. I play acoustic and electric guitar, & occasionally bass, in the band at church.

I'm reviewing Amplitube SE, which came bundled with Mackie Tracktion 2. I'm using it as a plug-in in Tracktion to process dry guitar signals. Currently, I'm using it for a classic rock project.

I'm running Tracktion and Amplitude on a HP Pavilion zv5000 laptop with a 2.4 GHz Pentium III processor and 768MB of RAM. I use an Edirol USB soundcard (a UA-1EX if I remember correctly) and monitor with JBL passive monitors of decent quality. (I don't remember the model number off-hand, they ran about $450/pair.)

The interface is pretty intuitive. It's setup to mimic an amp face with a few extra and specialized switches. I find the program to be fairly easy to use overall, and have found the presets to be decent, and can be pretty good with some adjustment.

I had no problems installing the plug-in. Copy protection is somewhat irritating. YOu have to use the serial number and a digital ID number specific for your computer, log on to IK's website, and get an authorization code. Less than 5 minutes, but you have to fill out a fairly extensive survey of name/address/phone number, and give them a working email address. This is especially irritating because they show you the authorization code on the web page after you fill all that stuff out--you don't have to use the email address to get the auth code. This leads me to believe that the primary purpose of the email address is to send promotional emails, which I loathe. I really hate giving out my email address. Anyway...

The sound is pretty good. Good enough to do the job, anyway. I would rate it 3rd-best of emulators that I've used. The best emulator I've used is the Vox Tonelab. Second-best is the POD XT. Third-best is Amplitube. However, Amplitube has a clear edge for recording--I can go back and change settings at any time. If I use the Tonelab or POD for a preamp, I have to re-record if I want to change the sound very much.

I've been using the Amplitube for a very, very challenging project. At least, it's challenging for a perfectionist like me. I've been recording a guy's parodies of classic rock songs, so I've been trying to nail the tones of AC/DC, The Kinks, Aerosmith, Roy Orbison, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and others. I'm about a third of the way through the project and so far Amplitube has given me what I need to make extremely convincing reproductions of the originals. That is, probably 98% of a random audience and 90% of guitarists would mistake it for the original until the different vocals come in.

I do spend some time tweaking presets; actually a lot of time. But that's because I'm looking for an exact, specific sound. If I were just looking for a "good" sound, many of the presets would work, at least for classic rock and blues. I tried using the Voxengo Boogex freeware tube amp emulator plug-in for a while, but couldn't really get what I was looking for out of it. I found Amplitube to be markedly superior in tone, and noticeably quieter. Of course, for the money it had better be superior.

Not surprisingly, I find that a huge part of getting the tone I want comes from (in descending order): my playing technique, which guitar I play, the setup (strings, p/u's, action height) and settings (switch position, volume & tone knob position) of the guitar.

As I said, I bought this (Amplitube SE) bundled with Mackie Tracktion 2. (It also came with numerous MDA plugins, SampleTank 2 SE, and the RM IV drum sampler.) For that price, I feel it was worth it. I wouldn't pay full price ($400) for Amplitube. I would put the value in the $100-$200 range, but I guess I'm cheap.

Note, I haven't tried Guitar Rig or any other non-freeware plug-in guitar amp emulators. The other emulators I've tried were hardware (ToneLab, POD, POD XT, CyberChamp) or freeware.

Overall, I've found Amplitube to be a useful tool for shaping tone on dry guitar tracks. If I were recording an original (non-parody, non-cover) rock guitar project, I would probably use it only as a backup to real amps. I would, in that case, use it to provide tones that I didn't have amps capable of producing. Of course, I'm assuming that I would already have a good idea of what I wanted the final arrangement to sound like. If I was still undecided on arrangement, I would record a dry track in addition to the miked cabinet so I could use Amplitube to re-amp later if necessary.

In summary: It's decent. Useful for certain things and easy to use, capable of producing good usable tones, but not worth the $320 street price. Because of the high cost for the program, I'm rating it only as a 7. If it were in the price range I feel is more appropriate ($100-200), I would rate it an 8.

I'm a guitarist/bassist with 25 years recording and gigging experience. I have lots of experience with DAWs and industry standard software such as Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic, Reason, and numerous plugins.

The Interface was okay - nothing special but not bad either.

The sounds are acceptable especially the clean ones. Obviously this is an emulation package so there are problems but overall the plugin enables reasonable emulations of classic setups. For clean tones the plugin does a great job with minimal noise.

It was a bit pricey in my opinion. But when I bought it, Guitar Rig had yet to come out so it was a logical choice for me at that time. I use Amplitube to develop demos in the studio and some of the tones make it onto the final product whereas I re-record other tracks using mics and real amps. As mentioned I like the clean tones and find that they are quite useable in a professional context much more so than the distored tones, which sound very processed and nu-metal-ish - that is fine if that is the sound you are going for but I would rather mic up a Marshall or a Boogie for the real dirt. Still Amplitube does a decent job of capturing some of these elements. In terms of performance I haven't had crashes. I use it with Pro Tools and on occasion PT will complain about buffer settings but hey this is on a single CPU laptop with a gig of RAM so I'm not complaining. When I put it on the desktop I get no problems.


