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rombsix -> RE: iRig Acoustic (clip-on microphone) (Nov. 24 2015 23:58:39)
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OK - so I got this to work. Yay! It worked by connecting it through my Galaxy S6. There was one stupid / tricky step which I was not doing that finally got it to work. For some weird reason, you don't hear the output of the mic unless you change the active display on the phone from the actual Amplitube app to the Samsung Professional Audio (SPA) screen. It's like if you're watching a YouTube video then you change to looking at your messages, you would expect the YouTube sound to keep playing in the background even though you're now looking at text messages, but for my case I actually lose the YouTube sound. I figured this might be the same issue, and indeed it was! So it's tedious because you have to set the effects through the Amplitube app then you have to go to the SPA screen to hear the actual output, so you can't really fiddle around with the effects directly (due to having to switch back and forth between the two screens). The demo videos did NOT show that to be needed, so I'm guessing either this gizmo is still not working well with Android, or my iRig or Galaxy S6 is screwed up.
The other thing is that there is a MINOR delay in the live sound so if you do a golpe on the wood with the strings muted, you will hear a TINY gap between the sound of the golpe on the actual sound board, and the sound of the golpe through the headphones. It is really NOT a huge issue - totally manageable - but it is not as "perfect" as I hoped it would be (i.e. it's NOT zero latency). SPA allows you to decrease the latency, but that requires more "CPU" usage, and I think my phone crashes because the sound becomes super distorted and unusable if I change to the low-latency (high CPU usage) setting (instead of the "moderate latency (Recommended)" setting). And actually, the low-latency setting doesn't really seem to help with the latency, but rather it sort of makes it worse (along with the distorted sound). But hey - if you're looking for a delay + distortion metal effect, then you're set! [8D]
But seriously - regarding the QUALITY of the audio and the live effects: I was really impressed. It doesn't sound as good as it does in the demo videos on YouTube, but for the purpose of a $49 gizmo used via a phone app, I think it is super awesome actually. I set a delay effect and reviewed Ewan Dobson's "Time 2" piece that I've covered in the past (tough to play by the way! I'm impressed I played it cleanly in the past!), and it really sounded awesome! I also used just regular reverb through an amp effect, and I played some granaina / taranta, and it sounded really good, seriously! It perhaps sounded just as good or even better than my $350 MXL USB .009 microphone actually! It was just a bit more "dirty" sounding (i.e. some mild hiss, perhaps from my room with the PC fan going or the A/C fan going), but that was sort of remediable through fiddling around with the input volume and output volume. I didn't play with it enough to get the optimal setting for best sound and least noise, but I am still pretty amazed with this thing. It is really NOT as crappy as I was expecting it would be based on Sr. Martin's comments. I got in contact with the customer support people and they replied within 8 hours via email and they are the ones that helped me figure out how to get it to work. I am going to contact them about potentially optimizing the results I've achieved so far, then I'll look into an app to record something and I'll post it here so you can check it out...
Olé!
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