malvasia bianca

One item that I forgot to add to my earlier list of requests for the next version of Rocksmith: help us get low-latency audio.

The game strongly encourages you to use optical audio; and, when I switched over to that, it made a big difference. But there’s a reason why I didn’t switch to optical audio earlier: I want the audio for games I play other than Rocksmith to go through HDMI, not Toslink. And, even when I followed the developers’ suggestion for an alternate adapter, I had to add an amp to get it work right.

Given that, my first reaction was: they should sell a peripheral that’s a Toslink -> headphone adapter, with a built-in amplifier. If they’d sold something like that, then I would have bought it months earlier, and that would have been great. But, thinking about it more, I think they can do something better. Because the game already comes with a peripheral, namely the USB guitar adapter; I’m certainly not an expert in the details of USB, but given the existence of USB headsets, presumably they can send the audio out over USB as well as sending the guitar input in? And presumably USB can draw enough power to add amplification to that audio jack?

So: I would like the next edition of the Rocksmith adapter cable to come with a microphone jack for audio out, with a volume control in it. It could be a little ungainly, which is too bad; but people who don’t want to use the microphone jack can ignore it. And it feels to me like it would significantly improve the out-of-the-box experience for the game.