In The Groove 2 R21: Load Songs off USB Drives!
 

Basically, if your arcade manager installs the R21 update to his ITG2 machine and enables custom edits, you can play up to 50 songs from your USB drive on the machine! However...

-Songs must be less than 2:00 in length
-Song preview will not play
-Graphics (backgrounds and videos) will not show
-Music must be .OGG (easily converted from mp3)
-Stepfile must be .SM (easily converted with StepMania's Edit)

What do you think of this revolutionary feature to official arcade cabinets?

I prefer the ITG pad to the DDR one, so it could be a good thing to try DDR songs on a ITG dedicated cabinet. I just don't understand how Roxor doesn't care about music copyright.

The argument is that it can be classified as a service offered, and therefore they are not responsible for what the users play on it. They also don't have to worry about file format royalties because OGG is open source.

I don't get it...wouldn't it kill the purpose of the machine itself...people's going to run around with 2gig USB Sticks and playing stepmania all over the place

If you can find a home pad with the bar that feels EXACTLY like the one at the arcades, please tell me where to buy it, which will make that r21 useless.

Sounds like fun (I can think of a bunch of songs that I'd like to bring in already...)! I wonder how the arcade owners are going to enforce keeping "parental advisory" songs off of the machine.

If RoXor promotes this well enough, and an easy to use Stepmania wizard was made available, we could see casual and even non-gamers wanting to play the newest Usher song, etc at the arcade...

Uh, didn't you hear? RoXoR no longer has rights to ITG. Konami won the rights in court. RoXoR can't promote anything for ITG anymore.

so do i have to make the files to put on my usb flashdrive myself? or do i download them from somewhere?

Frankly, I'd use this feature to play my own songs on the machine. You would have to use Stepmania to make your steps, and some sort of audio editing program to cut your song to meet the machine's requirements, so it'll take a bit of work.

It's time to dust off those Captain Jack edits I worked on for "Captain Jack's Peace Camp" a while back...

The 2:00 length thing has some backdoor loops. I fully watched a guy play a 10 friggin' minute song while waiting to play. It really got me mad. lol

Really? I wonder what those backdoor hacks for that are. I've tried to cut songs down to the right length, but getting it at 2:05 and being unable to trim anything else out is really aggravating.

Are you sure it wasn't a linux-hacked ITG2 dedicab?

I second that request for the time-hack info. Some songs would lose too much when cut to 2 mins or less...

*Bump*

Have any other GFFers used this feature? Are there any problems that I should know about before I try loading my songs at the local arcade?

Also, can you recommend a codec/prog to convert to .OGG

There are too many songs that I'd like to play on the ITG2 machine.... I can't wait ^.^

Someone released a little command prompt program called OggLengthPatch which will modify the Ogg Vorbis header so it will think it has a length of about 1:45. As long as the bitrate is low enough so that it's under 5mb (not hard at all), you could very well have a 10 minute song.

I've never had the opportunity to try Custom Songs myself; when I got my aracde manager to update to r21, I had to turn on Custom Songs myself in the maintenance menu, but the flash drives weren't working. The next time I went, the machine was version r6 (WTF), and the USB drives weren't working. I asked to patch the machine, a different guy got the USB drives working after two seconds, but then when he realized I needed the maintenance menu, he said no with a bunch of bullshit.

I imagine I could get through a chapter with my book-on-tape stepfiles..

What's the BPM on that:erm: