[ New ] [ Load ] [ Save ] [ Save As ] [ Quick save ] [ Load OGG ] [ Import ] [ Export chart range ] [ Export audio range ] [ Export Guitar Pro ] [ Export image sequence ]
[ Settings ] [ Preferences ] [ Display ] [ Controllers ] [ Song Folder ] [ Link To FOF ] [ Link To Phase Shift ] [ Link to RocksmithToTab ] [ Exit ]New
Create a new EOF project. You will select an audio file (in OGG, WAV or MP3 format), choose a destination for the new project, and enter some information about the song. If the selected audio file contains tag information, the song artist, title and year will be automatically entered into the song's properties from the audio file's ID3v1/ID3v2 tag or OGG Vorbis tag comments if available. The album information will be similarly read into an INI setting if it is available. When choosing a destination for your project you have three options. "Use Existing Folder" requires you to point to an existing folder where EOF will create your project files. "Use OGG Folder" will place the project files in the folder with the audio file you selected. "Create New Folder" will create the folder you specify in EOF's own song folder (see File>Song Folder).
Wherever you choose to store the project, the OGG file you chose will be copied to "guitar.ogg" (required by "Frets On Fire"). If you choose an MP3 file, and you have LAME and Vorbis Tools installed (included in Windows version of EOF), EOF will convert it to "guitar.ogg" using the average bitrate you specify in the "OGG Settings" dialog, automatically re-sampling the audio to 44khz if necessary. A copy of the MP3 file will also be saved as "original.mp3" in the project folder, for use with the Leading Silence feature. If you do not have LAME and Vorbis Tools installed, you will not be able to use the built-in MP3 conversion.
Load
Load an existing EOF project. EOF will look for a "guitar.ogg" file in the same folder as the EOF project file you loaded. If it cannot find one you will be asked to locate an OGG (or MP3, which will be converted to OGG format) file for EOF to load. If you cancel the prompt to browse for chart audio, EOF will open the project without any audio and playback controls will be disabled, and audio will not be saved with the other chart files during Save/Save As. If no audio is loaded, File>Load Ogg can be used to allow playback and the saving of the loaded audio during save operations.
Save
Save the current EOF project. When saving a project EOF automatically generates all the files needed for the song to work in "Frets On Fire."
Save As
Save the current EOF project to a new location. Subsequent "Save" requests will write the song files to the new location. If no "guitar.ogg" exists in the destination folder, EOF will create one using the currently loaded OGG file.
Quick save
Save the current EOF project and creates any additional files enabled in File>Preferences, but without all of the prompts and warnings that the Save and Save as functions present. Error messages are still displayed if problems are encountered during quick save.
Load OGG
Load a new OGG file into the current project. At this time, EOF will only allow you to load OGG files that are in the same chart as the folder. This is for privacy reasons, so if somebody shares an EOF project file, it won't expose the person's folder names on the author's computer. If your song has separate audio for the guitar or other instrument you are fretting you can use this function to switch out the audio.
EOF keeps separate "Delay" settings for each differently named OGG file you load. This allows you to use tracks of differing length without having to adjust the delay and notes each time you swap OGG files. This is useful if you have two different versions of the same song, perhaps a karaoke version without vocals and a normal version. Setting up the "Delay" for each file will automatically move the beats and notes to the correct place each time you use "Load OGG" to swap them out.
Import
[ Sonic Visualiser ] [ MIDI ] [ Feedback ] [ Guitar Hero ] [ Lyric ] [ Guitar Pro ] [ Rocksmith ] [ Bandfuse ]Sonic Visualiser
Sonic Visualiser is an audio analysis program that supports a large selection of plugins to process sound and while the beat estimation generally isn't as accurate as painstakingly syncing beats manually, the results are very impressive for an automated process. This feature would probably work best when you are first creating a chart instead of after you have authored your notes, but it's up to you if you want to use it after. To use this feature, download Sonic Visualiser (http://www.sonicvisualiser.org/download.html) and the Queen Mary plugin set (http://www.vamp-plugins.org/download.html) and install both of them. The simplest way to install the Queen Mary plugin set in Windows involves extracting qm-vamp-plugins.dll, qm-vamp-plugins.cat and qm-vamp-plugins.n3 and placing them at "C:\Program Files\Vamp Plugins\" (or at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Vamp Plugins\" instead if you're using a 64 bit version of Windows).
Once installed, open Sonic Visualiser and have it open your chart audio (ie. guitar.ogg) and you should see it begin to draw a waveform graph of the audio. Once it finishes, open the Transform menu, select "Analysis by category>Time>Tempo>Tempo and beat tracker: Beats". You can adjust the plugin parameters in the window that pops up if you want to experiment, otherwise just click OK and wait a minute. You should see lines plotted over the waveform that represent each beat of the song and a new layer tab will open on the side where you can change the line color. You can even change the plot type to segmentation to get a better view of the detected beat positions. If you are satisfied with the results, you can export the beat positions to a file that EOF can import. To do so, make sure that layer is still in the foreground (it is the selected layer tab on the side of the program) and use "File>Export annotation layer" and choose a place to save the file (your project folder would be a good place). Then in EOF, while your project is open, use "File>Sonic Visualiser Import" and select the file you just exported from that program. The project's tempo map will be updated to reflect the information in the file, but if the results aren't to your liking, you can undo the changes and trying other settings in Sonic Visualiser's beat estimation. Sonic Visualiser's "Tempo and beat tracker" plugin also has a "Tempo" estimation function, but in my brief testing, its results were not anywhere near as good as the "Beats" estimation, but you can certainly have the plugin run both estimations separately and just export whichever one you think is more correct, just make sure the tab for the one you want to export is active before you go to export the annotation layer.
