Rocksmith 2014 Edition – PC/Mac (Cable Included)
- A PROVEN METHOD TO LEARN GUITAR FAST National research studies have found that Rocksmith is the fastest way to learn guitar*. Over 95% of players have improved their skills. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned player, Rocksmith gets you results, fast.*National study by Research Media Group Inc.
- For technical assistance, the company Ubisoft has US phone agents ready to take your call at 1-888-610-2622 from 9 a.m. to midnight Eastern time on weekdays, and from Noon to 9:00 p.m. Eastern time on weekends. You may also submit an online request at http://support.ubi.com to get a subsequent reply by e-mail.
- LEARN YOUR FAVORITE SONGS Select from over 50 hit tracks, ranging from alternative rock, to heavy metal, and more. You will learn to play your favorite songs, step-by-step and note-for-note, with tutorials along the way.
- DESIGNED FOR EASE AND SPEED A new fully-customizable Riff Repeater lets you select your section, difficulty, and speed on-the-fly. Master Mode has been revamped to make learning by memory more approachable.
- GET PLUGGED IN Rocksmith 2014 Edition is compatible with the original Rocksmith Real Tone Cable that plugs any real guitar** directly into Xbox 360, PS3, PC, or Mac. **Guitar requires standard 1/4″ output jack.
PC System Requirements
Supported OS: Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows 8 Processor: 2.66 GHz Intel Core2 Duo E6750 or 2.8 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ (3.06 GHz Intel Core i3-540 or 3.30 GHz AMD Athlon II X3 455 or better recommended) RAM: 2 GB (4 GB or greater recommended) Video Card: 256 MB DirectX 9.0c-compliant with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (see supported list)* Sound Card: DirectX-compatible Hard Drive Space: 12 GB Peripherals Supported: Keyboard, mouse, microphone, Rocksmith Real Tone Cable (USB 2.0 port required) Internet required for activation Supported Video Cards at Time of Release: AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT / 3000 / 4000 / 5000 / 6000 / 7000 series NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT / 9 / 200 / 400 / 500 / 600 / 700 series Laptop versions of these cards may work, but are not supported. These chipsets are the only ones that will run this game.
Mac System Requirements
Supported OS: X Processor: 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB on-chip sha
List Price: $ 59.99
Price:
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255 of 267 people found the following review helpful
 Great improvement over the original but…, By
Learning with Mark W (Hampton Roads, VA) – See all my reviews
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Rocksmith 2014 Edition – PC/Mac (Cable Included) (DVD-ROM)
Rocksmith 2014 is a great upgrade to the original Rocksmith. However using the new version has caused me some good, bad and ugly! I purchased the original Rocksmith last November after purchasing a guitar. I played guitar a little bit in my teens and 20’s but now that I’m in my late 30’s I really wanted to learn to play versus just tinkering around. The original Rocksmith got me past the basics very quickly. I only learned and mastered a few songs but my friends and family were amazed and impressed how fast I picked things up. The original Rocksmith was great but the interface and game play was a little clunky and slow. Fast forward to the new Rocksmith 2014 and we have a much faster and polished learning system. In 2014 gone is the mode of start at the bottom working to play at top venues and large crowds and scoring points. This reminded me much of a Guitar Hero style of play versus learning. While yes you still learned it seemed focus was more on scoring points then really learning the songs. I guess you could say both went hand in hand but I really want to learn the songs and I don’t really care if a crowd is watching or scoring points so speak. While Rocksmith gave you the world tour gameplay, Rocksmith 2014 feels like the get it right in a studio gameplay. Installation I’m using the PC version as I did with the previous RS on an Asus i7 laptop with 16GB of Ram. I currently a 1TB hybrid ssd drive and a dedicated video card for graphics with 2GB of ram. As far installing the disks, that went rather smoothly. Steam was already installed however with RS2014 it also installs Uplay. Uplay from Ubisoft is supposed to give you stats on the game as well as leaderboards to see how you rank against