Shroud

I think it should be allowed, if someone doesn't manage to still find a disc copy of RS2014 for Windows/Mac/PS, there is at least one alternative already to play CDLCs being developed:

I think it's good to have that preferred path indicator! It would not feel very useful for me to request a song without specifying that I usually wish for the bass part. If the guitar part is charted as a response to my wishlist, I would have little use for it AND I'd feel bad that someone had spent their time charting the other part thinking it would have made me happy.

Yes, but it doesn't mean it just corrects itself. It's hard to tell without seeing you play, but if you're still a beginner on the guitar (because this is usually a guitar problem, not bass, and it's related to using the pick) then maybe it's possible you are swinging the pick too much. Many people when they start on an instrument, they instinctively think it's gonna be hard and therefore that they have to hit it hard, but that's unnecessary even with drums, much less with an amplified guitar. If I were your teacher, I would check that when playing lead parts you're not doing the same wide right hand movements as when you're strumming: you only need a very minimum movement of the wrist to play single strings. I would also check that you're not slamming down on the strings from far away, again you only need to activate a string's vibration with a small pressure, not hitting it like a hammer hits a nail. It is also possible that you're dipping the pick too far below the string, while you only need a millimetre or so of the tip of the pick to hit the string. Last but not least, you are using both downstrokes and upstrokes, right? Because if you only use downstrokes then it's going to be twice as hard to control your pick and to decrease efforts.

Downloads work for me, but I have to refresh the page sometimes

Yes that could be, but I just got the free version as I only needed it for testing your ChartPlayer. Another small feedback: I think the lyrics would be more readable without the disappearing effect.

Yes I would expect it to scale, but it stays the same: However it might be very much a problem with the Cakewalk DAW... all I did there was to click the fullscreen icon on the top-right corner of the window. Well I suppose that I would need some audio interface to have the DAW detect the sound from my instrument, I don't think the original RS cable itself works with Cakewalk, I can get it detected but I can't hear anything. By the way about note detection, are you using some FFT algorithm, are you leveraging the functionalities of the DAW itself, or something else?

You're right! It did create that folder to save the output, now the fixed version correctly targets the folder you choose from within the converter, and the button text updates back when finished. Conversion is actually pretty fast, just a few seconds per song. So now I was finally able to see how the ChartPlayer works inside Cakewalk, so here are my first comments and findings... of course I understand this is still very much WIP, and that you're already conscious about what you want to add in the future. First of all, it already looks great! The notes highway looks good and works very well already at this stage. It actually looks even clearer than Rocksmith, less fancy graphics but more readable. I have to think now about which songs gave me most trouble reading notes and chords because of visual overlapping, and see if they are clearer in your ChartPlayer. Switching to full screen does not enlarge the highway. I am not sure if this depends on the DAW, or if you are even planning a fullscreen mode. Just sayin' that it could be a limitation for some user. I am undecided at the moment on whether not having the "highway zooming" functionality is a good or a bad thing. In general, whenever Rocksmith "zooms out" to show a larger portion of the guitar neck (typically because notes farther away are going to appear), it throws me off and make me lose my concentration, and then I have to squint my eyes to see exactly the frets number when zoomed out . So my first reaction to your ChartPlayer not zooming is actually positive... on the other hand, I can imagine that with a song that has frequent jumps up and down the neck, scrolling instead of zooming might make it very difficult to read. I need to find some songs that do that, and see how they end up in your ChartPlayer. Speaking of the scrolling up and down, it is quite fast... it's a bit stressing to the eye but again it might be necessary this fast, since there is no zooming. The "skyline" works great, I can just click on it to instantly go back (or forward) to another section of the song that I might want to play. I also like how any action takes place instantly (no need to wait through "you're gonna be a superstar" silliness). The only bug I found was in the songs selection list: for some reason, after clicking back and forth between Lead and Bass tracks, it lost everything and only showed an empty list. Only after closing the plugin and going back in, it showed the list again. Anyway your ChartPlayer is actually already in a quite usable state, well done! I don't know what your current priorities, but if it were for me, I wouldn't go into the rabbit hole of implementing large features such as note detection or dynamic difficulties, but I would focus on improving the usability of the current basic features. For example, the song selection list could really benefit if displaying in full-screen a lot more songs at once (because we all have many hundreds at least in our collection, and Rocksmith itself shows too fee at once for me), perhaps along with more metadata information. Adding a search filter there would be also handy. I haven't tried yet if it is possible to slow down a song using the DAW's own speed settings, but maybe having something on the ChartPlayer screen to do that quickly would also be nice.