MIDI
Create a new EOF project from an existing MIDI file. This function is useful if you want to edit a song which was not created in EOF or if you want to alter a chart where the EOF file is not available. Tracks are imported from the MIDI file and song properties are loaded from "song.ini" if it exists. A Rock Band Audition (RBA) file contains a chart that was authored for Rock Band Network (RBN). EOF provides the ability to open the MIDI data from this type of file the same way as a normal Rock Band MIDI. EOF will look for a "guitar.ogg" file in the same folder as the MIDI file you loaded. If it cannot find one you will be asked to locate an OGG (or MP3, which will be converted to OGG format) file for EOF to load. If you cancel the prompt to browse for chart audio, EOF will open the project without any audio and playback controls will be disabled, and audio will not be saved with the other chart files during Save/Save As. If no audio is loaded, File>Load Ogg can be used to allow playback and the saving of the loaded audio during save operations.
If bass notes in lane 1 are found to have forced HOPO on phrases, EOF will prompt about whether to import these as open strum bass notes (see Enable open strum). If the "sysex_open_bass = True" tag is found in the imported MIDI's song.ini file, such notes will be imported as open strum bass notes automatically without prompting.
If an imported MIDI has yellow, blue or purple drum notes and no tom phrases, EOF will import them as cymbals instead of toms if the "pro_drums = True" tag is found in the imported MIDI's song.ini file. This tag allows a chart with all cymbals to be correctly identified and differentiated from a chart with all tom drums. This serves as a workaround to Harmonix's goof that in pro drums, all yellow, blue and green drums are treated as cymbals by default, which introduced a significant amount of Rock Band Network charts that do not play correctly in regards to pro drums.
If any unsupported (yet recognizable as Rock Band related) MIDI tracks are encountered (pro keys, harmony vocal tracks), EOF will offer to store them into the project instead of just ignore them. Each event in the stored MIDI tracks is stored in high precision millisecond timing, and is saved to the output MIDI during project save conforming to the chart's tempo map. This functionality should be useful for importing a MIDI that uses unusual tempo mapping (like ones with mid-beat tempo/TS changes) for the purposes of adding a pro guitar upgrade, adding new instrument/harmony tracks to a chart or simply synchronizing a chart with audio. The stored MIDI tracks can be listed/deleted via the Songs>"Manage raw MIDI tracks" menu function.
If the imported MIDI file has any tempo or time signature changes that occur BETWEEN beat markers, EOF will alert you of this and offer to store the tempo and beat tracks into the project. If you intend to modify an existing chart for use in Rock Band, such as creating an upgrade containing pro guitar, the upgrade automatically uses the original chart's tempo map when played in-game. Originally this was problematic because by design, EOF would insert extra beats when mid beat tempo or time signature changes were found, so that each change could occur on a beat marker. These extra beats would cause the upgrade file's timing to be different enough from the original imported chart to cause synchronization discrepancies. However by allowing the original tempo map to be stored into the project, during MIDI export, all events are written with the stored tempo map's timing, eliminating this problem.
If the MIDI being imported is in the format of the rhythm game "Power Gig", the five difficulties for each the guitar and drum tracks and the vocal track are imported. The fifth difficulty of these instrument tracks is stored in the BRE difficulty. Most rhythm games only support four difficulties though, so to remove the difficulty you don't want, make that difficulty active and use the Track>Delete active difficulty function. This will remove the active track and move all the higher difficulties' notes down one difficulty to result in four populated difficulties.
If Guitar Hero 1 or 2 style drum animations are encountered, they are imported as drum notes where applicable. These drum animations weren't authored as accurately as actual drum charts from later Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, but they are a good starting point.
Feedback
Create a new EOF project from an existing Feedback chart file. This type of file (typically has a ".chart" file extension) is a chart format generally created using the Feedback chart editor and was originally intended for creating custom charts for Guitar Hero. Various conversion utilities have been created previously allowing people to convert these charts into a MIDI file usable in Frets on Fire. This function allows Feedback charts to be imported. It will look in the chart's folder to try to load whichever audio file is specified by the chart (MP3, WAV and OGG are supported). If that file is not present, it will try to open guitar.ogg. If that file is not present, if the chart's folder only has one OGG file in it, it will try to open that file. If there is no OGG file in the folder, or if there are multiple OGG files to choose from, EOF will have you browse for the audio file to use. If you cancel the prompt to browse for chart audio, EOF will open the project without any audio and playback controls will be disabled, and audio will not be saved with the other chart files during Save/Save As. If no audio is loaded, File>Load Ogg can be used to allow playback and the saving of the loaded audio during save operations. Feedback charts containing non-standard 5 lane drums are supported. Section markers that are imported will be altered as necessary to make them comply with the "[section SECTION_NAME]" naming convention. Any [solo_on] and [solo_off] events that are imported are converted into solo sections for guitar (PART GUITAR) and lead guitar (PART GUITAR COOP). A note that starts less than 11/128 measures from the beginning of the previous note will be treated as a forced HOPO note. Notes that aren't forced HOPOs are imported as forced strums. If either the "N 5 #" or "E *" unofficial toggle HOPO notations are encountered during import, these will change non-HOPO notes into HOPO notes and vice-versa. If the "N 6 #" unofficial tapping notation is encountered, slider phrases are created to define these notes. If the "N 7 #" or "E O" unofficial open note notations are encountered, affected notes are imported as open notes.
5 lane chords in guitar/bass tracks are converted to open strum notes, but this behavior can be prevented by enabling the "Don't auto-name double stops" import/export preference.
