The Guide to Playing Custom Songs in Rock Band PS2

**thesentence** · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 1389

The Guide to Playing Custom Songs in Rock Band PS2

Download songs here or make your own using this guide. To make them work with Rock Band take a look at this guide.

Basically what we are doing is taking homemade note charts and audio (which is obtained elsewhere) and putting them into the game - producing custom songs!

Items needed

Download this and extract using WinRAR (mirrors)
IMGBurn
Audacity
Playstation 2 with method of booting burned games (Google)
Blank DVD-Rs
Computer with DVD burner
Any version of Rock Band for the PS2 (I recommend Track Pack Vol. 1)
ArkTool 6.1 or later, 7 for Rock Band 2 (Google)

If you only have Rock Band 1 or 2 I would STRONGLY suggest investing in one of the track packs. Rock Band 1 and 2 are dual layer. The track packs are very small, the first one is only 2.62 GB. You can most likely get away with 20 songs and still be slightly under the limit. Unless of course you want to put longer songs in. The dual layer discs are around 8.6 GB and will not fit on a single 4.7 GB DVD obviously.

For the sake of this guide I will be using the Rock Band Track Pack Vol. 1.

There are two methods to extract the game files onto your computer. Please read through both of them to see which one applies to you.

Method 1

Now after you have obtained the Rock Band Track Pack place the disc in your computer's DVD drive. Browse to "My Computer". Create a folder on your desktop named "Rock Band Track Pack". Drag the files from the disc into that folder on your desktop. It should begin copying.

Method 2

If you already have an .ISO of your game then you will need to open up Apache (click off the download updates etc.). Now select "open" and browse to your .ISO. Once you have opened it right-click SLUS and select "Extract All". This may take some time.

Now that you have successfully copied the contents of the Track Pack to your desktop we will need to begin readying the customs. Place all your music files (i.e. .MP3, .WAV, .OGG, etc.) and .MIDs in one folder on your desktop. I will be using 94 Hours by As I Lay Dying during this guide.

In Rock Band there is a 3 second difference between the notes and the music. In order to fix this we are going to have to add 3 seconds to every music file in our collection.

Now open up Audacity and select File/Import. Open up your music file. Hit Ctrl+A then hit the Home key. Browse to Generate/Silence then change it to 3 seconds. Hit OK.

Now hit File/Export and set "Save as type" to Ogg Vorbis Files. Hit save then clear (not necessary) then OK.

Now open up ArkToolGui in the ArkTool 7 Folder. Select File/Open then open up the GEN folder inside the Track Pack Folder.

Go to options and uncheck "perform crypts". Now open up the Ark File Contents and open the songs folder. Go down to truckin select "truckin.pss" and then right click and hit extract file.

The .PSS file is audio and also the video for the song. The audio is in .VGS format. Since we cannot create our own .PSS files with .VGS as the audio we will need to inject a .VGS file we create out of the .OGG file into the .PSS we just extracted. Since we will need to do this with many songs you should copy the .PSS file as many times as needed. Since this .PSS is the longest song in the game (5:22) we are limited to the length of our customs. If you have a custom longer than 5:15 I suggest you extract greengrass.pss from the original Rock Band to allow your customs to be between 5 and 9:30 minutes long.

If you would like to try creating your own background videos for Rock Band 2 see this guide. Recommended for experts only.

Now what we are going to do in the next few steps is convert the .OGG into a .VGS and then inject that into the .PSS. The reason we added 3 seconds to the .OGG is because in Rock Band there is a three second offset between the notes and audio.

If you prefer working with a GUI as opposed to the command line try this tool for the following steps. You can try both, but the command line tools are more stable as of now.

To create the .VGS open up the tools folder. Now take the .OGG and .PSS and place both of those into the tools folder. You may rename these two files to simplify this process. I named both of mine "hours".

Now open up "CreateVGS". Hit enter. Because I am using "hours" I will type according to that name. You type according to the name of your .OGG.

**thesentence** · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 1389

Mirrors

UPDATES:

06/24/2012 - New mirrorlist
_________________

The Guide to Playing Custom Songs in Rock Band PS2

**ComicBookGuru** · Joined: 16 Dec 2007 Posts: 1678

Just a thought, but I think it's a 2.95 second offset as opposed to 3.
_________________

Yep, I learned through Rocksmith!

**iwasaperson** · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 4:16 pm Post subject:

**iwasaperson** · Posted: Sun Jun 14, 2009 4:26 pm Post subject:

The offset that I found from master exploder is 3.001548 seconds from using the above method. I don't know if this is exact, but it's pretty close, so it's definitely NOT 2.95

**BlinkyBill** · Joined: 17 Jun 2009 Posts: 2

great guide

i followed it but i have a problem:

after i used PSVGS (application)
i found out that i don't have the MIDI file
it didn't create it

what i did wrong?

can you help me?

**NoctimaniA** · Joined: 16 Jun 2009 Posts: 5

any ways to do this for the 360?

**iwasaperson** · Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 5:29 am Post subject: Re: Midi?????

**3nish** · Joined: 14 Feb 2008 Posts: 21

hey thank you

**Shammyshoo** · Joined: 19 Jan 2007 Posts: 49

Stuck on creating the VGS. When I use the PSVGS to inject the vgs into the pss file I get a message saying "Can't open the VGS file ________" However, the previous step of creating the VGS seems to work, though I can't find said VGS anywhere afterwards. Help please.

**thesentence** · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 1389

Make sure you have all the tools in the same folder and make sure your vgs is in the same folder as PSVGS and the rest of the tools. It should say songnameFinished.vgs.
_________________

The Guide to Playing Custom Songs in Rock Band PS2

**Shammyshoo** · Joined: 19 Jan 2007 Posts: 49

I guess that means that the VGS is not getting made. Though I don't get any error message during those steps. Does anyone know of a reason why the VGS file might not be created?

**Shammyshoo** · Joined: 19 Jan 2007 Posts: 49

So yes. The VGS file is not being created in the previous step. I have tried several times with the same result. I have read the directions very carefully and followed them to a "T". No error message, but no .vgs file either! I'm flummoxed!

**thesentence** · Joined: 21 May 2008 Posts: 1389

What audio format are you using? Also what's your OS? (i.e. Windows Vista 64-bit SP1)
_________________

The Guide to Playing Custom Songs in Rock Band PS2

**Shammyshoo** · Joined: 19 Jan 2007 Posts: 49

Its an ogg vorbis file created in Audacity with the 3 second gap.