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Hands-On With Rock Band Network
With absolutely no advance warning, Rock Band Network went live to the public today. We've played around with it this afternoon to give you a full rundown of the exciting new features. The best addition so far? Playable demos.
First off, the new RBN content does not blast you in the face the moment you boot up Rock Band 2. It's simply an extra menu option under the already existing music store. Here's what you get:
Top 10
After buying and playing an RBN song, you now have the opportunity to rate it on a one to five lighter scale. The ten highest-rated tracks will appear here. Since not many people have played around on the service yet, there aren't a whole lot of ratings. This means there are quite a few perfect five ratings at the moment, but the top 10 should become more useful once RBN has been around a little longer. There's also a tab for the 10 newest songs, but again there are 105 new total songs up right now, so this won't be useful right out of the gate.
Harmonix Picks
This appears to be a hand-picked list of 10 featured tracks. Who knows how bands are selected, but if you're interested here are the current picks:
Bif Naked - "Sick"
Flogging Molly - "Requiem for a Dying Song"
Furly - "Icarus' Song"
Stroke 9 - "Little Black Backpack '09"
The Cold Goodnight - "Give"
Lacuna Coil - "Survive"
The Main Drag - "Don't Let Me Down (Slowly)"
The Slip - "Even Rats"
Steve Vai - "Get the Hell Out of Here"
Five Finger Death Punch - "Burn it Down"
Browse
This is where you can really dig in and check out every song that's in RBN. Sorting categories include: recording artist, note chart author, country of origin, decade of original release, difficulty, music genre, record label, language, and song title. Artist and song title work best if you already know what you want and would like to get there as quickly as possible. Otherwise, going into a different menu for every single letter of the alphabet gets tedious. If you just want to see everything in one place, language is the best place to browse since 104 of the current 105 songs are in English. Once you buy a song, it automatically appears in your main music library with a custom "RBN" logo next to it.
Random Song
The final main menu option is just what it sounds like. You hit this tab and it takes you to any track in the library. I can see it being a fun option for someone with some cash to burn who's looking for something new.
Pricing
All of the songs so far are priced at either $1 or $2. Most of the $1 songs lean in the indie direction while bigger bands go for the higher price. Though this isn't necessarily law. Flogging Molly tracks are only a buck while plenty of bands I hadn't heard of were the full two dollars. Even artists aren't necessarily consistent with their own pricing. The band You Shriek uses both prices, for example. One thing that isn't featured yet is track grouping discounts like song packs and albums. Even though The Main Drag has 11 songs up already, you'll have to buy them all one by one.
Demos!
In addition to have the standard sound clip preview of a track, you can now download playable demos of any song in RBN. Once the demo is downloaded, you back out to quick play to check it out. Once you get about 30 to 40 seconds of play time into the song it abruptly ends. Here you have the option to play it again, switch to a new song, buy the full version of the song, or instantly delete the demo if you don't like it. You actually download the entire song with a lock on it, so if you decide to buy the track it only takes a split second to become available.
Note Charts
For those unfamiliar with the RBN system, song charts are all done by third-party companies or bands themselves. Then they go through a peer review process before they're eventually approved for sale. I bought a handful of songs to see what kind of quality note charts come out the other end. After all, these tracks are competing directly with the professional Harmonix charts we all know and love. As far as I could tell, expert guitar was totally solid on tracks like "Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse" by Of Montreal, "Australia" by The Shins, and "Sequestered in Memphis" by the Hold Steady. Random indie demos seemed above board as well. The take home message: thumbs up on charting so far.
So who's played around with Rock Band Network so far? What's your take on it?
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