Guitar Hero
Create a new EOF project from an existing Guitar Hero note file (generally GH World Tour or newer), which are generally one of two formats depending on the source game (ie. NOTE format from GH5, Band Hero and GH: Warriors of Rock and QB format from GH World Tour, GH Metallica, GH Smash Hits, GH Van Halen). Older formats may require using a utility like GHTCP to export it to db chart (dbc) format. These types of file (often with an extension such as .pak.ngc) are common when working with custom charts for Guitar Hero and usually contains guitar, bass and star power phrases. It can also contain slider guitar sections, drum notes, drum rolls/swells and pitched lyrics. Some songs contain an additional "aux" instrument section that will be imported into the keys track. The aim for this import function is to get a true one to one conversion, and forced HOPO notes are optionally imported as such. In Guitar Hero, all notes that are not explicitly HOPO on must be strummed, but EOF will prompt about whether or not such notes will be imported with HOPO off notation. Drum rolls/swells are conceptually similar to drum rolls and special drum rolls in Rock Band standards, but in Guitar Hero, these phrases are marked as long drum notes instead of phrases containing drum gems. Lyric phrases will also be trimmed to fit the lyrics they contain, and empty phrases will be removed. When EOF finds practice sections in a Guitar Hero file, it will display the sections of each included language one language at a time and allow the desired language to be selected. EOF will look for a "guitar.ogg" file in the same folder as the MIDI file you loaded. If it cannot find one you will be asked to locate an OGG (or MP3, which will be converted to OGG format) file for EOF to load. If you cancel the prompt to browse for chart audio, EOF will open the project without any audio and playback controls will be disabled, and audio will not be saved with the other chart files during Save/Save As. If no audio is loaded, File>Load Ogg can be used to allow playback and the saving of the loaded audio during save operations. If the imported Guitar Hero file is in QB format (ie. pre GH5), EOF will add a "drum_fallback_blue = True" INI entry if any drum gems are imported. This tag will be used in future versions of Phase Shift to decide how to down-chart a 5 lane drum chart to play on a 4 lane drum kit (ie. to mimic how Guitar Hero would handle it).
Lyric
Imports lyrics from an existing file into the current EOF project (this menu function is grayed out if no project is loaded). Beats are appended to the chart if it is not long enough to contain all imported lyrics. See the Lyric import section of the vocal tutorial for details.
Guitar Pro
Import a drum track or replace the active pro guitar track or track difficulty in the current EOF project with one from a specified Guitar Pro file, with as much notation kept as possible (the number and tuning of guitar strings, vibrato, harmonics, tremolo picking, tapping, up/down strumming/picking, hammer ons, pull offs, bends, slides, palm mutes and trills). Guitar Pro is a music transcription program, and its file format is arguably the most popular electronic format for guitar tablature. Some third party programs (most notably the free program "TuxGuitar") also allow you to view and author files in this format.
To import a Guitar Pro drum track into your project, import the file and select the appropriate percussion track from the list. You will be asked whether to import that track to the normal drum track, the Phase Shift drum track or both.
To import a Guitar Pro guitar/bass track into your project, change the active track to any of the five pro guitar or pro bass tracks (this menu function is grayed out if a pro guitar/bass track is not active), invoke this function from the File menu, select a Guitar Pro file (format 5.x or older), select one of the listed instrument tracks and click the import button. By default, if the EOF project's active pro guitar track had any contents, they are discarded and replaced with the imported track. If the "GP import replaces active track" import/export preference is not enabled, the imported GP track will instead only replace the active track difficulty and leave the other difficulties in the active track as-is. If a pro guitar/bass track's difficulty limit has been removed (see Track>Rocksmith>Remove difficulty limit), or if the user preference is not configured to replace the active track (instead replacing only the active difficulty), tremolo picking notation imported from the GP file will be made track-specific and will only appear while the track's difficulty limit remains removed (while the difficulties are numbered instead of named). This is because in Rocksmith, tremolo notation is defined on a per-difficulty basis, and in Rock Band 3, it equally applies to all difficulties in a track. The best way to determine which track to import is to open the Guitar Pro file in a program that supports the format (Guitar Pro or TuxGuitar are likely the two best options) and compare the contents of the tracks to determine which one you're interested in. Or you can simply undo the import if it doesn't turn out to be the track you wanted. To import different Guitar Pro tracks to different tracks in the EOF project, finish importing one Guitar Pro track, change the active track in EOF to one of the other pro guitar/bass tracks, and perform Guitar Pro import again (importing from the same Guitar Pro file, or a different one if desired).
When the Guitar Pro file is processed, you are given the option to import the time signature changes from the Guitar Pro file, overriding any that exist in the EOF project. This is only important if you want the imported notes to appear verbatim, measure by measure, to the original transcription in the Guitar Pro file. If the Guitar Pro file has multiple voices authored for a track (a feature in the Guitar Pro 5 format), only the default voice (lead) is imported. If the Guitar Pro file uses any 7 string tracks, EOF will prompt whether to drop either the highest or lowest string, since only 6 strings can be imported. If the GP file contains tie notes that overlap each other, these notes are truncated during import because Rock Band doesn't support this and Rocksmith likely doesn't either. If the imported track uses a capo, the capo position is imported and the fret values of the imported notes will remain the same as they are defined in the GP file. If the Guitar Pro file has bends notated, the bend definition is imported as tech notes (see Track>Rocksmith>Enable tech view), to accurately recreate the bend for use in Rocksmith 2014.
Even though EOF can't import a GPX (Guitar Pro 6 format) file, there are websites (such as http://www.webtabplayer.com/TabConverter) that can convert these tabs to a supported format (like GP5) for free.
This function can also import an exported Go PlayAlong XML file, which combines Guitar Pro files with synchronization information. To do so, select an appropriate XML file, which needs to be in the same directory as the related GP file. Importing a Go PlayAlong file will force the time signatures to import, since GPA sync points reference measure numbers. EOF has logic to try to handle various different ways the Go PlayAlong project is synchronized, but for best results, make sure to sync the first measure of the tablature. If the tablature is synchronized in a way where one or more beats are positioned with a negative timestamp (are before the start of the audio), those beats are omitted from import. This cannot be avoided if you synchronized the file this way, but the worst side effect would be that the imported notes won't begin at the same measure as notated in the original Guitar Pro file.Rocksmith
Replace the active pro guitar track in the current EOF project with the contents of a specified Rocksmith XML file. To import a Rocksmith arrangement into your project, change the active track to any of the five pro guitar or pro bass tracks (this menu function is grayed out if a pro guitar/bass track is not active), invoke this function from the File menu and select a Rocksmith XML file. The active project's beat markers are synced to the information in the XML file. In addition, song properties (ie. song title), arrangement name/type, phrases, popup messages, sections, events, difficulty levels (including notes, chords and fret hand positions) and the tuning are imported.
