If you guys are unaware, there's an alternative to Rocksmith to better learn music. It imports RS files and has a 3d display mode nearly identical to RS.  Tone-Lib JAM. You can run the free trial forever, the delay gets longer I guess but I liked it so I purchased it.

Edited June 10, 20223 yr by Unleashed2k
fixed title

On 5/13/2022 at 10:05 AM, Cataclysmm said:

If you guys are unaware, there's an alternative to Rocksmith to better learn music. It imports RS files and has a 3d display mode nearly identical to RS.  Tone-Lib JAM. You can run the free trial forever, the delay gets longer I guess but I liked it so I purchased it.

Interesting, it'd definitely be worth checking out if it has full compatibility with RS. I don't have a huge interest in RS+ so this might be a nice alternative.

Didn't know about this, thanks for sharing

I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like maybe you can just load up any song and play along even without a tab. If so, this would be really useful with the slow down and loop features when writing your own tab / figuring the song parts out.

And good to know of alternative software due to never knowing what will happen with Ubisoft

Effects / amp sims could potentially be better as well, since this is software developed more towards the guitar community than gamers

I still haven't downloaded this to try out yet but just been thinking about it... if it works really well, I guess it pretty much eliminates the need to do the extra step of creating a chart from a tab... cus it appears you can just load a tab directly into this prog and start playing. I suppose if you like the RS environment then it doesn't have that, but otherwise...

Cataclysmm, thanks for sharing!!!

I downloaded and configured, took a look around the app and looks VERY promising!   I can't play right now, but will give it a shot later today and this weekend.

Off the bat, it resolves my biggest complaints with Rocksmith - very slow to start, bad video system with nvidia cards, difficult to navigate, unfriendly switching between rhythm/lead, in ability to make edits to mistakes in songs,  looping can be terrible on some tracks because the creator didn't bother to add sections.  works natively with external audio devices.  allows low-latency and higher quality audio input/output. ability to see a 2D tab-style view.  All of these are non-issues in TonLib Jam. and during my beta of Rocksmith+ Ubisoft actually made all the bad things about Rocksmith 10x worse.

Really cool feature, you can run VST Plugins such as Helix Native to build your own patches.

This might be a deafening answer for this community to move forward and break free from Rocksmith.  I will share some more when I get to playing with it;  but based on 10 min clicking around the app I'm 99% ready to cut Rocksmith loose.

@kringyes the intro screen to Rocksmith alone is so incredibly annoying - I know there's a hack but it doesn't work very well and it also doesn't eliminate the wait entirely. Plus the whole sign in to Ubisoft process takes additional time

And the ability to load third party VSTs is quite a huge leap forward from the RS sound engine. There are tons of excellent sounding FX and amp/cab modelers available now, so you can play with very high quality sounding patches compared to RS.

I still enjoy RS especially since I am used to it, but this program solves a lot of problems, and the ability to just load up songs and play without having to create a beatmap or use EOF removes a ton of time spent creating customs

So I've had a chance to play around with it a bit, and its pretty nice altho its not quite just load up any song and play - when you load an audio song it seems to sync the audio fairly well, definitely good enough to play along with a tab based on my limited testing so far. By the end of the song it is not exactly in sync, but its not a huge deal if you have the song audio solo'd (muting the tab audio) and are just using the tab as a guide to what you should be playing. I don't know yet if there's a way to improve the sync, haven't checked it out

You will also have to add an empty bar at the start of the song if the guitar part doesn't start right at bar 1, etc... not sure yet how this works for songs with really long intros bc I've only done very brief testing.

Also you will have to create tab arrangements for playing through the whole song by copy/pasting sections of the tabs into one single guitar part (depending on the tab you're using) because a lot of tabs have solos and various guitar parts separated out into different tracks, and you have to select the track to view the part which obviously you can't do while you're playing the song. Not a huge deal because its pretty easy to assemble an arrangement in the program by copy/paste

Of course you don't have to load the original song as a backing track and you can just play along with the tab, and also play the tab audio parts if wanted.

But overall its not quite a "load a song and play" experience, you do have to work it out a bit.

Still, probably better overall in terms of actually learning things and internalizing parts. 

Another advantage over RS is that you can load the program windowed and easily switch between other programs instead of having RS in fullscreen, and ToneLib Jam doesn't lock your soundcard up like RS either.

