The WORST Music Software EVER!!! EMedia Interactive Rock Guitar App Review (REGRET PURCHASING)

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I am so tired of all these subscriptions. Yousician, Rocksmith Unlimited, Simply Piano, and so many more applications require monthly to yearly payments. And that's just in the realm of learning music. Need I go on with video streaming? I still got my Quibi subscription boys! I just wish we could go back in time to before there were all these subscriptions. Like, say… 2013. Ah yes, back when I was still in high school! I didn't have to pay for anything other than food and gas back then. Luckily, the company EMedia published their old software back in 2016 on the steam page. Look at EMedia's Interactive Rock Guitar for PCs and certain mac computers.

[Intro]

I know you can see the game footage behind me; yes, that is what the software looks like. Interactive Rock Guitar is basically an interactive PowerPoint that aims to teach you how to play the guitar. It looks and runs a lot older than it actually is, especially when considering Rocksmith original came out a year before and Rocksmith 2014 came out a year prior. From the looks of it, all of EMedia’s teaching software is based on the same engine so it’s probably way older than the copy right date.

As far as the content goes… I will say each slide is pretty great with a ton of information on getting started with guitar. The content ranges the parts of a guitar to power chords to playing tons of different songs through interactive sheet music. I will so the contents page on the screen now, go ahead and pause to read through what the software contains. The website has these screenshots as well but in supper low resolution… yes, I will rant about the company in a few moments… stay tuned for that.

You can see from the footage behind the basic layout of the slides. There is a number at the top and the header. Below that is the content, and on the left will be any interactive information I will cover in a second. Lastly, at the bottom, you can click the left and right buttons to continue. I believe the slides are vector images as they resize very nicely on my 4k monitor without any blur. It's a good, forward-thinking move on the developer's part.

Now for the interactive part in EMedia Interactive Rock Guitar. On some slides, you will see a group of buttons. First is the projector button. Clicking that will open up a QuickTime video containing the instructor who has one of the most 2000's rock beards I have seen. The bassist from System of a Down has nothing on this guy… he has three of them! The instructor is Charles McCrone, who is still making music with the Kaleidoscope school of music. Good to know that the man is still rocking on to this day.

Another button you will see is a face with an exclamation mark. Clicking that will play a voiceover containing additional information based on the slide you are reading. Usually, it's just a thirty-second clip or less going on a tangent. There isn't a button that reads the whole slide to you. That's what I originally thought that button did. Why isn't that an option as well? It just baffles me.

Two other buttons appearing when there is music on the page are the speaker and backing band buttons. The speaker button plays the entire song that is on the page. A little visual guitar will also show up, highlighting the finger and string placement. It's a good feature for learning to place everything when rocking out. Once you learn, you are ready to begin practicing. The backing band buttons will play just the rhythm section so you can better hear yourself and keep beat. There are always two backing band buttons, one going slow and the other going fast. I would prefer if it was more of a sliding system due to sometimes needing to practice between these two speeds.

When doing the backing track, the software could supposedly read if you are playing the notes correctly or not and highlight them as it could with Rocksmith. I say supposedly because it didn't work for me at all. I used both the Rocksmith cables and a USB Guitar cable interface, and neither of them worked. There really isn't any direction on how to get it working on any of the menus, so I assume it's an issue with the drivers. The software is made and supports windows XP. I am running this on Windows 11, so that discrepancy is there. As I was editing this script, they updated the site and Windows 11 was added as a system requirement but who knows how accurate that is. I mean it still lists CD-ROM as an option like it’s 2015.

That leads me to my biggest issue with this software. How completely out of date the entire software feels. It looks and runs like some XP freeware software and features no substantial updates or versions to fix it. The issues even extend out to the company...

Read the rest at jack-jenkins.com

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