I understand that the newer version has many,many more features but it has taken so very long to hit the market that I wonder if there are perhaps problems with it. Guitar Rig is already up to their second production release and the demos of that sound good and offer lots of flexibility so IK Multimedia's laziness might work against them. In the end lets keep in mind that emulation software has come a very long way since the horribly over-priced days of Amp Farm and developers are getting better all the time. So at some point in the feature I think that this stuff will be on target. But we have a way to go before I'll be scrapping my amps and plugging up to a laptop for a gig.

I've been involved in the music biz for more than 3 decades. I use a fast Windows XP computer, SONAR and several Native Instrument soft synth plug-ins in a DXi plug-in environment. I tried to use Amplitube as a plug-in to add amp simulations to my soft synths.

When I purchased Amplitube a year ago, I made a $300 mistake. It crashes so frequently that I don't use it any more. I suspect that it was never really designed for SONAR's DXi plug-in environment.

I recently purchased Native Instruments' Guitar Rig ... the price has been recently dropped to $300 ... and it is far superior to Amplitube.

I decided to stop using Amplitube, but I thought my friend might enjoy toying around with it. So I emailed Amplitube at their official support site, asking how I could transfer the Amplitube ownership license to one of my friends ... and 2 weeks later, I have heard NOTHING from Amplitube.

Good sound quality ... before it crashes.

Purchasing this software is a HUGE mistake.

Im am relitively new to PC recording however dont let that deter you form this reveiw. i just got a new Celeron D 2.6 GHZ PC with 256Mb of DDR ram (64 of that is being set as on-board 3D),so im only using this plugin with 192Mb of ram, i use it in Cubase SX and i run my Guitar into A beringer BCA2000 Via USB.

this plugin is to easy to use...i ave know idea how anyone could have problems using it. you just click om effects in a track in cubase and select "AMPLITUBE" simple, done

I couldent belive how real 95% of these settings sounded, some of the higher gain setting can have alot of back groung hiss butthat depend on were you are in a room, ie i had my TV on so i turned it off and alot of that went away, plus i have a star so it got single coils in it so im sure if you wanted to use a high gain setting with a hummbucking guitar its should eliminate alot of unwanted sound.

as i said int the beging im am only using this with 192Mb of Ram when its say on there website that it requires a minimum of 512 (as does the Beringer BCA2000) and it runs and sounds fine.
i am very lucky to have got it for free however if i had to i would gladly pay for it, its simple to use and VERY versitile.
one other thing to add is i downloaded 250 Presets of Imesh (a P2P programm similar to Kazaa) all very good and alot of them were top sounding VIP settings so if you desire have a look around the net for them (it was only about 150K).

A lot of experience. When I used it, I used it in Cubase SX under Win XP. @GHZ with 768 meg RD Ram. MOTU 2408, 308 and Mackie 824 monitors with an Event Sub.

User interface is a snap. Easy to install. Easy to get a decent sound because a bunch of precents are included that you can tweak...if you want to tweak.

It's a little thin by itself and is a tad sterile in tone. With some effects it's not bad in a mix. Presets are okay. I have a POD XT PRO which in my opinion is a lot better, but if I was on a budget, this would be a good choice. It's the best software sim. of the ones I've heard. Additional effects are crucial for making this plugin sound good. It's nice that it's all in software, but since I got the POD XT PRO I haven't used it - but I'm keeping it in my bag of tricks.

It was a birthday gift, so I guess it was worth the price. My favorite feature is the inclusion of presets - it's a time saver and a lot of plugins didn't used to come with them. It's low impact on my CPU and has never crashed.

If it's all you have it will probably be the most awesome software plugin invented, but if you've been around the block it's just middle of the road.

A lot of gear and 25+ years of experience.

Using it (when I use it) with Cubase SX and other DAW PC based Apps.

Produce demos in most genres. Multiple PC's at 2.0GHZ or better running Win XP. MOTU A/D and Mackie 824's with Event sub.

A snap to use. I I always have a high regard for software that has a decent number of presets already made. This way I can tweek or just go with it.

It's the best amp/cabinet software simulator I've heard to date, but I also own a POD XT PRO and the POD XT PRO is what I use when I record. Amplitude is average to good and sounds Okay in a mix, albiet a little thin. It does sound competitively good compared to old POD gear and it's very handy to have it in the software environment - that's definely a plus.

Still, my preference is to use the POD XT PRO - it's no hasstle at all with SPDIF.

I only paid $35.00 for it and frankly I don't use it anymore. It was useful before I got the POD PRO XT, but now I'd much rather use the POD.

It never crashed when I used it and it was pretty CPU friendly. The guy that sold it to me had just bought a POD PRO XT and I followed his lead.