^^^That said, you can also still load RS DLC files into this program and play them using third party VSTs, so still a potential improvement if the other factors turn ya off

Likewise you can still make customs and then play them in this program. The 3D view isn't bad at all. A little less immersive

Need to figure out if you're able to get the audio sync more precise on imported backing tracks, surely its doable

Ok, I figured out how to do the audio sync... its super easy. Just have to look at the "Timeline" display bar at the bottom which will show the waveform of the audio and you can select the guitar track to overlay on top of the waveform. Then you just select a vertical bar and drag it to line up the necessary measures to re-sync the audio to the tab

Its really quick and easy, waaayyy easier to work with than EOF.

Yeah, this prog may be an RS Killer for me

 

The fact you can do everything you need to do inside a single program that is both intuitive and easy to use is another huge plus compared to the CDLC creation process

At the top left where it has the "Play Along FX" track - if you click on the measures timeline to the right of it, it will bring up the FX menu where you can select FX presets, program them and also select Amp/Cab sims. On the timeline you will see it place a colored bar for the FX and you change the FX at any point in the timeline - so you can program FX/amp changes throughout the song just like in Rocksmith... and the included effects are pretty killer sounding!

 

I was getting some latency with my soundcard interface so I had to change it to use ASIO4ALL in the options, now its playing great

 

Another tip - drag and drop the backing audio song files onto the track timeline instead of going through the menu to import. For some reason when I imported from the menu, it kept starting the audio on measure 2 instead of 1, but if I just drag and drop the audio file it starts on measure 1. Probably something stupid I am missing on my end.

It seems fairly promising. Looks like you can import the beatmap into eof by exporting it as a midi and you can actually edit the tab in the program unlike gpa. The midi playback synced with the song could come in handy and is actually in time unlike in eof. The loop/slowdown features are also good for transcribing, it's even got eq and panning options so pretty much all the features I need are covered except for the rare cases where I use phase cancellation.

Only slight annoyance is that you can't loop anything smaller than a whole bar and the tab editing seems a little clunky. Maybe I just need to get used to it since it feels kinda similar to how musescore handles it. Lack of legato slide options is a bit of a pain too but at least it has harmonic options unlike tux guitar.

Being unable to sync individual beats and having to do it by bar could also be a problem for songs that are really out of time. The auto syncing is meh but going off how "well" gpa preformed I wasn't expecting much and you can just clear it and do it manually fairly easily. The bpm changes being baked into the exported tab is a bit of a drawback too though and could take quite a bit of fixing before being able to upload something decent to ug/songsterr if you had to re-sync every bar. The 3D mode is a nice addition and could be handy for spotting certain tab issues (especially for midi transposition) but it's no replacement for rs imo.  

Overall this might be able to replace the use of guitar pro and transcribe in my current workflow and cut out a ton of the time spent in eof, I'll have to try making a full chart with it tomorrow and see how well it goes.

Some good insights there, I was wondering about the possibility of exporting for use in CDLC creation.

GuitarPro still seems to be the better tab editor as far as just transcribing a tab, but the features here seem extremely useful unless GP has this stuff and I don't know about it. 

Some of those issues with the final tab can always be fixed by importing the tab into GuitarPro at the end. Like if you click on the bpm you can quickly delete all bpms by zooming out and deleting each one (its pretty quick even if you have to do it for all bars). You can also add legato slides or whatever is needed.

I was thinking this program might be a good option for quickly testing CDLC charts instead of having to load Rocksmith, just load it in this program instead. Would be a much quicker way to see how its looking and spot errors than having to load up RS every time

The developers do have an active forum, so perhaps you could suggest needed features to implement in future updates. Surely it wouldn't be hard to add stuff like exporting tabs without BPMS and legato slide to notation

A couple of years ago I switched to tonelib jam and used it exclusively for over a year, mostly because of vst host functionality. I didn't like that if you want automate tone changes you need to use built-in FX and there is no way to auto-change VST plugins. Switched back when I got audio interface that allowed me to easily run VST alongside Rocksmith. And because TLJam pretty much still has same bugs that were there in 2019, I mostly use it as cdlc previewer.

11 hours ago, coldrampage said:

 The midi playback synced with the song could come in handy and is actually in time unlike in eof.

 

Have you tried adjusting midi tone delay in settings(F10)?

I personally like using eof midi playback => VSTi guitar

3 hours ago, theSG said:

Have you tried adjusting midi tone delay in settings(F10)?