The PsarcConverter doesn't seem to do anything... I tried selecting some psarc files of CDLCs that I know work fine in the game, but the PsarcConverter just hangs there saying Conversion status: 1 Songs Queen - Play the Game the button changes to Abort Conversion but nothing happens, Task Manager shows that PsarcConverter CPU usage is less than 1%. I also tried selecting multiple files, or a folder with a bunch of files, but the result is the same. Am I missing some libraries or other installations?

Ok, so I have at least managed to get it installed as a VST plugin. I normally use Reaper as DAW, but because I use an older version 4.22 (required for charting Rockband customs) which turns out it doesn't support VST3, I had to go find a recent freeware DAW and so I installed Cakewalk. Your plugin loads... but now what? I suppose I need a CDLC track in your format, but the CDLC converter from psarc to OpenSongChart format is not implemented yet, or is it? Do you have any songs in OSC format that can be used for testing?

That's a fantastic project you're carrying out there @ ladron ! I checked quickly your GIT hoping to see some .cs files there... I am a programmer myself and C# is my current favourite language Of course now my first thought is how I could help you out, but I am also always so overburdened with stuff to do that I should try not to add another one on my plate. Just this morning before reading your latest post I was contemplating how to find some extra time to finally start charting some CDLC. But I am following up on your updates and down the road I will at least try your program and give constructive feedback.

These would be really great for anyone serious about improving their playing skills. I think it would be awesome if the "skyline" picture turned RED on a slim vertical line at the point where you missed/botched a note, and at the end of the song you could drag over the skyline and see the highway scroll back to show you what you did wrong.

This CFSM bug is driving me nuts as I don't understand why, how, what...? There are some specific CDLCs where this bug happens, not all of them. For example, this is one of them: https://ignition4.customsforge.com/cdlc/8573 and this is another one: https://ignition4.customsforge.com/cdlc/12942. I'd like someone to test either of these two and tell me if it just happens on my PC! So the weird bug happens if I choose "Edit Song Information" and edit for example the title or the sorting, then when I click "SAVE" the CFSM automatically adds "Song" in front of the DLC Key This is not just a cosmetic issue, because by changing the DLC Key then the game loses all my progress in that chart because it thinks it's a different song. What really drives me crazy is that... if I try to go back and change the DLC Key to anything else than what it used to be then CFSM lets me do it, but if I try to restore the original DLC Key then nope, it puts the "Song" back in front of it For example that first song had a DLC Key "SoWhat" and CFSM forced it into "SongSoWhat", if I change it to anything else say for example "ThisIsARandomKey" the CFSM lets me do it without problem, but if I try to set it back to "SoWhat" it changes it again to "SongSoWhat". Even if I close CFSM and restart, how does it know what used to be the original DLC Key? Is there maybe some settings issue somewhere? Edit: thanks @ Phantatsy I already had that option selected, unfortunately it doesn't help. It's really a weird bug, I have no idea why it would happen only on my PC... in addition to adding "Song" in front of the DLC Key, if I try to make the DLC Key shorter than 6 characters, it fills the rest by repeating the previous (e.g. if I shorten it to "S" it changes it to "SSSSSS", if I shorten it to "So" it changes it to "SoSoSo")

The weird thing is that I don't think the original CDLCs show that error when I load them up the first time in DLC Builder to unpack them, but they give me the error when I replace the xml with the one I edited in EOF, even though I didn't change anything at the beginning of the chart.

Thank you so much to both of you! I followed your instructions and was able to make changes to a couple of CDLCs, tested in game they worked fine. I only encountered a couple of minor issues, just FYI: - after editing an xml in EOF and using the result as a replacement in the rs2dlc file, it looks like the DLC Builder always says that the new track has an error about having notes in the first measure instead of having an empty first measure; however if I just ignore this error, nothing seems to be wrong in-game - for some reason, my progress with the CDLC is reset to 0, even though the song ID/key looks still the same when checked in CFSM, and the game does remember if the CDLC was marked by me as a "favourite" But these are definitely minor glitches I can certainly live with.

Sometimes there is a good CDLC with a very small chart mistake: a wrong note, a missing marker, an awkward fretting, and so on. I would like to learn how to make such small chart fixes myself, with the minimum amount of work. Can someone help me out writing a step-by-step guide for this purpose? I expect that such process in broad strokes goes like this: 1- unpack a CDLC into individual files 2- edit the chart file in EoF 3- repack/rebuild the CDLC What tool to use for steps 1 & 3, and what file to edit? What would be the details of each step? Any other steps required? I am trying to keep this to the minimum effort required, limited to adding/removing/changing notes to the chart. I am not considering bigger changes like fixing the tempo mapping or adding new instruments.