Forgot if you can pass Highway Star on Expert? Want to prove to your friends that you passed Run to the Hills on Drums? Rock Band Scores remembers all of your scores for all your Rock Band tracks, both on-disc and downloadable. With Rock Band Scores, you can save your percentage score, number of stars, and a picture of your score for every song, every instrument and at every difficulty level!
Rock Band Scores is available on the App Store for $1.99 — the cost of ONLY ONE downloadable song!
Features
- Rock Band song database with entries for all disc songs and all currently available DLC
- Difficulty tiers, genre, album, year and song pack information for each song
- Five star and Gold star cutoff scores for each song, on each instrument and difficulty
- Updatable downloadable content (DLC)
- Record your raw score, percentage score, note streak and number of stars achieved
- Rate each song and keep track of which songs you have purchased
- Take a picture of your score to prove your achievements
- View the official Rock Band leaderboards for each song
- Import & export features let you back up and restore your data
- Purchase songs on iTunes and find YouTube videos of people playing songs in Rock Band
- Original Rock Band™ themed artwork
- All for the cost of JUST ONE downloadable song!
Screenshots
Screenshots are from version 1.5.1.
Revision history
- Rock Band Scores 1.5.5 fixes the crash on launch problem that some users experienced in 1.5.4.
- Note that it will take a few moments to load the song data on first launch. Subsequent launches will load the data faster.
- Rock Band Scores 1.5.4 fixes a compatibility issue
- Some users experienced a problem with this version crashing on launch. This issue has been resolved in 1.5.5.
- Fixed a bug in Career Leaderboards where only Guitar scores were being loaded
- Added a preference in Settings for ignoring the prefix "The" in song and artist names when sorting
- Changed the default tab bar ordering to put Playlist in the first position. This removes a UI breakdown for new users where they did not see any songs on first launch.
- As of version 1.5, some users experienced crashes when viewing a song. This bug has been fixed. Many thanks to Andy Crol & Jay Ponce for helping track this down
- Fixed a minor bug where the purchase filter wasn't correctly being applied when switching between different song sorts
- Added a link to the support forum on the about screen
- Restored compatibility with iPhone OS 2.1
- The "Songs" list is now sorted by ignoring the prefix "The" in song names
- When using Quick Toggle to mark all Rock Band, Rock Band 2 or DLC songs as purchased, using this feature no longer un-purchases all other songs
- Fixed a bug that caused the app to crash when trying to edit a score after a low memory event had been triggered
- Improved handling of low memory conditions
- New "Quick Toggle" screen lets you rate songs, keep track of your purchases and favorite songs in one place
- The Favorites tab can now be removed from the toolbar
- New Purchased button on the info bar lets you hide songs you haven't purchased, in every song list
- Added additional song sort for Percentage score
- The prefix "The" is now ignored when sorting song and band names. This places songs like "The Collector" and "The Camera Eye" amongst songs that begin with "C", instead of songs that begin with "T"
- Fixed a minor sorting bug in the Release view
- This release fixes a small bug where the Stars song list did not update correctly when changing the current instrument or difficulty.
- Updated the leaderboard code to work with the new rockband.com leaderboard API
- All sections in the song list now show how many songs are in that section
- Removed support for last.fm and song previews (song previews have not been updated since Oct 2008)
- Added song rating scale & song purchased toggle switch
- Added additional song sorts for song ratings & purchases
- Added 5-star and Gold star score cutoff values to the song detail screen for each instrument and difficulty. Cutoff data are from http://rockband.yajags.com/cutoffs/
- This release requires iPhone OS 2.1 or greater
- Added the number of songs in each category in the Stars view
- Added additional views for Instrument & Band Tier
- Several toolbar icons have been redesigned
- Fixed a bug that prevented exporting scores
- Fixed a visual display bug when selecting a song sort from the More view
- The Rock Band 1 icon is now displayed next to the the difficulty display for songs without a track
- Fixed a crash bug when trying to preview a song without a network connection
- Favorite songs view. Mark your favorite songs by tapping the yellow star on the song detail screen.
- Additional song views, including Album, Release Date and DLC Pack
- Customizable toolbar: add your favorite song views to the toolbar
- Search bar: quickly find a song by name
- UI: stars & scores are displayed on the song list for the current instrument & difficulty
- UI: main song list shows the currently selected instrument & difficulty
- UI: changed the star display on the song view to pad out the star display with empty star icons
- Import/Export: song names are now included in score exports so you can edit your scores in Excel
- Leaderboards: now loads 2 pages of scores at a time to reduce viewing delay
- Updated leaderboard parsing code to handle the rockband.com update.
- Supports Rock Band and Rock Band 2 difficulty tiers (tap to toggle)
- Supports trackless songs: difficulty meter now displays when a song does not have an instrument track*
- * YYZ from Rush's Moving Pictures album does not have a vocal track
- The "Update DLC" now changes its label to "Cancel update" when performing a DLC update.
