[TUTORIAL] Reemplazar canciones del Karaoke Revolution Party

Este hilo servirá para enseñaros a reemplazar las canciones en inglés del Karaoke Revolution Party por vuestras canciones favoritas.
Creo que está mas o menos dominada la técnica para insertar canciones en el Karaoke Revolution, pero nada se ha hablado en EOL de hacerlo en su sengunda parte llamada Karaoke Revolution Party, mucho más divertida ya que permite la posibilidad de cantar 2 personas a la vez, a diferencia de la primera parte.
Para ello, voy a rescatar un tutorial que se ha perdido al ya no existir la web que lo alojaba pero que por suerte continua en mi disco duro. Decir que os puedo asegurar que funciona. Yo mismo tengo mi Karaoke Revolution Party con un par de canciones reemplazadas siguiendo al pie de la letra el tutorial y la verdad es que resulta mucho más divertido poder cantar canciones en español.

Necesitareis los siguientes elementos:
KRMaker 1.3 (necesita instalado el Java Runtime JRE disponible en: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html):
http://www.mediafire.com/?edxdg0nc454bw2i

Audacity (en el tutorial se utiliza la 1.3 beta):
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/?lang=es

Anvil Studio
http://www.anvilstudio.com/

ARKTool 6.1 o superior:
http://www.fileserve.com/file/CZQpSQs/ArkTool_v6.1_with_src.rar
http://www.mediafire.com/?k519mmr7k25g7fe


Y aquí procedo ahora a copiar el tutorial. Fue creado por el usuario jm-oz en la difunta web karaoke.thelanlan.com. Como ya os digo funciona perfectamente. En su día me animé a reemplazar canciones y doy fe que funciona. Eso sí, hace un par de años de esto y desde entonces no he reemplazado más canciones por falta de tiempo, así que dudo que pueda responder a vuestras dudas si es que se os presenta alguna pues ya no recuerdo con exactitud los detalles del proceso.
Os dejo aquí el tutorial con la esperanza de que a vosotros también os pueda ser útil y así recuperarlo de la red con la intención de que no se vuelva a perder.


TUTORIAL "Replacing existing songs in Karaoke Revolution Party"

OK, after a couple of weeks messing about, the following proces is what I'm using to replace existing songs in Karaoke Revolution Party. I'm not too happy with certain parts of it, but have got reasonable results on the 5 songs I've put in so far.

First up, some assumptions:
1: You have a modded xbox, and you are running KRP from the hard drive
2: You have a network between your PC & the xbox to get the stuff you are doing from PC to the XBox.
3: You have the ARK contents from KRP on your hard drive twice - once in 'original' format and again in a 'working' folder which is what you will put back when done.

Warning - you run the risk of needing to re-install KRP if you mangle it - and mayu lose your savegames/characters/awards/ whatever - I take no responsibility for this, as I'm running with the same risks myself. If I find any big holes I'll do what I can to let you all know, but for now it's a bit of a wild frontier out here!!

Tools you will need:

KRMaker 1.3 (implies JRE 1.5 or better installed & working)
Audacity (the Beta 1.3 is what I'm using, although the 'stable' release should do just as well)
Anvil Studio
ARKTool 6.1 or better - includes all you will need to both edit DTB files & edit the ARK package which is simply replacing the edited DTB file/s and the mid/ogg files from the existing internal structure.

All tools are freely available for downloading - just Google for them.

OK, to the process!

Part 1: get the lyrics/music/notes together
Most of the same rules apply with KRP as with making content for KR, but there are a few differences. You can start the same way (if working from scratch) as with KR - get yourself the midi/KAR file and the wav/mp3 for the song you want, load them into KRMaker & line up the notes, put in lyrics, insert the base KR events & save the midi file. If you want, you can test your work in KR first. That would mean needing to create the packeage & going through the whole KR process. All we really need is the start mid/mp3 files close-to lined up. If you have an existing song you want in KRP (that's what I'm doing right now) then all of that you can skip and go to Step 2...

