Guitar Zero: Pumpkins Edition

[Shroom]

Ok, so I'm sure alot of you own guitar hero for ps2 and xbox360 or whatever. Some of you may be familiar with what amounts to a rip off of guitar hero for PC called guitar zero.

Guitar zero is basically a PC clone of guitar hero. You can even get a mod to make it look exactly like guitar hero. If you have a ps2 controller you need a usb adapter to connect your guitar to the pc, but with an xbox360 you connect directly to the pc and play the songs.

The thing about guitar zero is you can import custom songs, so here is what I propose we do.

If we can get enough people interested we could each pick a pumpkins song and make our own guitar zero setlist of all pumpkins tunes and post them up here. The files required are very small and as long we all use mp3's ripped directly from the cd's our mp3 files will all match. Everyone would only need to do 1 or 2 songs and we could have a huge collection of guitar zero songs for everyone to play, then if it goes well we could start exchanging other songs too.

If enough people are interested we could get this rolling. I can provide all the links needed for all the tools and all the directions to walk anyone who needs help through the process of making the songs.

If you are interested let me know and we'll get things started.

[brendo_91]

Originally Posted by Shroom

as long we all use mp3's ripped directly from the cd's our mp3 files will all match

False.

Not stupidly far off, but still... false.

[Shroom]

Originally Posted by brendo_91

False.

Not stupidly far off, but still... false.

No, they should match. We could always just note the exact length of the files we used to make sure everything matches up, so... crisis averted.

[brendo_91]

You understand that mp3 adds silence to the top and tail of a file? And that different encoders will do things differently?

[Shroom]

Originally Posted by brendo_91

You understand that mp3 adds silence to the top and tail of a file? And that different encoders will do things differently?

Yeah, it doesn't matter. There is a million ways around that (I mean literally 1 million ways) such as simply clipping the extra silence at the beginning of the file. Then you just make it a known rule to not have any silence at the beginning of your file. (the silence at the end wouldn't really matter)

Good. Glad we got that out of the way.

[yoshinobu's revenge]

Just pick a standard encoder for everyone to use. LAME.

[MMBKG]

I'm down if they're not. Fuck em. Let's roll.

[Shroom]

Originally Posted by MMBKG

I'm down if they're not. Fuck em. Let's roll.

Sweet. Hopefully a few more people will get interested if this takes off.


The first thing you will need to do is download a couple programs.

Guitar Zero

http://www.stepmaniamedia.com/images...rzero/zero.jpg

can be downloaded here...

http://www.stepmaniamedia.com/index.php?id=guitarzero


The 52 mb download comes with the program and a modkit you will need for custom songs.

You can also download the song packs for all the guitar hero 1 and 2 songs with all difficulties, it's a 784mb download but it should dl pretty fast and it's nice to have all those songs available.

The next thing you will need is the editor for a program called freetar. It's another guitar hero clone. The freetar player pretty much sucks but the editor is excellent for making custom songs.

You can access the java freetar editor here

http://www.freetar.net/download.php

with this version you have to be online. I have an offline editor I'll try to post a link for it later. The freetar player can come in handy if you want to quickly preview the song you've made.

A simple tutorial on using the freetar editor can be found here

http://freetar.pbwiki.com/Freetar%20Editor%20Tutorial

it's really easy to use once you get the hang of it. Basically you load up your mp3, then you hit play and you can just use your guitar hero controllers button to program the notes in where you want them. You can also slow the songs down to 1/2 speed to make it easier. Then, you can go in and make edits by selecting the individual notes. It seems complicated at first but once you get the hang of it you can make a fairly complex track in about half an hour or so.


When you are done you simply save your file as a .sng file, which is the freetar format. You can then load the .sng file in the freetar player to preview it if you want.


Next you will want to convert the .sng file into a file that can be imported into guitar zero.

Go to this website

http://www.nukular.ch/foftools

Select Freetar hero to Frets on Fire MID converter.

Select browse on whatever difficulty level you think suits the song you created and then convert. It will create a .mid file and ask you to save it. Leave it named as notes.mid

Now you will need to get a program called anvil studio which is free and can be downloaded here

http://www.anvilstudio.com/upgraden.htm

once you download and install anvil, open the notes.mid file and then go to file and choose Export Midi-Format 0 and anvil will generate a midi file usable for guitar zero.

The next step requires you to run a command line in the cmd prompt and then you're basically done. Once any of you have gotten this far let me know and I'll post a tutorial on this part, which will create a guitar zero format file and then I'll explain how to setup the setlist in guitar zero so you can create your own custom setlists with whatever songs you want. Once this is done you can start playing your songs, and hopefully lots of other songs created by the netphoria community.