Loads Of Band Stuff

Rock Band

Ok, so instead of doing a bunch of different write-ups on this topic, I figured I would just lump them all together into one. 3 is a charm here.

First, Rock Band just announced that they have sold over 6 million DLC songs since the games release. That of course is just insane to think about. At least to me. I probably wouldn't have believed it if it wasn't for the press release that they sent out about it all. The only thing that seemed kind off about the release is that they giving this the credit for why they were releasing the updates they most likely had planned.

"Thank you to the music lovers who have helped Rock Band reach an incredible milestone of over 6 million purchased downloads at such an early stage," stated by Paul DeGooyer, SVP DVD, Gaming and Audio, MTV. "The success of Rock Band downloadable content to date firmly reinforces our vision and its potential as a platform for music discovery. By empowering players with the ability to customize their Rock Band library with a rapidly growing selection of rock artists and songs on a weekly basis and adding great new features such as the in-game music store, we are thrilled to give fans more ways to enhance and enjoy their Rock Band experience."

Here's what you get with the update if you haven't got it yet.

Music Store: The store will allow you to preview and purchase new songs from within the game, viewing and previewing songs as well as difficulty ratings for each instrument.

Revised Fan Caps: The number of fans a player can earn in easy, medium and hard settings have been increased to let players progress further in the Band World Tour.

More diverse songs in Band World Tour: Harmonix has fixed a bug that caused the same songs to pop up multiple times in the same our of Band World Tour play.

Improved phoneme recognition: The detection and scoring for phoneme recognition has been tweaked.

Microphone Latency on PlayStation 3 improved: The microphone latency on the PS3 has been optimized.

Xbox 360 Band Logos are now visible through Xbox LIVE: A problem with parental controls was blocking them, now custom band logos are visible.

Faster loading of downloadable content: Load times have been sped up and DLC is now cached.

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Second is the actual Music Store that they talked about. So this was something I was hoping for for quite some time since I got the game and started to download songs. It comes with some pretty cool features that will be extremely useful for all the new DLC. Let me explain.

Not only can you see the new songs and such from within the game itself, but it will list the new ones as well as have a way to sort through everything very easily. Say you only want songs from one band, bam, you can search by band. Same with genre, artist, song, album, pack, and difficulty. On top of that, when you select a song, it will show you some information about the song. You know the basic stuff like Artist and Album information. But the one thing I really dig is that it will actually give you a snippet of the song before you actually purchase it. This is the feature that I will use to my great advantage. Seeing as before I would do a YouTube search for songs that I have never heard of before. One more thing before I shut up about this, it will also show you the difficulty of the song by each instrument and band. That way you know what you are getting into before you shell out the cash.

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Lastly, a little bit more about the full album downloads that were talked about with future DLCs. Mainly, not much more than it is only shortly away from being released out. They are already setting up for it, seeing as they have placed the section in the new Music Store section. They are just finalizing a few things before it is finally opened up for actual release. But it is a good sign that it won't be too far off.

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