by PhayMo
Builds a custom Rock Band 2 Deluxe disc for the PlayStation 2 from folders of Clone Hero songs. You choose the songs, it converts the audio, charts, album art and background video into the formats the console expects, packs them into the game's archive and writes a bootable ISO.
Everything it produces has been tested on real hardware.
Windows. The chart converter runs Magma, the official Rock Band compiler, which is a Windows program.
Python 3.8 or newer, from python.org,
if you are running from the source. Tick Add Python to PATH during setup. The
packaged .exe needs nothing installed.
Your own copy of Rock Band 2 Deluxe for PS2, unpacked to a folder - the one
containing SLUS_218.00 and gen\MAIN_0.ARK. This tool does not include any
game files.
Songs in Clone Hero layout: one folder per song holding notes.mid (or
notes.chart), song.ini, the audio, and album.png. Separate stems such as
guitar.ogg and drums_1.ogg are ideal, since the game can then mute each part
as it is missed, but a single mixed song.ogg works too - as do .wav, .mp3
and .opus. With one mixed file the whole song plays from the backing track, so
missed notes do not drop out.
A song offers exactly the parts its chart plays: a guitar-only chart becomes a guitar-only song, and its disc space goes down accordingly. Stems for a part the chart skips are not wasted - they are mixed into the backing track, so the song still sounds complete. Lyrics on their own are not a vocals part; most Clone Hero charts carry them just to show the words.
Background videos are included - eleven short clips in venues\, one picked
per song and looped behind it. Drop your own files in that folder, or point the
Setup page at a different one. They only need to be a few seconds long.
A song that brings its own video plays that instead, the way Clone Hero does it:
a file named video or background in the song folder, in any format Clone Hero
accepts for an animated background - .mp4, .avi, .webm, .ogv, .mpeg -
or .mkv, .mov, .mpg and .m4v besides. song.ini's video_start_time is
honoured, so a video meant to start part-way in still lines up, and a short one
loops rather than running out.
A still background.png or .jpg is left alone, and that song gets an animated
venue clip like any other. Clone Hero's animated highways are not backgrounds
either: Rock Band 2 draws its own note track.
Or set Background to Black on the Setup page and have no video at all, which is much the cheapest thing you can do to a disc - see Choosing songs that fit below. Then no video files are needed, and songs that brought their own are black behind too.
ps2str.exe, from Sony's PS2 SDK. It muxes the video and audio together.
It cannot be distributed with this tool, so you have to supply your own copy.
Everything else - FFmpeg, Onyx, dtab and Mackiloha - the Setup page downloads
for you in about half a minute.
Budget around 30 GB of free space for the work folder, and expect a full disc of a hundred songs to take a couple of hours.
If you have the packaged release, unzip it and run RB2DX Disc Builder.exe. The
first start takes a good twenty seconds while it unpacks itself, with nothing on
screen until the window appears - it has not hung, so give it a moment before
double-clicking again.
From the source, double-click run.bat, or:
python -m rb2dx gui
Then, on each page in turn:
- Setup - point at your game folder, your video folder, a work folder and
where to save the ISO. Press Download what's missing to fetch the tools,
then select
ps2strand use Locate to point at your copy. - Songs - add your song folders and press Scan for songs. Tick the ones you want. The bar at the bottom shows how full the disc is as you go, and each folder shows how many of its songs you have chosen.
- Build - press Build the disc and watch the log. Songs that cannot be converted are set aside with a reason rather than stopping the build.
- Results - the finished ISO, plus anything that was left off and why.
Burn the ISO to a DVD-R, or run it from a hard drive loader.
A real PS2 boots the ISO this tool writes; PCSX2 does not. With identical files on it, an image written here fails where one written by ImgBurn boots, so it is in how the image is put together rather than anything on the disc.
So tick Also save the disc's files in a folder, under Save the ISO as on the Setup page. The build then leaves the disc's contents in the folder named in Save the folder as - beside the ISO unless you point it somewhere else - and you make the image yourself: open ImgBurn, choose Build, set the destination to an image file, drop that folder in as the source, and on the Options tab pick file system ISO9660 + UDF with UDF revision 1.02. Everything lands at the root of the disc, which is where the console expects it.
The folder costs no disc space worth speaking of: its files are hard links to the ones the build already wrote, as long as both sit on the same drive.
The stock Deluxe disc is 7.62 GiB and that is the default limit, because a disc that size is known to boot on real hardware. A song costs roughly 11 MB a minute at the default video quality, so a three minute song is about 40 MB.
Two thirds of that is the video. Setting Background to Black on the Setup page spends it on songs instead: the same 33 songs that weigh 2.54 GB behind venue clips come to 0.99 GB against a black background, so about two and a half times as many fit. There is still a video stream in each song - the game reads its audio out of one and finds none without it - but black at 150 kbps costs almost nothing. You lose the venues; the note track, crowd and scoring are drawn by the game and look exactly as they always did.
