I and the rest of the family got in a lot of Rock Band sessions this weekend. The game is phenomenal, but it’s a pain to keep set up permanently because it takes up so much space, especially the drums. But my oldest daughter had a party Friday night, so I hauled everything out for the first time in a while and the house was rockin’ in no time.

But the best part about being an Xbox 360 roadie this weekend was that I finally transferred the songs from the original Rock Band to Rock Band 2. I highly recommend doing this. It doesn’t just save you from having to swap between the two discs during extended jam sessions; it also means you can easily create set lists using songs from both games. It’s well worth the $5 fee that’s charged to relicense the Rock Band music for Rock Band 2. 

To do it, make sure your 360 or PS3 is connected online and signed in to Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. When you put in the Rock Band disc, it should ask if you want to update. (You might have already done this in the past few months if you play a lot.) After updating, there should be a new option to export songs. Choose it, and confirm that you will pay the $5 licensing fee. The songs will transfer to your system’s hard drive, a process that will take a while. Then, when you insert the RB2 disc,  the original game’s songs will show up in the listings.

There are two caveats: (1) Three songs were not included in the relicensing deal for this feature. They are Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills.” But you still get the original game’s 55 other songs. (2) This feature is not available yet for the Wii. But Nintendo’s console did finally get its own Rock Band Music Store last week. It’s starting with 50 songs, including 20 free RB2 tracks. More tracks will be added to the Wii store each week until it’s caught up with the more than 500 downloadable songs available for the 360 and PS3.

Finally, in the last bit of Rock Band news, Harmonix and MTV games announced last week that the following games will be added to the music store this week (Tuesday for Xbox Live, Thursday for PlayStation Network):

Steve Miller Band “Space Cowboy,” “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker”
Godsmack “I Stand Alone”�
Belly “Feed the Tree”�
Ghost Hounds “Wind Me Up”
Mute Math “Typical”�
Rob Zombie “War Zone”

Usual pricing: $1.99 (160 Microsoft Points for the 360) per track; $5.49 (440 Microsoft Points) for the Steve Miller Band 3-pack. I’ve really gotten into downloading new tunes, a great way to extend the life of this fun game and a pretty good deal when you consider the amount of entertainment each track provides.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 8:57 am and is filed under Video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.