BenVersluis.com

If you scour the internet for multi-tracks, you’ve probably seen the Beatles’ four tracks, the complete sessions for “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and just about any other type of multi-track recording you could think of.

Well, add the entire setlist of Rock Band and all the Guitar Hero games to that list.

Apparently some guy somewhere figured out how to open up the afformentioned games and grab the .mogg files: the Ogg Vorbis files inside the game. When you pull those from game and drop them in Audacity, all of the sudden you have a multi-track session from one of the games. Now, you should know that the MTRs aren’t 32 track MTRs, rather a few stereo tracks and a few mono, usually totaling around 10 (maybe a few more). So you get the printed stems of the songs.

I won’t link to the site that directly links to downloads for all these songs (it’s still illegal, you know) but here’s a slightly edited (for grammar and clarity) FAQ that was posted on the blog that broke all these songs to the internet:

All of the .mogg files open in Audacity.

First two tracks will always be stereo tracks but will be split into mono in Audacity.

The typical tracklist for these .moggs are:
1. Kick (stereo)
2. Snare (stereo)
3. Overhead/room mics
4. Bass
5. Guitar(s)
6. Lead Vox
7. Everything else (strings, synths, backing vox, etc)

A lot of the MTRs are covers. They should be clearly labeled as such.

The original multi-tracks were taken by Rock Band’s developer pre-mastering. The developers (or a studio that works for them) mastered all the material inside of Rock Band.

I’ve grabbed a lot of these files and it’s pretty cool. My only concern is that a lot of the masters clip pretty relentlessly. A friend of mine suggested it was the engineering, but I’m not willing to bet on that. I think, if anything, the clipping occured from transfering the masters from Rock Band to some guys computer.

All-in-all, this is a pretty cool hack. I’m sure Harmonix won’t be stoked to find out this is happening, but it’s cool for the rest of the world. If you’re interested, go try and search for the blog to find the tracks. I guarantee you it will take about five minutes in Google.

EDIT 10/21 - Commentor Samwise had this to say:

Hey man, they peak cause they are all playing at once at an almost mastered volume. The truth is the OUTPUT is peaking, not the individual tracks. If you can pull them up in something like Pro Tools (although Audacity works fine, it just takes longer), pan them all out, and lower them all, it won’t peak…

Hope I helped 

And he’s totally correct. I did this with a few of the tracks I downloaded and it instantly sounded better.

Tags: harmonix, multi-tracks, ogg vorbis, rock band

This entry was posted on Monday, August 18th, 2008 at 8:22 am and is filed under games, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.