Part 2 - convert the base music file to Ogg 4-channel using Audacity
[list=] Open the MP3 file (or the extracted WAV file from an existing song - extra steps are required for that however) in Audacity. If you chose the WAV file from an existing KR package then you will see about half (or sometimes more) of the song is 'quiet' - I chop all that off so I'm only left with the music. MP3's generally do not have that.
IMPORTANT: the MP3 is 'imported' so it's actually converted to an editable waveform by Audacity. By default, it's imported as 44,100kbps, 32-bit float combined stereo audio. We need to adjust everything to be 48,000 kbps and 16-bit PCM respectively, split teh stereo track into left & right separate tracks, as well as add in 2 more mono tracks (to a total of 4 tracks for 'standard' KRP songs - 6 for duets, but I've not done one of them yet). Adjusting the audio like this has a compression effect on the music, making playback sound a little like Alvin & the Chipmunks.
First, you will need to click on the top section next to where the waveform is displayed in the main window, starting '08 - Lips Of' in my example with a pull-down triangle - click there & select 'Set Sample Format' to be '16-bit PCM' from the second list that appears: it will take a second or two for it to register.
Click again on the same area, but this time choose 'Set Rate' and choose '48000' from the list. You may notice that the waveform 'shrinks' a little bit. If you play the track now, you can hear The Alvin Effect, only milder.
I've guessed the amount of compression, and about 8% is what I've trialled, although this is definitely not 'perfect'. Click on the track (to the left) to select it, else most of the menu options are not available. Then, choose 'Effect' from the menu items and 'Change speed' - this opens a dialog box, which is where I put in '-8' for 8%. That stretches it back to something like the original song length adn speed, perhaps more, perhaps less: you may have to play with this to your taste. NOTE: Because of this speed alteration, the midi file you have is no longer in synch with the waveform/ogg you are working on - I'll get to adjusting that later.
Now, we need to split the stereo track, which can be done by clicking the pull-down list we used before to set the Sample and Rate. Choosing that, leave both tracks as 'Left' and 'Right' respectively.
Next, we need to insert 2 new, blank tracks below the existing stuff (CTRL+SHIFT+N, or 'Tracks - Add New - Audio Track')- these should be set as 48000, 16-bit PCM as well. I generally just copy the left & right stereo tracks and paste into thoose mono tracks the resultant combination. To do things 'properly' you should use Voice Removal on the stereo track before splitting/copying into the mono, or more properly the mono track should only have the voice, no background music - that is just too much like hard work for me, so I just copy everything there to both mono tracks & leave it at that - feel free to do all that extra filtering if you want to be 'proper' about things though... :). Doing that is as simple as 'Copy' (both left & right selected at the same time - SHIFT lets you choose multiple tracks) and 'Paste' to the blank, mono track - then paste again to the second mono track. Ensure that you have set the two mono tracks to be 48000/16-bit PCM before copying the L/R audio into them!
OK, so now you have all of the guts of the music that plays while you sing along all-but done. Now, to export this as a 4-channel OGG file you will need to change the Audacity settings to allow 4-channel output (by default it only allows stereo, so if you export now it would down-mix). CTRL-P or 'Edit - Preferences' will get you into the settings for Audacity: the 'File Formats' section contains a 'When exporting tracks' section - set it to 'Use Advanced Mixing Options'.
Now, finally, you can export your OGG file! Choose 'File - Export' and from the dialog choose OGG from the Type list - choose a location & you are done with that part.
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OK, sorry to say that was actually the 'easy' bit, at least for me! The MIDI file editing using Anvil Studio is a lot more involved, and requires you have the file open in Audacity (to look for time markers for events), so leave Audacity open with the file loaded for now - you will come back to it a couple of times.

Part 3 - Adding and fixing the Midi file using Anvil Studio
[list=]First, open the Midi file in Anvil Studio, and add in a new track (Track - Create - Instrument Track)
Rename this new track to be 'Medley' - I'm not sure if case is important or not: the two other lines you should have are both named in uppercase completely, while the Medley line is 'proper' case.
Now, depending on your song, you can have 2 or 3 Medley sections, and you must also have a 'Short Song' definition in there. Listen through the track, and slow down with Audacity to pick where the sections start & stop - this will give you an idea of how many sections you can chop it into. Note that you also need to know where the singing parts start & stop, which can be different to the medley section start & stops. The following list is that I use as a 'base' and then attach relative times to.
short_on
medley_on1
short_vox_on
medley_vox_on1
medley_vox_off1
medley_off1
short_vox_off
short_off
medley_on2
medley_vox_on2
medley_vox_off2
medley_off2
medley_on3 *
medley_vox_on3 *
medley_vox_off3 *
medley_off3 *
I've not used all three on every song, and I'm not certain that 3 is the only possible number of medley sections - I've just not come across a 4 or above yet, although I've not looked exhaustively.
Copy the entry names & paste them into the 'comments' section in Anvil ('View - Comments'), then go to Event List and put in the times for each event. I generally 'guess' the number, as you cannot just type in '2:13' - you need to put in millisecond/framecount numbers instead which only roughly equate to 1000 per second (I just don't know what the translation/conversion is). So, to put in 2:13 it is about 133000. Also, only put that in the 'Time of Event' box - not the first one - that messes with the placement of all other entries.
Once you have got all of the time points you need, and know what your first sung word and last sung word are we need to adjust the tempo of the music to match the Ogg file we made earlier. This is also a bit of a black art right now where you adjust the timing to get the same first & last note sung as they are in the OGG file. If they can never line up, then you need to adjust the tempo to increase or decrease until the gap is the same, then you can move it (by changing the 'Time Before' or first box of the first note, which in turn pushes everything else) until they line up. This is why it's important to make sure that the song you start with in KRMaker has the right timing to match the song, even though it gets mildly mangled - you can straighten it out in Anvil (an accidental pun - sorry :) ).
Also, there are some things you can do in Anvil that you cannot in KRMaker. Things like inhibiting just one note from te sung stream (like the $, but it's the # key instead). Numbers have a different meaning: when in Party mode with 2 mics, you may have noticed that when in competition you sing alternate lines from the verses. You can set your song up to do this by putting a '1' or '2' after the line/period, which will then throw that line to the first or second mic, correspondingly. For lines without numbers, both singers need to sing them. If not in competition it's ignored completely & you both sing the same thing the whole way through.
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Part 4 - Editing the songs.dtb file
OK, this is not so bad, but you do need to know some things about the song you have made, like the tempo, length, short song length, approximate genre and number of medley sections. You will be using the modified GH2 editor that allows reading and editing the DTB files as they unpacked from the ARK file. This is the tool that you use to make changes, which you then put back into the ARK file & you can sing your custom songs.

