Rock Band Tracker v 0.9b Released

I have uploaded a new version of Rock Band Tracker, version 0.9 Beta, which can be downloaded at the links at the bottom of this post. There are several important features in this update, but in order to use them you will need to take advantage of a great feature of Keldon.net's Rock Band website. Please read this post carefully so you fully understand how to use the new features and what their implications are to new users versus existing users. I apologize for the length of this post but it really is necessary to explain this fully.

The program now has the ability to process a particular format of a spreadsheet and import the scores found in it into Rock Band Tracker. This process will also automatically update your Collection file to include all songs found within the spreadsheet. This can be done in two separate places. If you select "Import Keldon.net Spreadsheet" from the "Update" menu, score results will be added and your collection will be updated. If you prefer manually entering your scores but would like to be able to use this spreadsheet to automate the maintenance of your Collection (which would spare you the pain of using the lousy Collection Editor in the program itself, you can select "Update Collection from Spreadsheet" under the "Collection" menu. The latter option will not update or add any new scores from the spreadsheet; it will only search for the presence of scores for songs you have not yet specified as being in your collection and add it.

IMPORTANT NOTE: It is very important that you make sure you have the latest update file to be sure this will work properly. I haven't been able to test yet for how the program handles situations where the song title doesn't exist in the master song list in Rock Band Tracker itself. I hope that it will just ignore it, but it's hard to say for sure at this point. If you are a new user and download the "full" package below, the data file supplied is completely up to date. For existing users, I have included the latest update.dat file in the archive with the new executable. If you haven't updated in a while, be sure to process that update file before attempting to use these new import features.

As a general rule, I would recommend that you vigilantly update your Rock Band Tracker data file to ensure that you get optimal results from this feature.

ANOTHER IMPORTANT NOTE: Because of the complexity of this feature and the various scenarios that can arise, I would recommend making manual copies of your data.dat, log.dat, and collection.dat files before using this new feature to make sure you don't lose anything if an unexpected problem arises.

In addition to these new features, I also corrected the Visual Star List to no longer include "blank" results for songs that are not in your collection. You'll also notice that there are checkbox menus at the top of the panel. This is a preliminary feature that has not yet been completed. At the moment, only the Difficulty filters on Guitar actually have any functionality. I hope to complete this addition in an upcoming version, but I didn't feel like stripping out what I had done so far.

Here are the instructions for obtaining the spreadsheet file that these new features work with:

1) Go to http://www.keldon.net/rockband in your web browser.
2) Click "My Scores" in the menu at the top.
3) In the box for "Player/Band Name", enter your PSN ID or XBL Gamertag.
4) For the "Instrument" box, select "All Solo."
5) Set your platform appropriately and select "Rock Band 2" as your game.
6) Select "Expert" as your difficulty.
7) The default checkbox settings should work, but make sure that "Show songs without scores" is NOT checked. It should be unchecked by default. The checkboxes for "Show RB2 scores", "Show RB1 scores", and "Show DLC scores" should all be checked as well.
8) Click the "Get Scores as CSV File" button at the bottom.
9) Save the resulting file as "scores.csv" to the root of your Rock Band Tracker directory. It might take a while to generate if you have a lot of results.

That's it. Once the "scores.csv" file is in your Rock Band Tracker folder, you will be able to use these new features. You can also repeat this process periodically, overwrite the existing file, and import your newest scores again. There are no adverse consequences to repeat imports.

NOTES:

There are a few things that users should be aware of with respect to this new feature. First of all, the spreadsheet results (and, by extension, the RB2 servers) do not make any distinction between scores achieved at different difficulty levels. This means that if your best score is on Hard, it will be imported and Rock Band Tracker will treat it as an Expert score. To get around this, you can manually delete results for songs you know you haven't beaten on Expert or achieved as high a score, but unfortunately there's nothing else that can be done because Harmonix doesn't appear to make the difficulty distinctions anymore. Secondly, the spreadsheet does not contain any information regarding percentages and note streaks, so this data will be absent from results imported in this fashion. Finally, since the spreadsheet only stores your highest score on each song for each instrument, it will not track all of your results.

Because of the way this program was designed at the outset, the ideal way to use it is still to write down your scores and manually input the data. There are several things that the program tracks that will not apply or will not be comprehensively tracked using the spreadsheet import. However, this new option can help you maintain your collection or at least get you started with some base data instead of having to start from scratch. However, if you don't care about percentages or note streaks, and you are only interested in seeing how your scores have improved, then this new feature can still be used exclusively and spare you a lot of tedious data entry.

Here are the links for the new versions:

FOR EXISTING USERS ONLY:

Rock Band Tracker v0.9 Beta EXE only (includes update.dat file):

http://www.geocities.com/angrysportsguy/rbt09b_exe.zip


FOR NEW USERS ONLY:

Rock Band Tracker v0.9 Beta Full version:

http://www.geocities.com/angrysportsguy/rbt09b_full.zip

NOTE: New users should simply extract the folder contained in the .zip file above to any location to which they have full rights. The desktop should work fine for most people. Make sure you keep the directory structure intact. Then just run the RBTracker.exe file. You will need the latest version of Microsoft's .NET runtime to use this program. If you are prompted in this way, you can get this runtime environment at Microsoft's website.

Enjoy!