Bandfuse
Create a new EOF project from an existing Bandfuse chart file. This type of file (often with an extension such as .rif) is a binary chart format used by Bandfuse. Like Rocksmith, this game offers gameplay with real guitars and like Rock Band it supports a microphone for pitched vocal scoring. The difficulty system is different than both of those games though. It uses static (doesn't change dynamically based on the user's performance) difficulties, but the number of difficulties per instrument varies. The rhythm guitar and bass guitar arrangements can each have up to 5 difficulties, but for simpler songs some difficulty levels are omitted. The lead guitar arrangement is authored as difficulty level 6 of the guitar track.
Export chart range
Saves a user-defined portion of the active project as a new project file, with the corresponding portion of the chart audio being exported as a new OGG file. For best results, use the Set start point and Set end point functions to mark the part of the project you want to export.
Export audio range
Similar to "Export chart range", but just exports an OGG file to the specified name and location. For best results, use the Set start point and Set end point functions to mark the part of the project you want to export.
Export Guitar Pro
Uses the command line RocksmithToTab utility (available at http://www.rocksmithtotab.de/) to be used to create a GP5 file of the active project in the project's folder. This function requires you to have installed the utility and linked EOF to it (see File>Link to RocksmithToTab).
Export image sequence
If you wanted to create a video of your chart, you may be worried about lag when using screen recording software. EOF has a solution to that problem by allowing you to create an image sequence (one PCX format image file for each frame of the chart, at a rate of 30 FPS). The PCX files are created with incrementing file names in a "sequence" sub folder of your chart's project folder. You can use the free VirtualDubMod (http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/) application to create a video out of this sequence:
1. Open the image sequence (in VirtualDubMod, open File>Open video file and select the lowest number PCX file in the sequence. It will automatically load the other PCX files (as long as you don't disable the "Automatically load linked segments" option) as raw video frames.
2. Open Video>Frame Rate and change the source rate to 30 to match the 30FPS that EOF exported with.
3. Select your desired compression/filter/etc. settings in the Video menu. I usually go with the Xvid codec and perform two passes. For the first pass, select "Twopass - 1st pass" in the Xvid configuration options and then select "Save as" from the file menu. Then for the second pass, without changing any other settings, go back to Xvid configuration options and select "Twopass - 2nd pass". This time, you have to specify a target bitrate. Sometimes if I feel too lazy to pick a bitrate, I use the average bitrate given by the Xvid status window from the first pass, but you can pick any valid bitrate you want and then use File>Save as to overwrite the file created in the first pass of the compression. When it completes, you will have a video file without audio.
4. Use your favorite video editing application to "mux" in the audio for your chart. I usually go with one of the other VirtualDub releases (http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/) or (http://home.comcast.net/~fcchandler/stable/) for this because handling audio streams in VirtualDubMod just seems more complicated to me. You may need to convert your chart's audio to regular WAV format for this step, depending on the tool you are using. In VirtualDub, you would open the Audio menu, select "WAV Audio" and select your chart audio file. If you do provide the audio as a WAV file, make sure to enable the audio to be compressed again by selecting Audio>Full Processing Mode, then Audio>Compression and select your desired codec and settings. I usually use LAME MP3 and a constant (CBR) bitrate setting, constant bitrate is more reliable for audio/video synchronization in general.
5. You can show the finished video to your friends, upload it someplace like Youtube or whatever you want.
Settings
Change the program settings. See Configuring EOF for details
Preferences
Change the user preferences. See Configuring EOF for details
Display
Changes display options. If a pro guitar/bass track's difficulty limit has been removed (see Track>Rocksmith>Remove difficulty limit), more than 5 difficulty tabs will be allowed to display, depending on the program window's width.
Display: Changes the size of the EOF window to one of the pre-set sizes. Also provides an option to use a software based cursor instead of the normal cursor in your Operating System, in case it's not working properly. Also provides an option to run in 8 bit color mode, in case there's a reason you need to do so, but this will lower performance unless your computer is running in 8 bit color mode to match.
Set display width: Allows you to increase the program window's width to a value above the default width for the active pre-set window size. If the specified width cannot be set (such as if it's wider than your computer's current display resolution), EOF will revert to the default width for the active pre-set window size.
x2 zoom: Doubles the size of everything displayed in EOF except for the menus and dialog functions.
Redraw: Rebuilds the EOF window in unusual cases where it stops updating, such as if you leave it running after a Remote Desktop session.
Benchmark image sequence: Tests and reports the render speed of EOF for the current project and display settings, allowing the user to easily check the effectiveness of different customizations or build options.
Set 3D HOPO image scale size: Specifies the size to render HOPO gems in non GHL mode tracks in the the 3D preview. By default, such HOPO notes will display 75% the size of normal notes.
Enable Notes panel: Hides or shows an additional panel of text below the piano roll, resizing EOF's program window width if necessary for the panel to be displayed (the resize is skipped if either the Into panel or 3D preview are disabled in File>Preferences>Preferences). The contents of the Notes panel is defined in notes.txt file in EOF's program directory, which can be edited to display things like your favorite keyboard shortcuts, to-do items, etc. Disable and re-enable the notes panel to reload any changes you have made to the file while EOF is already displaying the notes panel. The notes panel will be allowed to take up all space on the bottom half of the EOF window that isn't in use by the Info panel or 3D preview. Please see the Notes panel documentation for more information on customizing the Notes panel.Controllers
Configure guitar and drum controllers. These can be used in tandem with the "Guitar Tap" and "Guitar Strum" edit modes.
Song Folder
Tell EOF the base folder where to save new projects. New projects created with the "Create New Folder" option will be created in a folder inside of the base folder. For example, if you select "C:\games\fof\wipsongs" for the base folder and create a new project with "Create New Folder" and "my new song" as the new folder name, the project will be stored in "c:\games\fof\wipsongs\my new song\"
Link to FOF
Allows you to link EOF to "Frets On Fire" if you are using a mod which allows starting a song from the command line (RF or FoFiX for example). You will first locate "FretsOnFire.exe" and then select the location of the song library (the base song folder). If done correctly, you will be able to launch FOF with the currently open song for testing (see Song>Test In FOF).
