[JrMan]

Note that you can install a Cobra ODE (or any other ODE as long as it can run Multiman) on any PS3 (up to 4.55, or 4.53 on a 4k Super slim), use Multiman 4.50 and install custom songs on an OFW ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_wink.gif” /> That’s what I do. Although all ODEs are blocked on 4.60 OFW for the moment, we have to wait for an update by the devs.

Do you use PSN with it? Is it safer than using CFW?

[viperi]

anyone figured out what is causing the problem with the song Steve Ouimette – La Marseillaisa? I don’t think it’s inside .mogg file as I can hear the song playing in the preview and it’s not freezing in the menu, so it must be something wrong in song.dta I guess.

[Dahnlee]

Okay, I’m a relatively new member/C3 user.

 

First, I want to say how truly grateful I am to TDCMark and TrojanNemo for opening up the whole custom song catalog to us PS3 users! TrojanNemo’s C3 programming efforts that allow the CON file conversion is a particularly HUGE gift. I first heard about the GH to RB files over a year ago, but that was Xbox only and I just had too much sunk into the PS3 DLC and peripherals to change. However, I dreamed that someone would provide this very solution for PS3 – so THANK YOU!!!

 

That said, I have actually researched my way through most of the technical challenges associated with customs on the PS3, but I wanted to take a shot at figuring out the “no cache/can’t save stars” thing. It seems like stars do get saved, but it varies from start up to start up which ones are actually displayed. I thought it might have something to do with all the customs residing in the HMX0756 folder(which is originally dedicated to just 20 songs), so I thought I’d play around with putting a song in another folder to see if it would consistently save the score for that song. As a starting point, I selected HMX0A91 that contains the official DLC song “Love Shack”. Using MultiMan to FTP the files and the merge function in the C3 PS3 menu, I added “Time Again” to the “Love Shack” DAT file and uploaded the modified DAT file and the “Time Again” resource files to HMX0A91. When I booted the game, “Love Shack” still plays fine; although “Time Again” shows up in the song menu, when I select it, I get the “won’t load, skipping song” message.

 

So I’m curious. In the OP setup option #2, you are essentially creating the HMX0756, free song folder, right? Is HMX0756 the only folder that will work for customs on the PS3? Also, what exactly does “UP8802-BLUS30463_00-RBHMXBANDCCFF0D6.rap” do?

[viperi]

Good to hear that you are trying to figure out about saving stars for song progress. If you have any success let us know. I was wondering myself why it’s showing progress to only like 20 randomly selected songs each time you enter rock band. I was thinking that it’s saving them somewhere into rock band save file.

[Dahnlee]

I have continued to play around with this. I tried inserting a custom track in the folder for the New Order/ Talking Heads/ Deftones DLC and also into the Rock Band Blitz folder; neither scenario worked (got the same “skipping song” message). I’m really curious why the game seems to only read customs from this one 20 pack DLC folder and other song folders are locked. I’m also curious how anyone ever managed to stumble onto this fact. Next, I think I’m going to try some of the directories that hold the on-disc songs for RB1 and RB2.

 

I have also noticed that the star ratings appear to be accurate and permanent for “Party in the USA” and “Enter Sandman”; however for other customs the stars/percentages appear to randomly and haphazardly pop up – in some cases, gold star ratings have spontaneously appeared for customs I haven’t even played yet! Although “Party in the USA” and “Enter Sandman” might just be flukes, it is interesting that those two songs were actual HMX releases (in spite of the fact that they are loaded as customs).

[hamburgerjung]

I have continued to play around with this. I tried inserting a custom track in the folder for the New Order/ Talking Heads/ Deftones DLC and also into the Rock Band Blitz folder; neither scenario worked (got the same “skipping song” message). I’m really curious why the game seems to only read customs from this one 20 pack DLC folder and other song folders are locked. I’m also curious how anyone ever managed to stumble onto this fact. Next, I think I’m going to try some of the directories that hold the on-disc songs for RB1 and RB2.

I think the answer is quiet easy:

There is a licence key that has to be used every time a song will be converted from con files to PS3 version. This happens in the background when you use the CON Tools by TrojanNemo.

This licence key points to the free download pack folder and only works with songs within it – that’s the whole story, I guess. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_wink.gif” />

[Dahnlee]

There is a licence key that has to be used every time a song will be converted from con files to PS3 version. This happens in the background when you use the CON Tools by TrojanNemo.

