So I’ve been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately. It is by far one of the funnest games I’ve played in a while. Unfortunately, due to my supreme broke-ness I have to rely on friends and relatives to fullfill all my Guitar Hero needs as I don’t currently own a PS2. I do get to play now and then, but on those evenings when I get that insatiable hankerin to play, I’m usually just S.O.L. Until now…
I had heard rumblings about Frets On Fire through the interweb, but I didn’t really give it much thought. I figured it would be cheezy and wouldn’t work very well. Boy was I mostly wrong. After suffering from a near seizure on Friday due to lack of Guitar Hero in my life, I decided to give it a try. I mean, how bad could it be? And besides, it is free after all.
The download and install was totally painless. I fired it up and was presented with three rather catchy default tunes. They weren’t anything I’d ever heard before, but they weren’t bad. I picked up the keyboard and holding it in a sort of guitar-ish position, I gave it a shot. It took me about 15 minutes to really get used to the timing of the keyboard. It is actually quite different playing with a keyboard as opposed to the GH controller, but once I had the timing down, I spent the next hour rockin out to the default tunes. They got old quick. I wanted Crossroads! I wanted Bark At The Moon! I wanted to try Miserlou and Rock This Town! I went into the built-in song editor to see what that offered and I noticed an option to import the GH set list. This was worth looking into. I started through the import process and was told that I needed the insert the GH disc into my computer in order to import the songs directly. Hmmm… As I don’t own the game, this obviously wouldn’t work.
I decided to hit the Frets On Fire forums to see if there were any add-on tunes. I immediately noticed that the community is still in the infant stages. There are a few songs for download out on the boards, but there wasn’t really anything that interested me too much. And many of the posted files were the fret files only, meaning I had to supply the tunes (the game will actually allow you to import and play any ogg audio file). I thought this might be an option, but I quickly discovered that I didn’t really own any of the music that had been “fretted”. I was about to give up when a post about importing GH tracks caught my eye. One of the forum members suggested torrenting the GH iso in order to import the tracks. Hmmm… To each his own I guess. Torrenting files is not really for everyone.
About 2 hours and a couple imports later I was jammin to Freebird like I had written it. This game truly rocks! To be fair though, here’s a list of some of the good and bad things about it:
The Good: it runs quite well on my Athlon XP 3000+ and fully supports 1680×1050 rez, easily imports and plays all tracks from Guitar Hero 1 and Guitar Hero 2, plays almost exactly as you expect it to, it’s an excellent way to grab a GH fix between actual GH sessions, and when it comes down to it, it’s just a dang fun game, plus it’s free. Also, if you happen to be a non-Windows user, its available for Linux and Mac OS as well.
The Not-So-Good (I didn’t use “Bad” becuase I didn’t find much that was actually bad about it): you play on a keyboard (in itself this isn’t so bad, but I’m used to the GH controllers and that really is part of the appeal of the game), hitting fret 5 is rather difficult on a standard keyboard because of the gaps between sets of F-keys (this may also be partly because of my girly nerd hands but it made playing on Hard almost impossible), no multi-player support (again, this isn’t a GH replacement, but it would be nice to jam with a friend), it currently doesn’t support playing the rhythm track on GH2 songs (I actually had to physically delete the rhythm tracks on a few songs bacause they didn’t seem to mesh correctly), doesn’t seem to support power-ons and pull-offs (at least I couldn’t seem to get them to work), no whammy bar/key.
Now please don’t make your download decision based on the volume of Bad in the Good/Bad list above. Although there are some definite gripes about this game, those few things wouldn’t keep me from recommending this game to any Guitar Hero fan. And really, if you’ve never played the real version of Guitar Hero, you won’t even notice most of the items on my gripe list. Either way, they really weren’t that big of a deal to me and I have played the real thing. I’ll mention again that this game can’t really replace the real version of Guitar Hero, but it is an excellent way to get in some extra practice between sessions. And for those that don’t own Guitar Hero, this game is an excellent substitute. All that’s really needed is to find a way to convert a GH controller for use via USB, then I’d be set. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get my Lynard Skynard on. Freebird here I come!
how do u import songs i dont kno how to do that… please share
There’s a couple ways to import songs…
If you own Guitar Hero, just put your Guitar Hero disc in your cd-rom drive and then open FretsonFire. Go to the “Song Editor” option and use the “Import Guitar Hero Songs” option. The game will do the rest.