Link to Phase Shift
Allows you to link EOF to Phase Shift, which will start a song from the command line. You will first locate "Phase Shift.exe" and then select the location of the song library. If done correctly, you will be able to launch Phase Shift with the currently open song for testing (see Song>Test in Phase Shift).
Link to RocksmithToTab
Allows you to link EOF to RocksmithToTab (available at http://www.rocksmithtotab.de/), allowing the project's pro guitar and bass tracks to be manually exported to Guitar Pro 5 (gp5) format (see File>Export Guitar Pro). Make sure to link to the command line program (RocksmithToTab.exe) for this feature to work as expected.
Exit
Close EOF. If you have unsaved changes you will be prompted to quick save the project.
Undo
Undo the previous operation. You can undo up to 100 operations.
Redo
Redo the previously undone operation.
Copy
Copy the currently selected notes to the clipboard (see Editing Songs). The clipboard is shared between all instances of EOF. If you copy notes in one instance, you can paste them into another instance. If you copy notes in both instances, only the most recently copied notes will be in the clipboard. Copied notes' statuses are kept on the clipboard and are applied to the pasted notes accordingly. If the first note that is selected is between 1 and 10 milliseconds before a beat marker, EOF will note that it appears to be off and offers to adjust the note's position so that it lines up with the beat marker.
Paste
Paste notes from the clipboard. Note positions and lengths are pasted relative to the beat markers meaning pasted notes will stretch and shrink depending on the BPM of the beats being pasted into. Pasted notes will begin at the current seek position and continue on through subsequent beats. You can use the Song>Seek menu's functions to seek by beat and grid snap to effectively control where the notes are pasted. This allows pasted notes to retain their original grid snap positions even when you are pasting into beats that have different tempos than the copied notes. By default, pasted notes merge with any notes that already exist, with the pasted notes winning any contention for statuses (ie. if a normal yellow gem is pasted onto a yellow cymbal, the result is a normal yellow gem). Alternatively, if the "Paste erases overlap" preference is enabled, any note that is within the range of the chart that would be altered by a paste operation are deleted. If any notes being pasted use a lane higher than the active track supports (ie. pasting 5 lane bass notes into 4 lane pro bass), the gems on the exceedingly-high lanes are dropped, unless this causes the note to have no gems, in which case the note is converted to a chord using all lanes. This helps identify places where pasted notes would need particular attention for note consistency, etc. If the copied notes have arpeggio or handshape phrases when paste is performed, those phrass are created to encompass the pasted notes.
Old Paste
The same as "Paste" except the note positions and lengths are not scaled to fit into the beats. The notes will remain exactly as they were copied and the first note will be pasted exactly on the position line.
Paste From
Paste notes from another difficulty in the active track. "Paste From>Supaeasy/Easy/Medium/Amazing/Difficulty" copies all notes from the specified difficulty to the currently selected difficulty (useful for downgrading songs to lower difficulties). "Paste From>Catalog" pastes notes and their statuses from the currently selected catalog entry. If the "Paste erases overlap" preference is not enabled, paste from catalog will stop pasting notes early if it reaches a beat that has notes in it, to prevent notes from being overlapped. If Paste From is used on a pro guitar/bass track, EOF will offer to also copy the arpeggio sections, fret hand positions (both of which are defined on a per-track-difficulty basis) and difficulty-specific tremolo phrases if there are any in the specified difficulty.
Grid Snap
Change the current grid snap setting. Grid snap forces note placement to the specified setting. If you have created a tempo map for your song, turning grid snap to an appropriate setting will save you lots of time when placing notes.
The built-in grid snap settings assume 4/# (4 beats per measure) time signature, so a grid snap setting of 1/4 means that each grid snap position occurs at 1/4 of a measure intervals. With this setting you can fit up to four separate notes into one measure. A grid snap setting of 1/8 means that each grid snap position occurs at 1/8 of a measure intervals and so on and so forth. Using a custom grid snap level, you can define the number of intervals per beat or per measure. Keep in mind that if you supply a custom "per measure" grid snap, you must also place time signatures where appropriate, in order to define the number of beats per measure. Otherwise, one beat per measure will be assumed. Currently, a limit of 96 intervals is in place, because using higher values will rarely be practical.
The "Display grid lines" function toggles the display of each grid snap position based on the current grid snap setting. When grid lines are being displayed, any note that isn't at a grid snap position will have its vertical line rendered in red instead of gray, making it obvious that it doesn't line up with a grid line.
Zoom
Change the zoom level of the fretboard editing area. For faster songs, zooming in can help with note placement. Zooming out can allow you to see more of the song at once, such as when comparing repeating parts of a song. The custom zoom option allows you to indicate how many milliseconds each pixel of the editor window represents. You can use the zoom in/out shortcuts (+ and - on the numberpad) to zoom in and out of a custom zoom level. If a custom zoom is in effect when EOF closes, it is restored when re-opening EOF.
Preview Speed
Change the speed of the fretboard in the 3D Preview.
Playback Rate
Change the speed of the audio playback. For fast solo sections it can be useful to play the song back at a slower speed to make it easier to hear the notes in the song. You can play the song back at 50% speed without changing the setting by holding the Ctrl key while beginning playback. You can play the song back at 100% speed without changing the setting by holding the D key while beginning playback. You can play the song back at 25% speed without changing the setting by holding both the Ctrl and Shift keys while beginning playback. You can also specify a custom playback by specifying the percentage of full speed it should play back, such as 30 or 200. By default, any time a playback speed other than 100% is initiated, EOF uses the time stretch feature. This feature leverages the rubberband library to use phase vocoding techniques to allow chart audio to be played back slower than full speed without changing the pitch. This is more processor intensive so you may need to increase your audio buffer (and AV delay) to compensate, but you can disable this feature by unchecking the "Edit>Playback rate>Time stretch" option.