other players online. To me this seems like an unnecessary step when it could have been incorporated into Steam! Now not only do I have all these pops from Steam when I open and close Rocksmith, but I also get popups from Uplay. It’s now even more annoying then previously before. Opening for the first time So I got the RS2014 installed and went into it for the first time only to get an error message “No Audio Output Found.” My built in sound card worked fine everywhere else but not in RS2014. I closed out to troubleshoot. I changed the sound card sample rate in properties, turned exclusive on and off to no avail. I also use 1 of 2 external USB Audio interfaces for pro-audio recording. I plugged that in and it started with no error but the sound was garbled. I went back to the built and card and tried a few more things. Now I did just update to Windows 8.1 so I figured let me try to install an updated driver. Bada bing that worked! Now most of the time I do use 1 of the external audio interfaces because they allow me to have the lowest latency (delay you hear for when you play your sound vs actually hear it). I still couldn’t get past the garbled crackling and popping with the pro interfaces. I did some digging on Ubisoft’s forums and found you can change some settings in the Rocksmith.ini file if you’re having trouble. For me on both my pro interfaces I had to change the latency to 2 and the output buffer size to 1024. That did the trick! Now all of this took about 1 1/2 hours to figure out! I did not experience these hiccups in the original Rocksmith. This was also an annoyance but I’ve been using and troubleshooting PC’s for over 20 years. If there’s a problem with a program I’m going to eventually figure it out. From to point of view of someone who doesn’t have my troubleshooting experience, I can see where this would be quite frustrating! Now I know not everyone has the same hardware configurations so it can make it a lot harder to program and get this stuff right but the install experience should not have been this complicated! I’m going to give that a big needs improvement! Learning your first song When you first start RS2014 you have to pick your guitar type, left or right handed pick, calibrate and finally tune it. After that you can immediately start playing songs. Just pick one and start learning. Like RS, RS2014 starts you out slow and then gradually gives you more and more notes as you get them right until you’re at 100 percent mastery. What I really like with RS2014 is that if you have trouble with a section you can immediately go into Riff Repeater mode with exiting the song. This will focus on that section and make you play it until you get it right! Practice makes perfect and the more you play the better you will get at it! Other notes While I haven’t experienced all of what RS2014 has to offer because I’ve only had it for a day, I can say I’m impressed with what I have tried thus far. Now if you own the original Rocksmith one would think you should be able to use those songs in the new version right? Well you can but you have to pay and additional .99 to Steam to transfer them to RS2014! What???? I’ve…
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
 Magnificent!,
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Rocksmith 2014 Edition – PC/Mac (Cable Included) (DVD-ROM)
Magnificent! It is absolutely; the single most amazing musical tool available! I am a beginner. I have had no formal guitar experience ever. I plucked strings before like "mary had a little lamb" and now am playing real songs. I am playing songs that would have taken me years for sure to play. The game makes sense and is fun. You can play in rhythm Chords, lead, and bass guitars. It is like anything you have to put the time in, however it is a lot of fun doing it. I find myself saying I’ll only play for a half hour. The next thing you know; I have been playing for hours. I run this game on my lap top with a quad core processor. I do not notice any lag however I am not using a hdmi cable. I’m using the tone cable for the guitar to the computer only. The game is truly awesome. I recommend it to anyone who has ever had the desire to play the guitar. I would like to see more downloadable Christian oriented songs though! That is my only complaint. I believe it is only a matter time before there are more. : ) Cheers to Rocking it Out.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
 Great but FLAWED product, By
Verified Purchase(What’s this?)
