The Guitar Hero/Rock Band phenomenon is showing no signs of waning, with countless sequels still on the way (including one focused solely on music by The Beatles) and money continuing to pour into the coffers of their respective game publishers. But gamers are still being forced to live with a problem that’s troubled the genre since its formation: you can only play along to songs that publishers have approved, licensed, and then ‘mapped out’ with note charts to play along to. Today, they’re getting a solution: JamLegend, the Guitar Hero-like website that uses your keyboard instead of a plastic guitar, has launched a new feature that lets you play along to any song in your music collection, whenever you’d like.
For those that haven’t been exposed to JamLegend before, the site shares a lot of common ground with Guitar Hero. Gamers load up a song and a flurry of colored dots begin to flow down the screen, with each one corresponding to a differet key on your keyboard. The experience is less atmospheric than the games you’ll find on the consoles, largely because it lacks flashy graphics and plastic guitars, but if you’re a Guitar Hero addict looking to get your fix at the office, it’s certainly good enough.
Until now JamLegend has fallen prey to the same problem as Guitar Hero and other console games: if a song wasn’t in the catalog, you couldn’t play it. Now, you can upload any song you’d like, and using digital signal processing, beat detection, and other automatic analysis, JamLegend takes the song and converts it into a playable track within a few minutes. Of course, generating a playable track is is one thing — but are they any good?
After trying out a few tracks, I found the technology to work well, though it isn’t perfect. On a standard, professionally-made track, you typically play along to guitar notes and not the accompanying drum beats or vocals. The auto-generated tracks tend to catch the most prominent sound at any point in the track, which means that sometimes you’ll find yourself playing elements of each instrument, along with the vocals. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a bit different from what you may be used to.
Because this is a fairly unique feature in the genre, JamLegend is hoping to use it to start monetizing the site. Users can upload up to five of their own tracks at once, and each week they can swap out one of these for a new one (in other words, there’s a waiting period before you can add new songs). If you’d like to have more songs available at once, the site offers an entry-level premium package for $5 a month, which allows for up to 100 tracks at once, or a $20/month package for 500 songs.
All in all this a solid addition, though I’m curious if the record industry will have a problem with it. The only way to add a song to your library is to upload your own copy (the site makes it easy to buy songs you don’t already own, which is another source of revenue), but we’ve seen the labels get upset over less.
Game is awesome! Few flaws but those should be ironed out. I love the concept of this game.
It is a good game. I am going to have to try out the new feature to upload your own songs.
Best social game I have ever seen. Great game and 100% online. I absolutely love the Facebook connect features.
It’s very solid and well built. There need to be more applications like this. I also like that you can actually use your controllers from Rockband or Guitar Hero.
All the Hip-Hop songs are educational. I love the photosynthesis one.
Would people seriously pay $$ to upload songs to a site that
“uses your keyboard instead of a plastic guitar”
I mean, if you can play on your TV with a plastic guitar … maybe – but paying to play just makes absolutely no sense to me.
Dude, if you took 5 seconds out to read the thread you are commenting on, you’d know you can actually use your current game controllers with JamLegend instead of a keyboard, if you wish,
This is brilliant – making decent note charts algorithmically is a huge, huge challenge. I know Audiosurf did it before, but I thought that it wasn’t particularly good (pretty terrible for a lot of rap and R&B), but these guys and gals definitely have something special here. Contrats to them!
This is awesome! Congrats guys!
I was surprised to see this when there was no coverage of the recently-announced Rock Band Network:
http://www.joys...am-for-artists/
http://www.joys...arting-this-fa/
Looks cool. I’d love to integrate this into my site one day.
Very cool new features – the site looks great too!
Nice work Andrew and the rest of the Jam Legend team. This startup was born out of http://www.laun...hboxdigital.com right here in good old Washington DC!
I love it
it’s about time you gave some love to CMCers wooo
Awesome site! Should be a lot more popular than it is
Andrew, Arjun and Ryan rock! So happy that I can now play all my Nirvana tracks!
You guys did an awesome job here – the best web implementation of this genre by a mile.
I’m addicted to JamLegend, I’m actually in the top 2000 in their ladder system. I tried the upload feature last night, and was pretty impressed with the process. Uploading was fast, and it only took a few moments for it to analyze the song and generate the note chart. I was pleasantly surprised that the note charts matched the beats very well, and handled bpm changes and breakdown sections with ease. They aren’t perfect and don’t come close to the Human-charted songs, but it’s very good for being constructed by an algorithm.
One of the major shortcomings of JamLegend is the music catalog, which is 95% filled with crap bands. The ability to upload your own music alleviates that problem, and is a very welcome feature to the site.
JamLegend rocks… Andrew and Team has produced one of the very few flash games I’ve been super addicted to. I don’t even like RockBand, but got super hooked on JamLegend.
Proud to say that I was (probably one of the many) people that push them to also connect with Facebook Connect. Not just because we wanted them to use Kontagent’s Facebook Connect analytics, but because I knew it would ROCK with it connected to Facebook.
Keep up the great work guys!
Sweet. Been playing this game off and on for about a year now, and it stays entertaining. This is something that the console music games would have an extremely hard time implementing. Sounds like it could help them get a good revenue stream, too. I like it.
Great team at JamLegend – Expect great things!