If you don’t own Guitar Hero, you’ll need to first download the songs (you can do this using emule or a torrent client, I found a torrent containing every single GH1 and GH2 song on mininova.org). Once downloaded, you’ll find that each song consists of 4 files. There will be a song.ogg file (background music), a guitar.ogg file (lead guitar audio), a notes.mid file (layout for the notes), and the song.ini file (which tells the game how to meld the files together). All 4 of those files for each song should be placed in its own folder in the following FretsonFire directory (folder where the game is installed): FretsonFire\data\songs
Once you’ve pasted the files into the “songs” folder, just start FretsonFire and you should have all the GH1 and GH2 songs.
One thing to note is that the GH2 songs also have a rhythm.ogg file because GH2 has the option to play lead or rhythm guitar. FretsonFire doesn’t support the rhythm track so you’ll need to delete the rhythm.ogg files. If you don’t delete it, FretsonFire will try to play it and it screws up the song.
How do I get the oggenc.exe thing into the game. Thats my big problem. please respond.
i went to the website mininova.org and went to get the torrent for FoF so i could have the guitar hero songs and it wasnt there. do you know of any other websites where i could get all the songs from?
Here’s a couple links to the torrents for GH1 and GH2 song packs for Frets On Fire on Mininova (hopefully I won’t get targeted for posting these)…
GH1 Songs: http://www.mininova.org/tor/543223
GH2 Songs: http://www.mininova.org/tor/606935
I’d imagine the GH3 song pack will be up in the next couple weeks as well.
Simply putting the disk into a window system with a DVD will NOT work. Nothing but 5 meg of DVD A/V files and FoF doesn’t like it.
Nonetheless, thanks for the top on the download. (bittorrent is a nuisance)
UPDATE: I don’t have a direct link, but I was able to locate the GHIII songpack on isohunt.com this past weekend as well. Just visit isohunt.com and search for “frets” and you should find a couple torrents for the Guitar Hero 3 songs. As usual, they work great.
How to change frets on fire’s graphic or theme….?
The latest version of Frets on Fire allows you to switch to a “Frets on Ice” mode which basically just turns everything blue. This is done from the options menu, but you do need to have the latest version of the game to do this.
You can get the latest version HERE.
Just wondering how you import songs to Frets on Fire with Mac, is it the same process because I am having trouble.
I’m actually not sure if there’s any difference on Mac. I’m more of a PC/Linux guy myself. I’ll have to check with some of my Mac friends to see if they’re able to get it to work. I’ll let you know what I find out.
How did they manage to import “Guitar Hero 3″ songs? I’ve tryed but have gotten no where.
is it possible to download just one song rather than a whole pack because when i downloaded a pack of them my computer got so slow i couldnt do anything and i had to reboot it?
@chris…
Depending on which torrent client you use (I prefer Utorrent), you can specify which files within the torrent you would like to download. You can select the guitar hero torrent and then specify which songs from that pack you want to download.
Hey I find this to be pretty helpful with the uploading Guitar Hero songs. I downloaded the uTorrent like you said that you like and went to the mininova site, but how long does this take to download?!?!? I mean, I’m downloading the GH2 songs now and I know that there’s 40 songs to download, but it’s already been about 2 hours and it’s only 20% done. Sure it’ll be fun when it’s all done, but I wanted to be able to play tonight, and now I might not be able to play until Monday (it’s Saturday now). Is it supposed to take this long?
Unfortunately, with torrent downloads it really depends on how many people are sharing it at the time. I’ve had some downloads take less than and hour and some take close to 2 weeks depending on how much bandwidth is out there for the particular file. It can be frustrating, but give it some time and you’ll get em.
Also, the GH3 songs are now available out there as well. I’m not currently seeing any seeds out on mininova, but here’s a start from PirateBay:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3893738/Frets.On.Fire.Guitar.Hero.3.Song.Pack
yeah to solve the no controller problem if you haven’t already you can buy a ps2 to usb controller converter. then you can plug your guitar hero controller in to the converter and play with the guitar hero controller. haven’t tried it yet but it’s worth a try!!!
Hey Lancelot…
Your comment reminded me to post this small update:
I have now purchased a PS2 to usb converter and I am currently using my PS2 guitar hero controller to play frets on fire. It works like a champ. There are a couple things to be aware of though… first, frets on fire doesn’t support the whammy bar so you just can’t use it. Second, you’ll need to download JoytoKey (download link below)which converts the controller input to keyboard strokes. This is the only way I’ve found to make the controller work for FoF.
You can download JoytoKey on the following page:
http://www.electracode.com/4/joy2key/JoyToKey%20English%20Version.htm
i have a guitar hero 3 PS3 cd. can the computer read it? (blu-ray)
and also what are the codes for the joytokey thing
so it would work on my ps3 guitar hero controller
Can you put any song on FoF.If so,tell me how.
i pressed the import gh songs on song editor and it said to enter the path of the mounted gh cd