 

Hmmm, okay. Where does the CON Tool write the key? Is it in the DAT file or coded into one of the song files? Would it be possible to edit this by hand so that songs would work in another folder?

 

I honestly don’t know that it would even make a difference, but this type of playing around is how I occasionally stumble onto things.

 

BTW, “Party in the USA” and “Enter Sandman” do seem to be saving the correct stars and percentage ratings. Any speculation about why those songs would be different?

[TrojanNemo]

There are two files that are used by the tools when doing the conversion.

 

under bin/raps/ there is ps3.rap. I named it that way because it’s easy, usually it’s a long name, still ending in .rap.

 

There is also klic.txt in the /bin/ folder. That has ContentID and KLIC License Key, both corresponding to the 20 song free pack.

 

All three of these are used by the encryption process, so if you want to use a different pack/file to put customs under, you’ll need to modify those files accordingly.

 

I just made things work based on the research done by tdcmark, and I don’t really know how you get to the contentID and KLIC license key, or how you get the .rap file in the first place. For that, you’ll need someone with more PS3 specific experience. I’ve never even owned a PS3

[Dahnlee]

Okay, this all makes a little more sense to me now. In fact, these same mechanics also pose a hurdle to editing any of the MIDI DAT files for official PS3 DLC.

 

Essentially there is a 32-digit DEV KLicensee “key” that is unique to each song directory. This key serves to tie the encrypted MIDI files in that directory to a matching RAP file. As Nemo explained above, the key for the 20 song free download directory is hard coded into the MIDI DAT file as part of the C3 CON Tool for conversion/encryption process. So theoretically, custom songs could be put into any song directory IF you know the KLicensee key for that particular directory and use it to encrypt the song.

 

Unfortunately, this also means you can’t decrypt and edit official PS3 DLC unless you have that key.

 

So back to the issue of saving scores/stars. I can’t just dig around as easily as I hoped, but I’d still like to know what is going on. Back on about page 4, it was pointed out that the PS3 doesn’t use a cache like Xbox and presumably won’t save scores/stars. However, I am seeing that some progress is saved across sessions. I have kept my CFW PS3 offline, but stars for official DLC have saved when a score improved. As for the customs, there are at least two songs (Party in the USA and Enter Sandman) that have definitely saved stars and % score. I’m also seeing stars assigned to random songs. I suspect that this is related to the 20 song limit of the directory (as speculated two pages ago). However, I counted 28 customs songs with stars when I booted the system just now. My hypothesis would be that 20 of those songs were random and 8 are actually saving a score (2 of which would be Party in the USA and Enter Sandman). If that is true, I’d like to know what could be different about those 8 songs….

 

Any chance that TDC Mark is still around?

[hamburgerjung]

Any chance that TDC Mark is still around?

It looks like TDC Mark still has problems in getting a CFW PS3 as his old one got broken some time ago. ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_frown.gif” />

He tried to get a new one but still had an issue with using it for Rockband.

I would be happy to see him here again…

[Dahnlee]

I GOT IT!!!

 

Turns out that PS3 song IDs have to be NUMERIC in order for stars and song % to save.

 

After my last post, I started looking at the song.dta file to see if I could spot a common characteristic of “Party in the USA” and “Enter Sandman” that was different from all the other songs. Sure enough, those two were the only songs out of the 200+ customs on my system that had purely numeric entries for the song_id parameter: Enter Sandman = 13 and Party in the USA = 1006016. Interestingly enough, Enter Sandman is alphabetically the 13th song on the RB1 soundtrack and the Miley Cyrus pack was originally released on June 22, 2010 (I assumed 10-06-016 = song #16 for June 2010).

 

Since no PS3 DLC was released in 2014, I used a sequence of 1400XXX to renumber the song ID entries in the custom song.dta file (1400001, 1400002, etc.). I uploaded the modified DTA file to the PS3 and VOILÀ – stars, lighters, and song % all now save!!!

 

For the record, it turns out that the date and the Miley Cyrus song ID were just a coincidence. After I did some more checking, I found that all HMX DLC start with a 100 or 101 prefix and RBN DLC start with a 501 prefix. Still, the 140 prefix worked just fine.

 

The song_id is not linked to other file or subfolder names, so you can change it without having to change anything else. Obviously, you want to keep track of your numbers so that you don’t repeat any, but otherwise this is a really easy fix.

