Rocksmith 2014: How to play without the Real Tone Cable

In this post I’m gonna show you how to play Rocksmith 2014 using a normal cable. If you’ve never heard about Rocksmith, well, we could say that it’s like Guitar Hero played with a REAL guitar. And when I say REAL, I’m not meaning a controller made like a real guitar, like the ones you can use in Rock Band 3: i mean a real guitar, like the one you could already have at home, or even a bass. I’m not gonna discuss the possibility to see this game as a tool for learning to play an instrument, but personally, as a guitar player, i’m enthusiast of being able to play a game that gives you an authentic guitar experience and, at the same time, lets you practice guitar and learn new songs. Plus, with the included gears, you can play like a rock star!

After the success of the first Rocksmith, Ubisoft released a new version of the game, with an improved gameplay an other cool features.

 

The Rocksmith 2014 Real Tone Cable

How does this game work? Everything is possible thanks to the so called Ubisoft Rocksmith 2014 Real Tone Cable: a cable that connects your electric guitar jack output to a usb port on your pc (or XBox or PS3). You can buy the bundle containing the game and the Rocksmith 2014 Real Tone Cable (same as the previous Rocksmith version’s Real Tone Cable) or even the Rocksmith 2014 Guitar Bundle, or buy them separately. Like i happened with the first Rocksmith version, I tought: would I be able to play Rocksmith 2014 trough my pc’s sound card using a normal 3.5 to 2.5 adaptor? If so, I could avoid to buy the Rocksmith guitar cable.

If you ask to Ubisoft, they will tell you that the Rocksmith Real Tone Cable is a must for playing the game. Of course the requirement of this cable is a way to (try to) stop piracy. Like in Guitar Hero, you could copy the game, but you can’t copy the controller. But for Rocksmith 2014 you can use your own guitar, and the Real Tone Cable is, well, just a usb guitar cable. Obviously, if you try to play the game using a normal cable, it will ask you to connect the Rocksmith 2014 Real Tone Cable to be able to play.

Looking on the internet about this topic, I found lots of people with my same question, and somebody with a solution: a patch that allow you to run Rocksmith using any audio input in your pc instead of the Rocksmith pc cable. This includes the mic input and external audio cards. So I spent some time experimenting and, finally, I’ve been able to play the game with a very simple setup.

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How to use a normal guitar cable to play Rocksmith 2014

I won’t encourage you to illegally download a Rocksmith 2014 torrent. You will find it, but you can also buy the game from Steam and it is not that expensive. Anyway, I’m gonna show you what you need to do with your Rocksmith installation for being able to play it without the Ubisoft cable.

First, download the Rocksmith 2014 crack (alternate download here). This crack will let you also play DLC, that are downloadable songs that can be added to the game. Copy the folder content to the Rocksmith folder, replacing the existing files (make a backup before, if you wish).

Next, you should go to the Control Panel and disable all the audio inputs, except the one that you want to use as the guitar input, otherwise Rocksmith will tell you that you have too many instruments connected.

First I tried to set up my M-Audio Fast Track, wich is a good USB sound card, but I got no luck: the problem is that it has two mono input channels: the first is used for recording a microphone, and the second for recording a guitar. Rocksmith treats the first channel (the mic’s one) as the game audio input, so basically no audio arrives to the game. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to select the second channel as the unique audio input in Windows, and of course I couldn’t plug the guitar in the Fast Track microphone input.

So i plugged the guitar directly into the mic input in the pc sound card, using a cheap adapter. Some people seemed to have success using the line input, so you may have to try it too. In both case, remember to disable all the other inputs in the Audio Properties in the Control Panel, to avoid the “too many instruments connected” issue.

In the Recording Properties, you should then select the microphone and go to its properties. In the ‘Enhancements’ tab, somebody had to uncheck “disable all sound effects” and check “DC Offset Cancellation” and “Noise suppression”. I personally found better to check “disable all sound effects” to avoid audio latency.

In any case, in the Advanced tab set the recording quality to “2 Channel, 16bit, 48000hz (DVD Quality)”.

Then, delete the Videodump.txt file in the game folder. It causes problems to many users.

Also, setting Win32UltraLowLatencyMode at “0” in the rocksmith.ini file help very much with sound distortion in the game.

To play with a normal cable, download the Rocksmith 2014 nocable patch and save it into the Rocksmith folder.

You should be able now to play: run Rocksmith2014_nocable.exe (if you have problems, click on it with the right button and select Run as Administrator). Enjoy!

If the sound is bad, you could try this configuration for the rocksmith.ini file:

[Audio] EnableMicrophone=1
ExclusiveMode=1
LatencyBuffer=3
ForceDefaultPlaybackDevice=
ForceWDM=0
ForceDirectXSink=0
Win32UltraLowLatencyMode=0
DumpAudioLog=1
MaxOutputBufferSize=512
[Renderer.Win32] ShowGamepadUI=0
ScreenWidth=0
ScreenHeight=0
Fullscreen=0
VisualQuality=1
RenderingWidth=0
RenderingHeight=0
EnablePostEffects=1
EnableShadows=1
EnableHighResScope=1
EnableDepthOfField=1
EnablePerPixelLighting=1
MsaaSamples=4
DisableBrowser=0
[Net] UseProxy=1

Hope this helps. Let me know your results in the comment section below!

Rocksmith 2014 Remastered

Ubisoft released Rocksmith 2014 Remastered, with new improvements. With this update came, the nocable patch could not work anymore. But there’s a solution.

With a text editor, open the file settings.xml located in your Rocksmith installation folder (C:\Programs Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Rocksmith2014 by default).

Set this values:

OffcetVID: 012C96EC
OffcetPID: 012C96F4

Save the file and everything should be working fine!

 

In case, you can check the Shop area of this site and buy the original Real Tone Cable, or find it on Ebay!