ToneLib Jam - Ultimate software for practicing?

Gear
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***EDIT 1/24/23: Just letting people know up front that Tonelib Jam is free for 30 days with no restricitons - and then you have to buy a license. Right now a license is $70 USD. It does go on sale fairly frequently and it’s currently on sale for $42.

I know Zoom users often talk about using Tonelib Zoom which is free software that allows you to see, change and save all the settings in your Zoom(r) guitar pedal.

Out of curiosity I also downloaded Tonelib Jam - and found something kind of spectacular: Tonelib jam will natively open and play Rocksmith files (.psarc). It is also fully compatible with: GuitarPro, PowerTab, TuxGuitar.

I have over 2,000 CDLC Rocksmith songs - and now I can REALLY play with them: It allows you to open - see the tab, see the regular notation - play it in sync with the embedded music file, view the bass track - independently adjust the volume of the bass and backing tracks or pan them to one speaker - view in 3D “Rock Band” or Rocksmith style, alter playback speed, add a metronome, hook up to an audio interface to add your own track, print tabs and score, etc. I haven’t even scratched the surface of how I can customize it for practice.

It’s seriously impressive - here is Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black, in Rocksmith .psarc file format opened in Tonelib Jam - in bass mode - you can see at the bottom I slowed it to 90%, bumped bass volume and dropped the backing track down in volume and turned on a metronome:

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Or the Raconteur’s Steady As She Goes in Editor mode:

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Or Lay Down Sally in 3D mode:

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Or here’s something you can’t do in Rocksmith, Songstrr, Chordify or Guitar Pro: Bass track boosted, synced to original recording in the background (not midi), 3D mode with tabs and standard music notation all showing simultaneously:

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I’m pretty excited about the possibilities.

Edit: Just discovered how easy it is to make a practice loop: tricky section? Pause - use mouse to highlight the section - adjust playback speed - decide on how slow you want to start and what increments you want to speed up in - hit play and you’re looping that section while you slowly speed up!

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Very interesting… Will it play nice with a digital audio interface rather than the Rocksmith USB cable thing.

I use Tonelib zoom with my Zoom B3Ñ. I like it better than the Zoom software. So I’m not surprised that this is good software.

I did the recent Rocksmith+ beta in July, and really enjoyed it. It worked great with my Motu M2 DAI. But now the release date has been pushed back to at least the end of the year.

I will have to give this a try!!!

Thanx
Chris

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Sweet! Looks much better than Rocksmith.

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No this sounds really interesting!
Downloading it now to take a look.

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That’s really cool.

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I use it standalone in my experiments so far. So I’m not connected to the computer via Rocksmith realtone cable or a DAI- I just play along as if it were really fancy sheet music.

At some point I’ll try connecting - but I don’t think it would have rocksmith style “gameplay” where it detects your notes. I think it would just allow you to record your own track as you play along - and easily turn that on or off in the master song file.

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Ahhhh… that makes sense. I saw the note highway thing and assumed it had the note detection. I’ve yet to try it, but I will!

Chris

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So, this can be played like rock smith, but thru your DAW, and it can use RockSmith User created files?

And with any rock smith user created file you can do all those screens you showed above?

Where can you get the RockSmith user created songs?

Like how can I get a library, are they free, or do you have to pay to download them?

Do all the user created files have bass lines, or are some just guitar or something else?

Thanks, I never tried locksmith, but if I can just download this and play it thru my normal computer DAI set up, and can just get a bunch of songs for free, Well…He he, he he, he Eh!!!
“This is new charted territory. I will start to explore right away commander”

also, where do you get other files.

Is this really to use to transcribe and create your own files to play along too?
Or
Should I ask, CAN you use it to transcribe and create my own files (I believe that was a feature in RockSmith Plus, but I am not going to pay to play that, as steep as it might be per month.). I would love to start doing that, but have not picked or downloaded a copy of Transcribe, or picked out songs and just keep putting it off.

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I have played around with it a bit. Some things I didn’t quite figure out, but here are some things:
You can connect via DAI and play along and record. What I didn’t quite figure out is if there is away that it will add the just recorded audio to the timeline. I just managed to have a wav file that is stored in my file system. You can select what you want to record, only the bass, also the backing track and so on.
It won’t detect the notes you play.

I pulled one of my Rocksmith DLCs into the software (Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings). This is an official DLC from Ubi. It will also work with official DLCs. You then can see the notes for all instruments that are defined (usually, that is guitar (rythm/lead) and bass in Rocksmith files. For CDLCs, this might only be bass or guitar sometimes. Not any creator will create both.