This review is from: Rocksmith 2014 Edition – PC/Mac (Cable Included) (DVD-ROM)
Coming back to guitar after 20 years of life stuff. I was pretty good before, played in some informal groups. Bought the 2014 edition after practicing for about a year, in an effort to put more variety and motivation in my practice. I recommend it, mainly for the “Session Mode,” but there are some significant bad points:
(1) WHO CAME UP WITH THE VERTICAL FLOW? Like Guitar Hero. Obviously someone who has never played an actual guitar. The player’s mind and vision see the guitar neck as HORIZONTAL. All written forms of music, whether tablature or traditional notation, flow in the HORIZONTAL direction. I find it ridiculously difficult to follow the visual display of Rocksmith as it moves through a piece of music. I just ignore it and try to hear where the notes are coming. It is insanely “off,” like if I were trying to drive a car down the road and instead of seeing the road in front of me, forward and backward, I were seeing my car and the road displayed across my windshield in a perpendicular direction and trying to control the vehicle. You would crash. Every time. And why learn to drive or play in such a counter-intuitive manner? (2) THE STRINGS ARE ALSO UPSIDE DOWN. This was obviously also done by someone who has never played an actual guitar or used any written music. Guitar tablature music, which is what ALL players will eventually have to learn if they want to share ideas in a written form, has the LOW E at the BOTTOM of the diagrams. Traditional notation also has the low notes at the bottom and the high notes at the top. And when a guitarist looks DOWN at his/her own guitar when playing, that’s how the guitarist sees the strings – low E at the bottom, A D G B E at the “top” of the guitarist-eye view. In 180 degree contrast, Rocksmith displays the strings with the low E at the TOP. This is counter-intuitive and feels “upside down” to anyone with actual playing experience. It was obviously designed by someone who watched guitarists from an “audience eye view.” Beginning musicians shouldn’t learn to play from an opposite view to the one they’ll actually use, and experienced musicians will feel highly thrown off (as I do) by even looking at the screen while trying to play along with a song. Thus, even though I find Rocksmith 2014 helpful, and I did not have the technical problems that some had (PC, Win 8.1), I mainly use it to practice in Session Mode. I can’t understand why the product was designed this way if they expect actual musicians to use it, as they apparently do by designing it to respond to a real guitar as the controller. |
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Great improvement over the original but…,
Rocksmith 2014 is a great upgrade to the original Rocksmith. However using the new version has caused me some good, bad and ugly! I purchased the original Rocksmith last November after purchasing a guitar. I played guitar a little bit in my teens and 20’s but now that I’m in my late 30’s I really wanted to learn to play versus just tinkering around. The original Rocksmith got me past the basics very quickly. I only learned and mastered a few songs but my friends and family were amazed and impressed how fast I picked things up. The original Rocksmith was great but the interface and game play was a little clunky and slow.
Fast forward to the new Rocksmith 2014 and we have a much faster and polished learning system. In 2014 gone is the mode of start at the bottom working to play at top venues and large crowds and scoring points. This reminded me much of a Guitar Hero style of play versus learning. While yes you still learned it seemed focus was more on scoring points then really learning the songs. I guess you could say both went hand in hand but I really want to learn the songs and I don’t really care if a crowd is watching or scoring points so speak. While Rocksmith gave you the world tour gameplay, Rocksmith 2014 feels like the get it right in a studio gameplay.
Installation
I’m using the PC version as I did with the previous RS on an Asus i7 laptop with 16GB of Ram. I currently a 1TB hybrid ssd drive and a dedicated video card for graphics with 2GB of ram. As far installing the disks, that went rather smoothly. Steam was already installed however with RS2014 it also installs Uplay. Uplay from Ubisoft is supposed to give you stats on the game as well as leaderboards to see how you rank against other players online. To me this seems like an unnecessary step when it could have been incorporated into Steam! Now not only do I have all these pops from Steam when I open and close Rocksmith, but I also get popups from Uplay. It’s now even more annoying then previously before.
