3000 song limit?

[bjyaritz]

Seriously though, those of you who have collections over 1,000 how do you even manage them / put setlists together oustside of just doing random? It's not like there's a great library organizational tool in the game.

I let others pick the songs, It can be tasking with all of the grayed out ones to sort through.

[Doc_SoCal]

By the time I hit 3000 songs I am sure I will have a few hundred I can live with them living in my PSN DL file instead of on my game all the time.

More likely I will be playing RB4, or 5 which may have raised caps relative to what is available at that time or... Who knows...

[hmxhenry]

Reopening this thread with a few of the more nefarious posts about modding deleted (and information passed along to Microsoft) to provide an official response. Sorry Doc!

So, there are two responses to this: the short one and the long one.

The short response is, yes, this is a real thing.
The long response is… well, longer.

As I’m sure you’ve all noticed, there is a loading bar that pops up while your DLC library loads in RB3. Those of you with larger quantities of DLC will have longer load times than those of you with less DLC, because each piece of content requires memory to load. This DLC is being loaded at the same time as song audio previews, track information, menu and sorting options, album art and whole lot more. That gets to be an awful lot of information very quickly.

With all the associated tracks, packs, exports and upgrades, there‘s more downloadable content available for your Rock Band library than you’ll find in any other game out there. While this is an awesome problem to have (I’ll take too much content over not enough content any day) managing ALL of that data becomes an issue on such a large scale. In our test environment, we found that working with a cache of over 3,000 songs led to interminable loading times, memory leak induced crashes and random stops and stutters inside of game play, none of which makes for an ideal gaming experience.

In an effort to reduce those drastic side effects, we imposed a limit to how many songs you can have in your active RB library. The 3,000 song cap does not affect how many songs you can store on your hard drive, and it does not take away your capacity to buy additional tracks: it only limits how many tracks you can have active in your RB library at one time. You should be able to delete tracks from RB at will and redownload them at no cost whenever you decide you want to play them again.

To provide a bit of context, we’re still many months away from hitting 3,000 individual songs in Rock Band, depending on the output from the awesome RBN community. Those 3,000 tracks, including all exports and DLC, will take up around 85 GB of hard drive space. At last count, there were roughly 20 DLC completionists across all consoles, and that was when we checked in nearly 6 months ago. And while we plan to continue to release new tracks every week, and I hope all of you plan to continue to pick up the new songs you like, this cap won’t be an issue for 99.9% of you playing RB. But for those few, those proud few, that this will affect, hopefully it’s helpful to know that there is a way to manage that data and keep your RB library intact and manageable.

[TheHundredDollarHeadache]

In our test environment, we found that working with a cache of over 3,000 songs led to interminable loading times, memory leak induced crashes and random stops and stutters inside of game play, none of which makes for an ideal gaming experience.

So by extension, that number was 1,000 for the Wii?

...this cap won’t be an issue for 99.9% of you playing RB.

Add a few 9's to that. 99.9% means thousands of people would be affected assuming the game sold millions.


Hopefully Rock Band 4 will fix the memory leaks and such, because if it's going to be a long time before it's released, the library will have caught up by then.

[hmxhenry]

So by extension, that number was 1,000 for the Wii?

Following up with the production team about that right now.

Add a few 9's to that. 99.9% means thousands of people would be affected assuming the game sold millions.

Hopefully Rock Band 4 will fix the memory leaks and such, because if it's going to be a long time before it's released, the library will have caught up by then.

While the library will catch up at some point, as you pointed out the vast majority of people playing are unlikely to. Most will never hit this cap, not in a year, two years, three years, etc. We will, of course, track how many people this does affect and further down the road if it appears to be a larger issue than anticipated we'll address it then.

[folkeye]

Following up with the production team about that right now.



While the library will catch up at some point, as you pointed out the vast majority of people playing are unlikely to. Most will never hit this cap, not in a year, two years, three years, etc. We will, of course, track how many people this does affect and further down the road if it appears to be a larger issue than anticipated we'll address it then.

If anybody has any 'overflow'...and if I can tolerate listening to the song, I can take it off their hands to lower their number. I know my library would take forever to reach that amount...

[Santa Claustrophobia]

Five bucks says that HMX will just say it was to limit overhead or system resources. [...]

[...]

The number of people this kind of limit would affect could probably be counted on one person's fingers and toes.[...]

Called it!

[Jarr3tt88]

Perhaps a solution in the future would be like how itunes does it, a check list of what you want and don't want on your ipod.

If 3,000 was a limit, have a main check list in an option menu or something

[rab39]

In an effort to reduce those drastic side effects, we imposed a limit to how many songs you can have in your active RB library. The 3,000 song cap does not affect how many songs you can store on your hard drive, and it does not take away your capacity to buy additional tracks: it only limits how many tracks you can have active in your RB library at one time. You should be able to delete tracks from RB at will and redownload them at no cost whenever you decide you want to play them again.

To provide a bit of context, we’re still many months away from hitting 3,000 individual songs in Rock Band, depending on the output from the awesome RBN community. Those 3,000 tracks, including all exports and DLC, will take up around 85 GB of hard drive space. At last count, there were roughly 20 DLC completionists across all consoles, and that was when we checked in nearly 6 months ago. And while we plan to continue to release new tracks every week, and I hope all of you plan to continue to pick up the new songs you like, this cap won’t be an issue for 99.9% of you playing RB. But for those few, those proud few, that this will affect, hopefully it’s helpful to know that there is a way to manage that data and keep your RB library intact and manageable.

I just hit 2096 today...

So what exactly happens if you have 3,001. Will it not show #1 - the first you bought - or #3001 - the last you bought? You say this won't affect songs on your hard drive but how do you manage the ones that are active?

Will loading times substantially worsen as you approach 3,000. Mine loads pretty fast since I have RB3 installed on my elite. Less than a minute.

[StriderHiryu]

I'm glad I saw this. I'll be avoiding the massive RBN purchases I had been planning on for future parties, as a direct result. If something I specifically want shows up, I'll snag it of course, but the hundreds of dollars I was planning on spending on RBN downloads will stay in the bank instead. I'm on a PS3 anyway though so even if I grabbed everything available, it'll probably be quite awhile before I run into this problem.

I'm gonna cry when it's confirmed the PS3 has a capacity lower than the Xbox. (speculation based on 360's unified memory architecture).

I always found it strange that my game has to sit there for two solid minutes to "load up" my additional content. It's not as though I'm actually playing all those songs at once... (to be clear, I'm not complaining about the load time specifically, although it would be nice if it were lower)

I'm guessing a large portion of the "loading" it's doing are the song previews. If that's the case, my suggestions:

1. Remove the previews for the songs that are most played by that particular console (obviously we know what the song sounds like). Add a toggle that let's you switch if it's the most played or least played songs that don't have the preview load by default. On the songs that don't have the preview loaded, add a preview option ala Music Store. When you hit it, it unloads the preview from another song, then loads the one you're currently selecting.

2. Force people that want more content loaded at the same time to turn off ALL previews. Obviously, this is the less desirable approach.

3. If we're talking about a "memory" issue, tell the console makers to implement something like Windows Vista and 7's ReadyBoost technology and tell people to go buy a decent flash drive. Obviously, this seems the least likely.

These suggestions are based solely on my guess that whatever limit we're running into is based off the idea that most of that loading, is the previews for the songs. If that's not the case, why the heck is there any load time at all for a song when I choose it from the library? What I mean is, why would a song need to load twice?