[TrojanNemo]

I smell an update to the PS3 converter coming.

[TrojanNemo]

Here’s an interesting bit of information for you, followed by a challenge.

 

We’ve known for a while (since pksage figured out the cache file structure) that the game stores song IDs as numeric (long) values. Even custom songs with the alphanumeric song IDs in the songs.dta file get converted to numeric values in the song cache file. On Xbox, the song cache stores game play information, but only as long as you don’t delete it. When you do, poof, it’s gone. On the PS3, you never could store it before, because there was no song cache. So now I’m wondering if also changing the song ID on the Xbox version of the song would make the values stay stored across rebuilds of the song cache, which would be a pretty major finding. I’ll have some Xbox people test that theory.

 

For now, here’s a challenge for you. Can you test it a few times, adding one digit to the song id until it no longer works? I want to know how many digits the numeric value for the song ID can be before this breaks. Thanks!

[hamburgerjung]

I GOT IT!!!

 

Turns out that PS3 song IDs have to be NUMERIC in order for stars and song % to save.

 

After my last post, I started looking at the song.dta file to see if I could spot a common characteristic of “Party in the USA” and “Enter Sandman” that was different from all the other songs. Sure enough, those two were the only songs out of the 200+ customs on my system that had purely numeric entries for the song_id parameter: Enter Sandman = 13 and Party in the USA = 1006016. Interestingly enough, Enter Sandman is alphabetically the 13th song on the RB1 soundtrack and the Miley Cyrus pack was originally released on June 22, 2010 (I assumed 10-06-016 = song #16 for June 2010).

 

Since no PS3 DLC was released in 2014, I used a sequence of 1400XXX to renumber the song ID entries in the custom song.dta file (1400001, 1400002, etc.). I uploaded the modified DTA file to the PS3 and VOILÀ – stars, lighters, and song % all now save!!!

 

For the record, it turns out that the date and the Miley Cyrus song ID were just a coincidence. After I did some more checking, I found that all HMX DLC start with a 100 or 101 prefix and RBN DLC start with a 501 prefix. Still, the 140 prefix worked just fine.

 

The song_id is not linked to other file or subfolder names, so you can change it without having to change anything else. Obviously, you want to keep track of your numbers so that you don’t repeat any, but otherwise this is a really easy fix.

Man, these are good news – good job!

 

So this means there can be only 998 songs for each year?

 

e.g. 1400001-1400999 for 2014

e.g. 1500001-1400999 for 2015 aso

 

Can you send me your modified song.dat to compare it with mine to have a better understanding on how it works exactly, please?

 

For now, here’s a challenge for you. Can you test it a few times, adding one digit to the song id until it no longer works? I want to know how many digits the numeric value for the song ID can be before this breaks. Thanks!

Of course I can do it for you!

To make sure I test the right thing can you give me an example on where and how to change the digits?

And is there any special song you prefer to test?

[Dahnlee]

Can you send me your modified song.dat to compare it with mine to have a better understanding on how it works exactly, please?

Sure, PM your email address and I’ll be glad to pass it along ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />

 

 

So this means there can be only 998 songs for each year?

Nope, not at all. My theory about using a date-based format turned out to be wrong and I just got lucky that the 1400000-range didn’t cause a conflict with the official DLC on my PS3. As best I can tell, it appears that all numbers between 1100000 and 4900000 should be usable for customs (Below 1100000 you run the risk of duplicating HMX DLC and above 5000000 you run the risk of duplicating RBN DLC). That range alone allows for almost 4 million songs. Assuming RBN song IDs don’t go higher than 5019999, then 5020000 and beyond would also be wide open. Which actually leads into Nemo’s request…

 

 

Can you test it a few times, adding one digit to the song id until it no longer works? I want to know how many digits the numeric value for the song ID can be before this breaks.

Done. I found that if I added an additional 5 digits (12 digits total) everything still works. One more digit beyond that (13 digits) and the song would display random information (like it does with the alphanumeric IDs). One more digit beyond that (14 digits) and the song disappears from the index and it actually takes a little bit of work to get it back – just reloading the original DTA file wasn’t enough. I had to actually completely remove the song from the DTA file, run the game with the song removed, then reload the DTA with the song added back in.

 

If hamburgerjung is still willing to run through this exercise as well, he can hopefully confirm these results.

 

 

I smell an update to the PS3 converter coming.

Thank you again for your continued support of the PS3!!!

[Author]

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