Preview HOPO
Select the algorithm used to determine which notes display as HO/PO notes in EOF's 3D preview panel. RF is equivalent to "Guitar Hero 2." If you are using RF-Mod or FoFiX you should use this setting. FOF is for standard "Frets On Fire." Manual will only show notes within forced HO/PO On phrases as HO/PO notes, making it more useful for authoring in Rock Band or other rhythm games that may support this notation, as well as to future-proof your chart should FoFiX eventually support forced HO/PO On/Off phrases. An important note: HO/PO notes are determined by an algorithm in all current versions of FOF, FoFiX and all current mods, so what EOF shows is not necessarily what the user will see in-game in regard to HO/PO notes. What the players receive for HO/PO notes depends on their settings and what version of the game they are using. In order for a note to be a HO/PO note in FoF, it normally has to be within 1/12th measure or less of the previous note. Turning on the "Eighth Note HO/PO" setting in "Song Properties" will change the HO/PO note threshold to 1/8th instead, for mods that support the "Eighth Note HO/PO" song.ini file setting.
Metronome
Toggle the metronome. When the metronome is on, a tick will sound at every beat marker during audio playback. This feature is useful when you are creating a tempo map for your song. See Creating a Tempo Map for a demonstration of how to use this feature.
Claps
Toggle note claps. When note claps are on, a clap will sound at every note during audio playback. This feature is useful to ensure your notes are synchronized with the audio in the song. If your notes are placed correctly, the clap should sound at the same time each note is audible.
Clap Notes
Select a specific gem color you want to trigger claps.
Vocal Tones
Enables or disables the sounding of piano tones in PART VOCALS. See the Testing and editing lyric pitches section of the vocal tutorial for details.
MIDI Tones
Enables or disables the sounding of MIDI notes through your computer's default MIDI device to play a synthesized version of pro guitar/bass notes during playback. If a capo is placed on the track, the capo is taken into account. When this feature is enabled, clicking on a pro guitar/bass note will sound the tones for the note. A MIDI tone delay value can be specified in File>Settings that will allow MIDI tones to play back earlier than notes, in order to compensate for MIDI lag from factors outside of EOF. You can change what MIDI voices are used for the pro guitar and bass tracks by closing EOF, opening eof.cfg in EOF's program folder and changing the MIDI instrument number given for the eof_midi_synth_instrument_guitar and eof_midi_synth_instrument_bass entries. eof_midi_synth_instrument_guitar_muted and eof_midi_synth_instrument_guitar_harm entries can also be edited to define a different MIDI instrument number used to play back for palm muted or harmonic pro guitar notes. The numbering used for this begins with 1, as in instrument number 1 indicates "Acoustic Grand Piano".
Bookmark
Place a bookmark at the current location of the position line. You can seek directly to your bookmarks (see Song>Seek) at any time. If you are going to be seeking to a specific part of a song multiple times, having a bookmark there can save lots of time.
Selection
Select or deselect notes based on various criteria.
Select All: Selects all the notes in the current track difficulty.
Select Like: Selects notes in the current track difficulty that match any of the currently selected notes. If a vocal track is active, notes match if they have the same pitch. If an instrument track is active, notes match if they use the same lanes. If a pro guitar/bass track is active, the fret values must also match.
Precise select like: Is similar to "select like", but also requires notes to have the same statuses (ie. both forced HOPO) in order to match. If a pro guitar/bass track is active, the ghost status for each gem must also match.
Select Rest: Selects all notes from the currently selected note to the end of the song.
Select Previous: Selects all notes from the beginning of the song to the currently selected note.
Deselect All: Deselects all notes.
Invert selection: Makes notes in the active track difficulty that aren't selected become selected and vice versa.
Conditional select / deselect: Allows you to specify criteria to select/deselect notes based on the gems they do or don't have. If the active track is a drum track, it will allow you to specify whether or not the specified gems in lanes 3, 4 or 5 must be cymbals or toms to be selected/deselected. If the active track is a pro guitar/bass track, it will allow you to specify whether or not the specified gems must be normal, muted or ghosted in order to be selected/deselected.
Select / deselectChords: Applies to notes that have more than one gem.
Single notes: Applies to notes that have only one gem.
Toms: Applies to notes that are tom notes (gems in lanes 3, 4 or 5 that are not marked as cymbals).
Cymbals: Applies to notes that are cymbal notes (gems in lanes 3, 4 or 5 that are marked as cymbals).
Grid snapped: Applies to notes that are grid snapped with the current grid snap value.
Non grid snapped: Applies to notes that are not grid snapped with the current grid snap value.
Shorter than: Prompts for a threshold length in milliseconds, and then applies to all notes in the active track difficulty that are shorter than that length.
Longer than: Prompts for a threshold length in milliseconds, and then applies to all notes in the active track difficulty that are longer than that length.
Of length: Prompts for a threshold length in milliseconds, and then applies to all notes in the active track difficulty that are exactly that length.
On beat notes: Applies to notes that are on a beat marker.
Off beat notes: Applies to notes that are not on a beat marker.
Highlighted: Applies to notes that are highlighted.
Not highlighted: Applies to notes that are not highlighted.
One in every: Applies to one out of every specified number of selected notes. Which note in the sequence is affected can also be specified, so you can select/deselect the first out of every two notes, the second out of every three, etc.
Set start point
Defines the current seek position as the start or end points for the Create preview audio, Export chart range and Export audio range functions.
Set end point
Seek
Perform various seek operations, which move the position line to the desired location. The rewind function, for example, seeks to the position of the last time playback started. If grid snap is enabled, the seek previous/next grid snap functions are enabled, otherwise they are disabled. There are two seek to end style functions, one seeks to the end of the currently loaded audio, and the other seeks to the end of the chart. If a file was imported without suitable audio, those two end positions may be different.
Track
Select a track for editing. PART GUITAR is the default track. Tracks containing notes will have an asterisk (*) displayed next to them. All tracks are edited in a similar way. Some tracks such as PART DRUMS and PART DANCE will appear differently in the piano roll and the 3D Preview.
File Info
Display various information about the current project.
