Amp Room vs Guitarix

Amp Room is Softube’s guitar and bass platform for building tones from modeled amplifiers, cabinets, pedals, microphones, and studio effects. Five suites cover ENGL Savage Mark II, Marshall, Vintage, Bass, and Metal, with different gear combinations in each. Officially licensed effects come from Tube-Tech, Empirical Labs, Trident, and other makers. Suite Mode presents selected gear sets, while Studio Mode allows further tone shaping. Suite listings include a custom impulse-response loader, eight IR Producer Packs, customizable signal chains, and cabinet captures with movable microphones. Suites can be expanded with other Amp Room Suites and Amp Room Ready products. The software runs as AU, VST, VST3, or AAX inside a compatible DAW on macOS or Windows; it is not standalone. Use requires Softube and iLok accounts plus internet access. Prices range from €99, paid once to €149, paid once, with a 20-day trial.

Guitarix is free software that acts as a virtual guitar amplifier on Linux through the JACK Audio Connection Kit. Mono sound-card input passes through a main amplifier and rack section, which can be routed separately for stereo output via JACK. The rack contains more than 25 effect modules, including noise gate, flanger, phaser, and auto-wah. LADSPA and LV2 plugins can be added, and Guitarix is also available as an LV2 plugin suite for loading amps and plugins in a digital audio workstation. The project names Ardour and supports connection to Rackarrack or another JACK-aware host. It can process synths and other sound generators as well as guitar. The maker says a properly configured Linux system can process signals in no more than 10 ms. Guitarix is standalone software with an IR loader, licensed under GNU GPL version 2. It is listed for Linux and macOS; source can be built for BSD and MacOSX.