So, first you will need to get the songs.dtb file out of the ARK package. Open up ARKTool, and open the config/gen directory tree - you should see a coulpe of files there - one of which should be 'songs.dtb' - extract it to a working location.
Open up the songs.dtb file you just extracted in the GH2 editor, and look through the listing there. You will see that each song has it's own top-level folder, under which there are several entries. I'll use 'Believe' as an example, whic has a name of 'believe' - there are 11 entries there, most of which you can guess what they are for, and should require little to no explanation as to what to change - just go through them & make the alterations to the title, artist, song length, short song length, number of medley sections, tempo, number and type of stage characters as appropriate for your song. If you get stuck or mangle it - start over. It tok me a little while to understand how it fit together, but once I go it, it made sense.
Note that if you want to replace a true duet or dance song with a 'normal' song, you can - just remove the unused parts - just make sure you always have 11 entries underneath the primary folder!! I've done this on a coulpe of songs & so-far noted no ill effects.
Save & close it, and you are almost done!

Part 5 - Packing it back into the ARK file
OK, we're nearly there, I promise! The next part is pretty straight-forward: we're going to use the ARKTool to open up the working copy of KRP, replace the songs file in the config/gen folder, and replace the ogg & mid file/s for the song/s you have made alterations to in the songs file.

More specifically, we're replacing the songs.dtb file with our edited copy (not changing filenames), and also replacing the MID & OGG files for the taget song - so for the 'believe' example above, we'd take the files we made for Lips of an Angel (loaa.mid and loaa.ogg) and not rename, but replace - leaving 'believe.ogg' 'believe'mid' but with the contents of loaa.ogg and loaa.mid in there instead.
Save it (not save as - although that works it takes much, much longer & means that every time you make a change you have to upload the lot to your 'box') and exit ARKTool and then look in Explorer - you may need to look at the details of the files to see that only a small number of the files (always the main.hdr file, and at least 1 of the ARK files, sometimes two) has changed it's file date & size - these are the only files you need to put up to replace the files already on your box to have the song work, if all has gone to plan! Any subsequent changes should be done to your working copy, and any files that change and only those files need to be moved in order to get it up and running.
YAY! Done!! that should be it. See?? Easy!! :D

Once I'm done replacing what I want from the base KRP, I'll then do a final 'save as' - as that will get rid of any rubbish/space left behind due to the way the ARK files work and get me a couple of meg back. There's a lot to read about in how ARK tool works, and how others are using GH Edit to change different things - for me I'd just really like to know how to add instead of replace, but I suppose I'll get to that at some point!!

Warning - I have very little technical skill, and next-to no musical capability, so if I've used any terms incorrectly, or have led you astray I apologise but there's very little I can do. I may come back & re-touch this once I find different/better ways and/or tools to do things.



A little note on timing:

My walk-through above suggests that you put in the medley line details for timing first, then adjust the length/BPM to line up the first & last sung notes.

It occured to me just now that it would create a problem.

You actually will need to adjust the timing/BPM first, THEN put in all of the details for the song length, medley start/stop points etc. Doing it the other way will (has) mangled the medley line of my tracks before I figured it out!

On reflection, it makes sense (as it always does... :) )

C'Ya
Genial, tengo los 2 juegos en el hdd de la Xbox, asi que no se cuando, pero lo probaré. Gracias, un saludo :)
parece muy bien,a ver si algun dia me da tiempo para comprobar y hacer tuto.s2
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