Opening for the first time
So I got the RS2014 installed and went into it for the first time only to get an error message “No Audio Output Found.” My built in sound card worked fine everywhere else but not in RS2014. I closed out to troubleshoot. I changed the sound card sample rate in properties, turned exclusive on and off to no avail. I also use 1 of 2 external USB Audio interfaces for pro-audio recording. I plugged that in and it started with no error but the sound was garbled. I went back to the built and card and tried a few more things. Now I did just update to Windows 8.1 so I figured let me try to install an updated driver. Bada bing that worked! Now most of the time I do use 1 of the external audio interfaces because they allow me to have the lowest latency (delay you hear for when you play your sound vs actually hear it). I still couldn’t get past the garbled crackling and popping with the pro interfaces. I did some digging on Ubisoft’s forums and found you can change some settings in the Rocksmith.ini file if you’re having trouble. For me on both my pro interfaces I had to change the latency to 2 and the output buffer size to 1024. That did the trick! Now all of this took about 1 1/2 hours to figure out! I did not experience these hiccups in the original Rocksmith. This was also an annoyance but I’ve been using and troubleshooting PC’s for over 20 years. If there’s a problem with a program I’m going to eventually figure it out. From to point of view of someone who doesn’t have my troubleshooting experience, I can see where this would be quite frustrating! Now I know not everyone has the same hardware configurations so it can make it a lot harder to program and get this stuff right but the install experience should not have been this complicated! I’m going to give that a big needs improvement!
Learning your first song
When you first start RS2014 you have to pick your guitar type, left or right handed pick, calibrate and finally tune it. After that you can immediately start playing songs. Just pick one and start learning. Like RS, RS2014 starts you out slow and then gradually gives you more and more notes as you get them right until you’re at 100 percent mastery. What I really like with RS2014 is that if you have trouble with a section you can immediately go into Riff Repeater mode with exiting the song. This will focus on that section and make you play it until you get it right! Practice makes perfect and the more you play the better you will get at it!
Other notes
While I haven’t experienced all of what RS2014 has to offer because I’ve only had it for a day, I can say I’m impressed with what I have tried thus far. Now if you own the original Rocksmith one would think you should be able to use those songs in the new version right? Well you can but you have to pay and additional $9.99 to Steam to transfer them to RS2014! What???? I’ve…
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|Magnificent!,
Was this review helpful to you?
|Great but FLAWED product,
(1) WHO CAME UP WITH THE VERTICAL FLOW? Like Guitar Hero. Obviously someone who has never played an actual guitar. The player’s mind and vision see the guitar neck as HORIZONTAL. All written forms of music, whether tablature or traditional notation, flow in the HORIZONTAL direction. I find it ridiculously difficult to follow the visual display of Rocksmith as it moves through a piece of music. I just ignore it and try to hear where the notes are coming. It is insanely “off,” like if I were trying to drive a car down the road and instead of seeing the road in front of me, forward and backward, I were seeing my car and the road displayed across my windshield in a perpendicular direction and trying to control the vehicle. You would crash. Every time. And why learn to drive or play in such a counter-intuitive manner?
(2) THE STRINGS ARE ALSO UPSIDE DOWN. This was obviously also done by someone who has never played an actual guitar or used any written music. Guitar tablature music, which is what ALL players will eventually have to learn if they want to share ideas in a written form, has the LOW E at the BOTTOM of the diagrams. Traditional notation also has the low notes at the bottom and the high notes at the top. And when a guitarist looks DOWN at his/her own guitar when playing, that’s how the guitarist sees the strings – low E at the bottom, A D G B E at the “top” of the guitarist-eye view. In 180 degree contrast, Rocksmith displays the strings with the low E at the TOP. This is counter-intuitive and feels “upside down” to anyone with actual playing experience. It was obviously designed by someone who watched guitarists from an “audience eye view.” Beginning musicians shouldn’t learn to play from an opposite view to the one they’ll actually use, and experienced musicians will feel highly thrown off (as I do) by even looking at the screen while trying to play along with a song.
Thus, even though I find Rocksmith 2014 helpful, and I did not have the technical problems that some had (PC, Win 8.1), I mainly use it to practice in Session Mode. I can’t understand why the product was designed this way if they expect actual musicians to use it, as they apparently do by designing it to respond to a real guitar as the controller.
Was this review helpful to you?
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