Tutorial: How To Extract/Import GH Songs Manually! - *Windows Only*

[FoG]

Changelog:
Nov. 12 2007 - Version 1 of tutorial released
Nov. 30 2007 - Version 2 of tutorial released (Added new tool, VGSSplitter, and removed two tools, GH2Rip and MFAudio. Tutorial has been revised to coincide with new tool)

Hello, and welcome to my tutorial on how to extract and import Guitar Hero songs manually without the use of the Frets on Fire Extractor/Importer. I wanted to find an alternative to using the FoF Importer because it took way too long to do just a few songs. I also believe that this is much more reliable than using the FoF Importer. Now lets get started.
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Here are the tools I used to do this:

DVD Drive

Guitar Hero Explorer (Tool created by katamakel from Scorehero. This tool can read the Guitar Hero Archive from the GH Games and will be used to extract the files needed)

Audacity (Any Waveform editor will do, but this one is easy to use and free, it will be used to convert the .wav files into .ogg)

VGSSplitter (Tool was created by danielmbp from Scorehero. This tool is much easier to use than gh2rip. It automatically splits the .vgs file into three seperate .wav files) *Thanks to Desertman123 for the link to the tool*
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Now that we got that stuff out of the way, you now need to choose the song(s) that you want to import into the game. After you have chosen your songs, you have to place your Guitar Hero disk (1, 2, 80's PS2 supported) into your DVD Drive. You now have two choices here, you can either:

a) Extract the GEN folder from the Guitar Hero Disk to a place on your hard drive, open up GHex then click File > Archive > Add > Browse to where you extracted the GEN folder and open up the MAIN.HDR file.

b) Open up GHex then click File > Archive> Copy from DVD.

After you have done either one of those steps, you should see the following screen:



Now, expand the song folder and expand the song folder that you want, then right click the .mid and .vgs file and extract them both to wherever you want to. It should look something like this while extracting:


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It is now time to convert the .vgs that you just extracted into separate .wav files to be used with Audacity. We are going to use a very usefull tool called VGSSplitter. This tool gets rid of the need of GH2rip, and MFAudio. Now, open VGSSplitter and browse to where your extracted .vgs file is. After opening up the .vgs file, simply click on "Split it!" and wait for it to split the .vgs file into three .wav files.

This is what the screen should look like while splitting the .vgs file into seperate .wav files:



When it is done splitting, you should three two to three .wav files depending on the amount of streams in the .vgs file. They should be named [name of song] (band).wav,[name of song] (guitar).wav, and/or [name of song] (bass).wav respectivly.
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Now, Open up Audacity (or any Waveform editor), and drag in the first .wav file (band). After that, press file then Export as Ogg Vorbis. It should look like this when you are about to export it as ogg vorbis:



Save this as song.ogg. Do this 1-2 more times with the guitar .wav file and the bass .wav file respectively and save them as guitar.ogg and rhythm.ogg respectively.
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Now your at the home stretch. Create a new folder within your Frets of Fire song folder and call it whatever. Place your three .ogg files and the .mid file that you extracted earlier into it and rename that .mid file into notes.mid. Open up notepad and place the following into it:

Code: Select all

[song]
name = [insert your song's title here]
artist = [insert your song's artist here]

Save this as song.ini and you are done! Congratulations, you have just imported a Guitar Hero song into Frets of Fire manually! Thank you for reading this tutorial, I hope it has helped you out! Go on and play your new song!

[warhol]

Shweeeet

[BlackFate]

I've pinned this as people may find it useful,

Mike.

[warhol]

I've pinned this as people may find it useful,

Mike.

I'd prefer cama's rips, but haha xD

[FoG]

Please reply if you have found this tutorial useful. If you want to extract all the Guitar Hero .bin files from their respective .vgs files, I will release the .bat file on request.

[kdb424]

GREAT TUTORIAL! Why not just download the songs from the forums though?

[bunnyrock1]

Nice...3 posts & you've already been stickied.Nice Tutorial:)

[zandernoid]

i have GH2 for the Xbox360, so does that mean this won't work for me? If so, how could i upload them?

[FoG]

i have GH2 for the Xbox360, so does that mean this won't work for me? If so, how could i upload them?

I need to research if this tutorial works for the 360 version. Obviously, there are going to be some differences in terms of getting the archive out of the disc.

[poopsticker]

Please reply if you have found this tutorial useful. If you want to extract all the Guitar Hero .bin files from their respective .vgs files, I will release the .bat file on request.

yes, please!

[FoG]

NOTE: This doesn't do everything for you at once, it just extracts the .bin files from each .vgs file.

Here is the link to gh2rip with gh1.bat and gh2.bat:

Code: Select all

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wuaeru

When in GHex, right click on the song folder and click Extract. Extract this wherever and open up the search function when you are at the folder you extracted it from. For GH1 songs, just search up .vgs and copy all of those to a separate folder. For GH2, search _p, _coop and delete all that show up. After that, search up .vgs and copy all of those to a separate folder. After you separate the .vgs files, just click on the .bat file with the name of the game the songs are from, and it should do the rest.

Make sure that the files from the .rar file are in the same folder as where you sorted out the vgs files.

[Desertman123]

I have a VGS Splitter with a user interference and it makes the VGS 3 different channels (Band, Guitar and Ryhthm) all .wav. I think danielmbp from scorehero made this. Here's the link: http://www.savefile.com/files/1233823

[FoG]

I have a VGS Splitter with a user interference and it makes the VGS 3 different channels (Band, Guitar and Ryhthm) all .wav. I think danielmbp from scorehero made this. Here's the link: http://www.savefile.com/files/1233823

Thanks for this tool. I was unaware of its existence prior to writing the tutorial. With this tool, expect a revised tutorial very soon!

[FoG]

Revised Tutorial is now up with new tool thanks to Desertman123

[FretFan07]

thanks heaps for this, it worked for the most part

2 big problems i encountered though, which i was hoping i coulkd get some help for

1) Audacity would only readsome of the wav files, some of them it would open and i could see the wave form, but it would play and it didnt export a proper ogg file.
I converted thos wave files to mp3 with audition 1.5 and then converted them to ogg with audacity, but it would be helpful if i knew why audacity wouldnt read some files.

2) Now i have made my songs, they read fine in FoF BUT some of them have this problem where when it preveiws and when you go to play it, one of the tracks plays at double speed, sometimes the rythm, sometimes the song track and sometimes the guitar track. They all play fine outside of FoF, so whats up with that?