The backing track was the song itself, with all the instruments in it. You can run the instruments themselves, but this is just a midi interpretation of the tab. I don’t know if the Rocksmith format has the ability to have multiple tracks for each instrument. I only know that this is not the case for the Smashing Pumpkins song, unfortunatly, and for Bush - Swallowed, which I tried just now.

Yes, you can transcribe your own songs, I just tried to add some notes to an empty project, seems to work just fine.

You can save files in their own format, or you can export in the Guitar Pro format. I bet you can also import the Guitar Pro format.
Unfortunatly, no export for the Rocksmith format. I have 1 or two Rocksmith files where I would like to adapt the tab. But you can adapt the tab inside of ToneLib, if you don’t intend to get it back into Rocksmith.

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Thanks for the great tips, and for the PM

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AFAIK it won’t detect notes. So you won’t be able to “play the game”. But you can easily have the song playing - the notes coming at you in 3D on the “note highway” while the music notation and tabs are scrolling along below the highway. That’s how I have used it - bass only connected to my amp, not the computer.

You can get thousands of songs free- the actual .psarc files here: https://customsforge.com/. Both m.psarc Mac and p.psarc PC files work. Tonelib doesn’t care if the song is mac or pc - only the original Rocksmith games cares about that.

Those are CDLC or Custom Downloadable Content - made by fans, so quality can sometimes be lacking - but mostly it’s very playable even if it’s not 100% accurate to the recording. For me that’s good enough because I want to play the song, not completely copy every note in the recording.

Use the Ignition4Search feature - get it in Mac or PC file format (but not Xbox) - and it will open right up in tonelib for you. Then you can print the tabs to paper or use the computer.

When you are searching for songs at customsforge- you can use a lot of different filters - obviously you want songs with a bass track - and you can specify windows/PC format, you can even select tuning if you want to keep everything standard or something.

Song selection is large - over 50,000 files, but a lot of them are multiple versions of the same song, so I’d say it’s safely 5,000 high quality songs. It skews heavy to hard rock- but if a song is/has been fairly popular I haven’t had problems finding them. There are some weird exceptions, but about 9/10 songs I’ve found ok.

Here’s a caveat: If there is an official Ubisoft released song, it can be hard/impossible to find a custom(free) version. The people who make these are true fans and want to support Rocksmith, so they want you to buy the songs that have been officially released - a sentiment I agree with actually.

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Oh damn, first time I have thought to myself, for a brief second “Should have bought a PC”, then I snapped back.

I used to be a Windows guy, way back before probably around 2008, ever since then, I only use PC at work. But I have not worked for almost 2 years due to health issues and Covid (I didn’t have Covid, but slows down all my health resources, so I stay down longer) .

So, are you saying to specify MAC version when I download a file?

I will go and check it out before I start to ask a bunch of questions I can possibly answer on my own.
Thanks for all the help, and the future help in about 10 min :thinking: :rofl:

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Now that is a Rabbit Hole.
Damn, I barely got out of there allive.

There was a lot os stuff on my list, and they appear to be pretty good.

Thanks for the help.

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I haven’t tried it - but I think the mac version of the .psarc files might work too.

***EDIT: The windows version of Tonelib Jam will open both m.psarc Mac or p.psarc PC files just fine. (It can’t even see xBox files though).

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What is also pretty cool: You can add built in effects to the play along track (your bass sound), and that can be done on a per measure basis.
So you could add different effects for the verse and the chorus, and while playing along, switching between effects will happen automatically.

It also supports VST plugins.

I haven’t checked yet how good the builtin effects are, but I think the feature itself is pretty neat.

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Cool, that’s a smart way to do effects - keeps from limiting to the builtins, and assigning them to measures is kind of like a simplified DAW.

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Big thanks to @KenKnight for highlighting ToneLib. I’ve been using the bundled Zoom software and found it really very clunky. Being able to drag and drop effects into the chain is so much simpler and intuitive in this free software. Having fun creating a delay patch for late night missions into the unknown. Thanks again.

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Tonelib Jam 4.7.5 (latest) is on sale for $34.97 right now. Full price now looks to be $69.95. When I grabbed it last September it was $44.95 - so this is probably a solid deal. ToneLib Metal and ToneLib GFX are also 50% off.

All of them also come with a 30 day free trial (no software limitations).

This program is back on my mind because I’m going to do a first jam session and we agreed on a few songs to prepare. Terrible memory here, so I’ll need it on paper as well. No need to get a questionable or hard-to-read tab transcription online because I already have the songs for Rocksmith - so now I just load them up into ToneLib Jam and print: tab, notation or both on the same page.

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I just ran across this thread. Very cool, @KenKnight! Thanks for posting it!

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Just jumped on this deal. Thanks for the heads up, Ken!