Audio cues
Opens a dialog window allowing you to change the volume for the chart audio and any of EOF's audio cues: Clap, metronome, vocal tone and vocal percussion. This will affect the volume of the cue when it is sounded during playback or when the chart is stopped (such as when clicking on a lyric or vocal percussion note). This dialog allows you to select the sound that will be used for a vocal percussion note (See Percussion sections in the vocal tutorial for details). This dialog also allows you to choose whether ghost notes (pro guitar or drum notes) or string muted pro guitar notes will trigger the clap sound cue.
Display semitones as flat
Displays piano note (see the Advanced topics section of the vocal tutorial for details) and pro guitar chord names with flat notation instead of sharp notation.
Waveform graph
Provides the ability to show, hide and configure a waveform graph for the currently active OGG file. To generate the graph, use the "Show" item in this menu or simply press the F5 key when the chart is not playing. After a few seconds, the graph will be displayed as per the settings in the "Configure" dialog menu. For each vertical slice (one pixel wide) of the graph, the minimum amplitude in that portion of the audio (rendered in dark green by default), the peak (maximum) amplitude (rendered in light green by default) and the root mean square (think of this as the average) amplitude (rendered in red by default) are displayed. In the "Configure" menu item, you can specify whether the left audio channel, the right audio channel or both audio channels will be graphed. You can also specify whether the graph will be scaled to fit within the fretboard area or the entire editor window (the area above the scroll bar and the below the playback control buttons). When both the left and right channels are being graphed, the left channel is drawn on top of the right channel. Once the waveform graph has been initially generated, you can show/hide it with the F5 key. If you load another OGG file (see File>Load OGG), the waveform graph will not be recreated until it is hidden and shown again. This will, for example, allow you to generate a graph for a drum track and then load another audio file. If you load or import a chart, any existing waveform graph will be discarded and will need to be created again by showing the graph.
The default colors can be altered by editing the eof.cfg file that EOF creates in its program folder when it exits. The colors are defined in hexadecimal in standard RGB format where each color intensity is a two digit value from 00 (none) to FF (maximum). The first two digits are the red intensity, the second set of two digits are the green intensity and the third set of two digits are the blue intensity. If an RGB value has leading zeros, they can be omitted, so "00FF00" will be considered the same as "FF00". As an example, the color fuchsia can be defined with a red intensity of 255 (FF in hexadecimal), a green intensity of 0 (00 in hexadecimal) and a blue intensity of 255 (FF in hexadecimal). To have EOF render the peak amplitudes of the waveform graph in fushsia, edit the value of the "eof_color_waveform_peak" entry in song.ini to "eof_color_waveform_peak = FF00FF". The trough (minimum) and RMS amplitudes can have custom colors defined the same way. There are various hex color charts and calculators available on the Internet that may help you find interesting colors, such as http://welcowebdesign.com/color.html. To reset to the default waveform graph colors, just delete the waveform color definitions under the [colors] section of eof.cfg and save the file. Do note that you must save your changes after EOF is closed, because the program will rewrite the current colors when it exits, and this would otherwise overwrite your changes.
Spectrogram
Provides the ability to show, hide and configure a spectrogram for the currently active OGG file. A spectrogram is a 3D graphical representation of audio, where the X axis is time, the Y axis is frequency and the color is amplitude. The window size in the spectrogram's configuration determines how much of the audio is represented by each column (pixel) of the graph. To generate the graph, use the "Show" item in this menu. Displaying the spectrogram is much more processor intensive than the waveform graph, so unless your computer is very powerful, you may get a lot of stuttering if you try to play back the chart while the spectrogram is being displayed. Increasing the buffer size dramatically may help counter this, but playback lag might be unavoidable without using Song>Spectrogram>Show again to hide the spectrogram.
By default, the bottom of the graph is approximaely 0Hz, and the top is half the sample rate of the sound file - for your typical 44kHz rate, it will be 22KHz. Each vertical block of color represents a small range of frequencies, and is color coded to indicate how much of that particular pitch is present in that section of the sound. Depending on how much other noise there is, you may be able to see individual tones or notes in the graph. If you want to learn more about spectrograms, Wikipedia is a great place to start.
In the "Configure" menu item, you have options for controlling the graph, similarly to the Waveform Graph. In addition, you can choose a color scheme (currently just color or grayscale), whether the vertical scale should be logarithmic (helpful for music, as the musical scale is logarithmic in frequency), and window size, and note range.
Window size is a parameter used when generating the spectrogram, and specifically is the width of the sample used for each column (or slice). Due to how spectrograms are created this also determines how many slices the frequency spectrum will be sliced into (how many "bins"), or how many rows are in the column. Effectively, higher window sizes get you better resolution on the vertical (frequency) axis, lower window sizes get you better resolution in the horizontal (time) axis.
The note range option, if activated, limits the graph to show only the chosen range of frequencies (given in 12-tone musical note names, use # and b for sharp/flat), so as to better see parts of the graph you are more interested in.
In order to save processing time, the program selects a single amplitude value from each frequency bin. This generally doesn't cause a noticeable difference, but you can enable the "Avg Freq" option to average the values in each bin instead.
Highlight non grid snapped notes
Dynamically highlights notes that aren't on any grid snap position, indicating they may need to be manually moved/resnapped. If a custom grid snap value is in effect, its positions are also checked. The highlighting updates when notes are moved/resnapped or the grid snap value in use changes to/from a custom setting.
Catalog
Perform various catalog related operations. The catalog contains portions of your song which you can play back or paste into other parts of the song (see "Edit>Paste From"). "Show" toggles the catalog display. "Add" adds the currently selected notes to the catalog. "Delete" deletes the current catalog entry. "Previous" selects the previous catalog entry. "Next" selects the next catalog entry. "Find previous" and "find next" will find the previous or next instance of the current fret catalog entry in the current track difficulty. It is considered a matching instance as long as the notes' gems are the same pattern (ie. red, red+green, blue), the notes' length and spacing doesn't matter. Optionally, increase the fret catalog's width so that it takes up the full width of EOF's window. The name and timing of the catalog entry can also be edited if desired. See the Catalog section of Editing Songs for more details about the fret catalog.