Which songs to leave off is up to you: the usage bar turns red and says how far over you are, and nothing is dropped behind your back. Sorting by On disc puts the most expensive songs at the top, which is the quickest way to claw back space, and the Difficulty column is there if you would rather thin out the hardest ones. Lowering the video quality on the Setup page is the gentler lever - it costs picture quality rather than songs.
Changing either one rebuilds the songs already staged, since their video has to be encoded again, and the usage bar prices them at the new size straight away.
The ISO stage refuses to write an image over the limit, so an over-full selection fails at the end rather than producing a disc that will not boot.
Leave out the four songs the base game came with, on by default, buys back about 264 MB - six or so of your own songs. Three of those four are never in the setlist and their audio is in a format this build cannot play at all; the fourth is Afterlife, the Custom Edition's one playable song, which also has its entry taken out of the game's song list so nothing is left pointing at missing files. Turn it off if you would rather keep them.
Everything the interface does is also available without it, which is handy for rebuilding after a change:
python -m rb2dx setup --base-game "D:\RB2DXCE-PS2" --work "D:\rb2dx\work"
python -m rb2dx setup --add-library "D:\Charts\Rock Band 3"
python -m rb2dx setup --download
python -m rb2dx setup --demo-songs keep
python -m rb2dx setup --disc-folder yes
python -m rb2dx setup --background black
python -m rb2dx scan
python -m rb2dx plan
python -m rb2dx build
Both share one settings file, in %LOCALAPPDATA%\rb2dxbuilder\settings.json.
A song is left off the disc. The Results page says which stage it failed and why. Missing album art and charts that Magma rejects are the usual causes. Failures are remembered so later builds do not stall on the same song; Try the failed songs again clears that.
A song's chart will not convert. Plenty of things a Clone Hero chart gets away with, Rock Band's compiler will not, and these are put right on the way through rather than costing you the song: an album track number of zero, chords of four or five gems where the game can draw three, vocal phrases nested inside one another, and lyrics belonging to a part the song does not offer, which are dropped along with it. Folder names holding characters the console cannot print are handled too.
The disc will not boot. Check the ISO is not larger than the size limit, and that the game folder you pointed at boots as-is. In PCSX2 it never will - see Playing in an emulator above.
A song hangs on the loading screen or crashes as it loads. Almost always a song list entry that promises something the song cannot deliver: an instrument offered with no audio channels behind it, or with nothing charted for it, does it every time. Nothing the game ships breaks that rule, so nothing built here does either - the parts a chart plays decide the channels, the ranks and the chart tracks together, and the chart's drum mix events are checked against the audio before a song ships. If a song still crashes, please report it.
The notes do not line up with the music. Fixed already: the chart converter pushes a chart forward by up to three seconds, by a whole number of seconds, so that its first note is not right at the start, and the audio is given exactly that much silence to match. It is measured per song rather than assumed. If a song still feels out of time, say which one.
No preview audio until you hover one particular song. Fixed already: every preview clip is stored together at the front of the archive, which is what the game's streaming needs. Nothing to do.
Each song goes through these stages, and songs run in parallel:
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| audio | Stems are mixed at 22050 Hz into one channel group per part the chart plays, everything else into the backing, plus a 30 second preview |
| charts | Onyx and Magma convert the chart to Rock Band 2 form; parts the song does not offer are dropped before Magma sees them, and lyrics, chords and lower difficulties are repaired so it accepts the rest |
| art | Album art becomes a 256x256 8-bit paletted PS2 texture |
| vgs | The mix is encoded to PlayStation 4-bit ADPCM, lined up with the silence the chart converter put in front of the song |
| video | The song's own video, a venue clip if it has none, or black, is encoded to MPEG-2 and muxed with the audio into a .pss |
| archive | Song files and the compiled song list are injected into the game's archive, which is repacked |
| iso | A bootable ISO9660/UDF image is written |
| verify | Every shipped file is read back out of the archive and compared |
Work is cached per song, so adding one song to a finished disc only builds that one.
pip install pyinstaller
pyinstaller rb2dxbuilder.spec
That writes dist\RB2DX Disc Builder\, about 90 MB, which can be zipped and
shared as-is. It is a folder rather than a single file so that the venues
folder stays visible: clips dropped in there are used without changing any
setting. None of the external tools are included, since the program downloads
those on first run.
- The Rock Band 2 Deluxe team, for the mod this builds on.
- Onyx Music Game Toolkit and dtab, both by mtolly, for chart conversion and for reading and writing the song list.
- Mackiloha by PikminGuts92, for the archive and texture tools.
- FFmpeg, for everything audio and video.
- Lysix, for their amazing tutorial.
MIT, in LICENSE. The background clips in venues\ are not mine and are only
there as a convenience - replace them with your own if you plan to redistribute
this.