- Based on pre-release screenshots, the difficulty meter of tier 7 songs shows 5 hearts. Now that RB2 has shipped, tier 7 songs use a somewhat more menacing icon.
- Ready for Rock Band 2's new 7-point tiering system*
- New splash screen
- New menu on the main screen for accessing common operations
- New user interfaces for updating DLC and importing score data
- Career leaderboards
- Fixed a bug with PS3 leaderboards displaying scores from incorrect songs**
- Load additional leaderboard results beyond the top 200
- Find & import your scores from the rockband.com leaderboards (requires an account on rockband.com)
- Rock Band 2 ships on September 14th. Once I get my copy, all of the new songs will be added through a DLC update.
- * tiers for existing DLC will be updated when Rock Band 2 ships
- ** requires a DLC update after upgrading to 1.2
- Save you raw score, note streak & notes. By popular request, you can now keep track of your raw score and note streak for each song, instrument and difficulty. You can also keep your own notes on each song.
- Leaderboards. Also by popular request, you can now view the leaderboards for each song, by instrument and by band. Leaderboard data are loaded from http://rockband.com/leaderboards.
- Preferences. Save your default viewing preferences for difficulty and instrument.
- Score data export & import. To help protect your data, you can now import and export your scores. Please read the instructions on http://rockbandscores.net for how to do this.
- Fixed an issue with updating DLC
- Improved stability
- Initial release
- Known issues: There is a bug in the DLC update code, and all attempts to update DLC will fail. This bug is fixed in 1.0.1. Also, some people on the App Store have been saying that this app crashes a lot, especially at launch. I've looked into this and made a few code changes that should improve stability.
FAQ
What is DLC?
DLC stands for "Downloadable Content". Every week, Harmonix releases new songs for Rock Band available for purchase on the Rock Band Music Store. These song releases are commonly known as "DLC".
How do I update DLC?
After running the app, tap on the info button on the top-right. Then, tap on the "Update DLC" button. All DLC updates are free of charge.
I update the DLC list on Tuesdays from Wikipedia's list of downloadable songs in Rock Band as well as loading up Rock Band 2 and looking up information that Wikipedia doesn't have. Since I'm also a busy grad student, DLC updates may not always occur in a timely fashion.
What happened to song previews?
I used to get song previews from Racoonfink's DLC page, but he stopped updating his page in October 2008. I was unable to find another source of song previews, so the feature was removed in version 1.4.
How do I remove a picture once I've taken it?
Simply swipe your finger across the picture from right to left (or left to right). The app will ask you to confirm if you want to delete the photo, first.
How do I make the picture larger?
Double-tap on the photo. It will rotate the photo to landscape orientation and zoom it full-screen. Double-tap again to exit full-screen viewing.
How can I take pictures with a wide-screen aspect ratio?
To do this, you'll need to take the photo with the Camera application. I was unable to figure out how to support taking photos in landscape mode within the app.
How can I export/import my data?
Export: Launch Rock Band Scores, tap the info icon on the main screen, and then tap the "Export Data" button. This will launch the Mail application with your data in the body of an email message, as well as instructions for how to import the data back into Rock Band Scores. Send yourself this email.
Import: Save the score data from your email to a text file. This file must begin with the line RockBandScores_CSV_Export, it must be saved as a .csv file, and it must be saved with Unix line breaks (LF). If you are unsure how to do this, I recommend using TextWrangler on the Mac or Notepad++ on Windows. Upload this file to a web server (Mac users can use the built in web sharing on OS X; see Apple's documentation for how to set this up). On your iPhone, run the Settings app, tap on RockScores, and scroll to the bottom. Tap on the text field for importing data, and type in the URL for your CSV file. Note that the URL must include the http:// prefix. Exit the Settings app, and launch RockScores. Your data will be imported on launch.
Still confused about importing and exporting your scores? More detailed instructions are available.
The way score export works is by creating an email message with your score data, which you can then send to yourself. This email message has some instructions at the top and your score data at the bottom. The instructions explain how to import your score data back into the app. The gist of the process is that you must create a file on your computer with the score data from the email (i.e. copy & paste). However, the app is a bit particular about how that file is formatted so it knows how to interpret it when importing your scores.
The score data are in a format commonly known as "CSV", which stands for "Comma-delimited format". This is a way of storing a set of "records", where each record consists of multiple attributes. In our case, each "record" corresponds to a song in Rock Band, and the "attributes" are your scores. In CSV, each "record" corresponds to a line in the file, and each attribute is separated by a comma (hence, "comma-delimited").
One subtlety in this process is telling the computer what constitutes a "line" in a file. Surely, in an email message or web page (such as this one), you see text flowing from line to line, with an occasional break for a new paragraph.
Like this.
How does the computer know where these lines end? The answer is that there is a special character that the computer uses to represent the "end of a line". In reality, and for historical reasons, there are actually *two* characters that represent "end of the line". They are the Carriage Return ("CF") and the Line Feed ("LF"). Those terms hail from the days of typewriters, where a Line Feed meant "move to the next line" and a Carriage Return meant "move the typewriter head to the beginning of the line".