Ah nice that fixed it. Had to change it to match the AV delay, thanks mate.

Also in regards to charting with tonelib I also tried gp8 which can also import it's beatmap into eof via midi and you can loop/sync sections smaller than a bar. It's EQ/Panning options are more limited but the tab editing seems far better so guess I'll be using that from now on instead.

Didn't realize you can't automate VSTs, good to know... seems like an odd choice to not include this functionality

I was prob a bit overzealous on my initial impressions as far as it replacing RS. It probably could for some, depending on what you need/want. I still think its a great option for anyone who doesn't want to put the time into chart creation but still wants to play along with songs that aren't available, because it definitely seems easier to get there than in RS, even if its not perfect

Does this software work for Bass?

 

30 minutes ago, dblbogey1 said:

Does this software work for Bass?

 

Yep

Had a few to play with it and it will take a bit of getting use to like any software.. but my 1-hour impression is that I'll be putting Rocksmith away and moving to TL Jam.  I don't do much editing these days (zero time) and primarily have been using Rocksmith to quickly learn so chords, riffs or work on a solo then take my learnings and play with friends or others in a live setting.   I no longer need Rocksmith for any kind of learning tool.  So in my case, TL Jam gives me everything I need in a much improved UI and experience that lets me get right into loading up a tab or RS DLC and start playing... it's also wonderful that I can just grab  a tab and load it too and use the 2D tab or 3D views.

It's also been quite stable, my ASIO drivers of Presonus Studio interface works great at at 0.7ms delay which is excellent,  I also got it to work quickly with Helix Native as the plugin and now I can use all my Helix patches and presets to step through... pretty cool.

I'll still give a few more hours of trial to make sure all is good, and then if it is I'm going to purchase it.

I've been using this some more to work on transcription of a song I'm charting, and I'm loving the ability to display the tab part over the audio while transcribing

But one thing is driving me crazy - having to start playback at the start of measures/bars instead of being able to play from inside the bar... is there some way to do this that I am missing? It seems unbelievable that this simple ability would not be possible

 

Also, what I've been doing is keeping GuitarPro open alongside and making the tab edits in GP since it has better editing functionality

I haven't been able to find a way to loop within a bar at this point,  at least compared to Rocksmith it's at a bar level instead of huge sections or poorly aligned sections for many custom DLCs.   using the keyboard it does let you step through note by note too rather then restart the loop

One thing I found helpful was under the view menu, turning off the "Catch Playhead" feature.. it's annoying when doing loops as it scrolls up the screen unnecessarily.

 

Overall, I think I'm sold - will give some additional time this weekend and buy it.   it's been stable, quick, smooth accurate so very happy using it as a tool to quickly learn tabs or practice some riffs or solos so it fully replaces my needs for Rocksmith.

One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get an Ultimate Guitar Official Tab loaded into it; it seems I can't extract it as a Guitar Pro file... hmmm...  am I missing something?

On 6/3/2022 at 11:58 AM, kring said:

One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get an Ultimate Guitar Official Tab loaded into it; it seems I can't extract it as a Guitar Pro file... hmmm...  am I missing something?

I'm not sure what you mean exactly? What format are your UG tabs in? The UG Official tabs I have downloaded are GPX and they will load into this program fine.

One thing I have noticed though is it seems to import some things incorrectly in newer GP formats and I have to convert them to older formats like GP5 to load correctly

 

One more thing worth mentioning is this program works very well to quickly convert CDLC files to GP5 tabs. The RS to tab program doesn't work very well for me - for some reason GP will not open any of those tabs no matter what I try. But GP will open the exported tabs from ToneLib Jam

I havn’t been able to find a way to get official UG’s to any format other than printing to PDF, and I have a premium account.

what steps do you take to get them into GPX?

27 minutes ago, kring said:

I havn’t been able to find a way to get official UG’s to any format other than printing to PDF, and I have a premium account.

what steps do you take to get them into GPX?

You can't properly download them even with a premium account 'cus UG pro totally isn't a ripoff.

Most people get them from here.
https://customsforge.com/index.php?/topic/66806-official-ultimate-guitar-tabs-18k/

Yea almost all the tabs are in that linked collection

But there is also an extension for Firefox that allows you to download the GP files from UG

There is a 50% off summer sale that kicked in, making it $35 for ToneLib Jam…  that’s easily worth it so I picked up a license.  Just hit their website to purchase and it’s automatic