In-game Rock Band music store revealed

News by Patrick Garratt Founder & Publisher (Former)

Published on March 20, 2008

Here. Harmonix is to release a major Rock Band patch this week that will add a fully featured music store.

The store is accessible through the main menu listed after the “Community” tab, and the purchasable songs are categorised by new releases, song titles, song packs and albums. Albums are not available yet, but are indicated to be “coming soon.” You can also sort the downloadable tracks by artist name, genre, difficulty and year.

Other additions from the patch include:

- Adjusted fan caps for “Band World Tour” mode: For those playing on Easy, Medium or Hard, they’ll be able to earn more fans, therefore allowing bands to get further along on the tour. Easy players will be able to cross the Atlantic, Medium players can get access to more venues, and Hard players on the Xbox 360 can unlock the “One Million Fans” Achievement.

- Better randomization on the randomized setlists: If you’ve noticed Weezer’s “Say It Ain’t So” and certain Metallica tunes showing up more frequently than others on the “random” setlists, Harmonix has too. “You’ll be glad to know that we’ve tracked down and fixed the issues that triggered these very repetitive moments in Band World Tour,” Senior Designer Dan Teasdale wrote on the “Rock Band” forums.

- Improved detection and scoring for phoneme recognition: Teasdale wrote, “If you had trouble [singing] on songs like ‘Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld’ and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop,’ you should have an easier time beating these songs now.”

- Faster loading of downloadable content: DLC loads faster, and the information is now cached so that the load time wait occurs only once, versus every time the game is turned on. “The reason [DLC took so long to load] is because we have to cache all of those audio sample onto your hard drive,” Drake explained at the demo. The new music store will only have audio for the songs you choose to preview, versus automatically previewing every track on the list when you scroll over it like in the in-game setlists.

- Microphone latency on PS3 is “improved”: According to Teasdale’s forum post, microphone latency in “certain situations” has been reduced. At the demo, Drake had explained that high-end AV set-ups had mic and drum fill lag issues that affected a small but vocal amount of users. “It should now be synced up as humanly possible,” he added.

- Xbox 360 band logos visible on Xbox Live: Parental controls previously stopped band logos from being visible on Xbox Live.