Computers, having evolved from typewriters (this is perhaps an understatement), carried over this model of line termination. However, this was unnecessary. Since there is no physical carriage mechanism, there is no need for separate "CR" and "LF" delimiters; a single "End of Line" delimiter would do fine. But, for historical reasons, we have separate "CR" and "LF" characters.
To further complicate matters, there are three current standards for how these characters are used in practice. When they were created, the three major operating systems -- Macintosh, Windows and Unix -- all chose different combinations of "CR" and "LF" to represent the "End of Line" in text files. The Macintosh format uses "CR", the Unix format uses "LF" and the Windows format uses both "CR" and "LF". Nowadays, since Mac OS X was built on top of Unix, it is preferred to use "LF" on the Mac (and by extension, the iPhone). Since this is the format natively used by the iPhone, this is why your score file must be saved with Unix (LF) line breaks.
The second issue is that of text encoding. In short, there are many different languages in the world, and these languages use all sorts of different characters to represent letters. In English, we have 'a', 'b', 'c', etc. In Hebrew, 'aleph', 'bet', 'gimmel', etc. The character encoding of a text file tells the computer which character set to use when rendering the letters specified in the text file. So, if the text file were written in Hebrew, the computer knows to display the characters with a Hebrew font; likewise in English. There is a special character set used today called Universal Text Format (UTF-8), which allows text files to store a wide variety of characters, including characters from other languages, characters with special punctuation (such as umlauts and grave accents) and even special mathematical symbols. Again, this is the character set natively used by the iPhone, and it is fortunate, because some of the songs in Rock Band contain accent markers and umlauts.
Now that you understand why we must save the score data using a specific format, the next question to address is how you save it in this format. Once you receive your score email (assuming you sent it to yourself), perform the following steps:
- Select all of the text in the email beginning with and including "RockBandScores_CSV_Export", until the last line in the score data. You can tell which is the last line in the score data because it will be the last line that has a bunch of commas in it. Do not include any email signatures that may be at the bottom, such as "Sent from my iPhone". That will cause import to fail.
- Open up the text editor, create a new document, and paste in your score data. Save this document in the CSV format (i.e. "scores.csv"), using Unix line breaks and UTF-8 encoding.
- In TextWrangler, you can set these using the small pop-up menus at the bottom of the window. Make sure "Unicode (UTF-8), no BOM" and "Unix (LF)" are selected before saving the document.
- In Notepad++, you can set Unix line breaks by choosing "Format > Convert to UNIX Format" and "Format > Encode in UTF-8" from the menu bar.
- Upload your score file to a web server. If you do not have a web site, you can create a free web hosting account on GeoCities and upload it there.
- Launch Rock Band Scores, tap the "action" button at the top right, and select "Import/Export Scores". Tap the text field and type in the URL for your score file. For example, if I uploaded my score file to
http://www.geocities.com/jweisz/scores.csv, then I would type in that URL (without the quotes).
- Tap import, and the app will load your score data from the site.
- If you experience any problems importing your scores, please send email. It would be helpful to attach your score data file as well.
Other Questions
Who are you?
Hi, I'm Justin. By day, I'm a PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. By night, I am Professor J, drummer for the band Thesis Committee.
What is the story behind this app?
My roommate and I picked up Rock Band in Feb. 2008 and were absolutely terrible at it. Bowing to certain social pressures from our friends, we started playing on Medium. As we got the hang of the game and ventured into "Hard" territory, we constantly questioned whether we could really do a song on Hard, or if we just failed out on it. And then, once we started playing on Hard, the questions all became about Expert. This lead to us creating a massive Excel spreadsheet where we recorded, for each song and instrument, the highest percentage score we got on that song, and the difficulty level we got it on. Every time we asked a question like, "Can I do Flirtin' With Disaster on Hard Guitar yet?", we were able to answer it with this spreadsheet.
The reason I created this app for the iPhone & iPod Touch is to help other people answer the simple questions of, "Can I play this song?" and "How well can I play this song?" without having to resort to creating their own gigantic spreadsheets. Further, Rock Band is a highly social game that encourages people to play in a variety of non-home settings, such as living rooms, dorm rooms, work, campus spaces, the bar, etc. With Rock Band Scores, you don't have to worry about remembering that you passed Green Grass on Expert guitar — just record your score and take a picture of it, no matter where you are playing!
Disclaimer
Rock Band™ and Rock Band 2™ are trademarks of Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. All other copyrights and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Contact
Got a question not answered above? Want to lend your support for helping me update DLC, or translating this app into another language? Please contact me. I'll do my best to respond quickly.
You can also post to the official Rock Band Scores thread on the Rock Band forums.
Rock Band Scores is Copyright © 2008-2010 Justin Weisz. All rights reserved.