INI Settings
Define additional INI settings which are not available in Song Properties.
Properties
Change the song properties for the current project.
"Song Title" is the name of the song.EOF stores all these settings in the ".eof" project file and exports relevant options to "song.ini" when saving for compatibility with "Frets On Fire."
"Artist" is the artist the song is attributed to.
"Frettist" refers to the person who created the "Frets On Fire" note charts.
"Album" is the name of the album the song is on, which can help people tell different versions of a song apart.
"Delay" is the delay or MIDI offset value which tells "Frets On Fire" how much time to delay the notes. Changing the "Delay" setting alters the position of all the beat lines in the current project and optionally adjusts the note positions as well.
"Year" refers to the year the song was released.
"Diff" refers to the band difficulty (tier) of the song as a whole.
"Lyrics" refers to the optional song.ini parameter that indicates to FoFiX that it should display Script style lyrics during chart playback using the file script.txt. If this checkbox is checked, and your chart has lyrics defined, EOF will create the script.txt lyric file (as well as a simplified plain text lyrics.txt file) automatically during a save operation and enable it in the chart's song.ini file. This will provide subtitle style lyrics for various versions of Frets on Fire, even those that did not support scrolling lyrics. Since script.txt requires the lyrics to be line synced, the script.txt file will not contain lyrics that are not defined within lyric lines, and EOF will present a warning if there are any lyrics with this problem. The script.txt export will not work if the project folder's path contains Unicode of extended (ie. accented) ASCII characters.
"8th Note HO/PO" refers to the optional song.ini parameter that overrides FoF's default Hammer On/Pull Off settings, specifying that a single note (probably not chords, but this may vary between versions of FoF) in any guitar track that is 1/8 of one measure apart or closer to the previous note will be a HOPO note and not require a strum. This song.ini parameter should work in RF-Mod based versions of FoF, such as RF-Mod, Alarian and FoFiX.
"Use fret hand pos of 1 (pro g)" refers to an advanced feature relating to authoring custom pro guitar content for Rock Band. When this option is enabled, EOF will export the MIDI so that a single fret hand position of fret 1 is written for the 17 and 22 fret pro guitar tracks, instead of writing a fret hand position for each note in the expert difficulty of each of the two tracks. This allows dislike guitar parts to be authored in different difficulties of the same guitar track, which would otherwise have fret hand markers written based on the notes in the expert difficulty, but if the fret numbers used get too high, it can lead to RB3 displaying incorrect fret numbers for those gems.
"Use fret hand pos of 1 (pro b)" refers to an advanced feature relating to authoring custom pro guitar content for Rock Band. When this option is enabled, EOF will export the MIDI so that a single fret hand position of fret 1 is written for the 17 and 22 fret pro bass tracks, instead of writing a fret hand position for each note in the expert difficulty of each of the two tracks.
"Use accurate time signature" specifies whether to use updated logic that properly changes the length of a beat takes the time signature's denominator (the "beat unit") into acount as it does in music theory. To prevent unwanted alteration for existing projects' beat timings, this is not enabled by default for existing projects, but can be enabled or disabled by going into Song>Properties and toggling the "Use accurate time signatures" option. When this option is changed, if the project uses any non #/4 time signatures, EOF will offer to alter tempos so that beat positions remain the same. Time signature changes that change the denominator are forced to be anchors, to prevent the ability to accidentally corrupt the tempo map. File imports have been updated to handle this setting being enabled for new projects, and GPA import will forcibly enable this option because the Go PlayAlong format writes its timings in a way where time signatures must be taken into account. Functions in the "Beat>Time signature" menu are now disabled as appropriate if the tempo map is locked, to ensure the beat positions remain unaltered.
"Loading Text" is the text that appears on the loading screen while your song is loading in "Frets On Fire" (currently only supported in FoFiX). If this field is populated, it is used to create a message box displayed at the beginning of the song when used for Rocksmith. You can put date/time tags in the loading text and they will be expanded to the current date/time values (see http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/ctime/strftime/ for usable tags) for the Rocksmith message box.
Leading Silence
Allows you to insert silent audio at the beginning of the chart audio, for purposes of allowing enough time before the first beat marker or simply give the chart a polished look by easily adding a controlled amount of leading silence before the first beat marker without having to alter the audio in another program such as Audacity. Unless necessary for syncing purposes, it's best to sync the first beat marker for your chart (see the EOF Tutorial for details) before using this feature. When you access the Leading Silence feature, you have the option of adding a specified number of milliseconds' or beat's (based on the first beat's tempo) worth of silence (only positive, whole numbers) to beginning of the chart via two different options: The first option (Add) simply adds the specified amount of silence whereas the second option (Pad) will take the first beat marker's position (MIDI delay) into account to adjust the chart so that the amount of silence added moves the first beat marker to the specified position from the start of the audio. The appropriate amount of silent audio is created and the currently loaded OGG file is joined to it. For example: If you have synced a chart to have a MIDI delay of 225, adding 100ms of silence will result in the chart having a MIDI delay of 335 afterward. If you pad to 500ms of silence instead, it will result in the chart having a MIDI delay of 500ms afterward.
EOF takes precautions to preserve the original audio, making this function safe to use. When this feature is used to add silence to the beginning of a chart, the original audio for the currently loaded OGG file (see Load OGG for details) is saved with a ".backup" file extension, allowing you to restore the original audio file manually if necessary. The undo and redo features are also compatible with this function, so you can simply undo and redo the adding of leading silence as desired. If you have already made enough changes so that there are not enough undo states to revert the addition of leading silence, you can open the leading silence feature again and add 0 ms of silence, and the original audio will be restored. That will also work for restoring the original audio file even if EOF crashed before saving changes. After each change to the audio, including the addition of, undoing of or redoing of leading silence, the waveform graph will be recreated if it has been generated. In the Leading Silence dialog menu, you have the option of whether or not to adjust the position of the note and beat markers. You should allow them to be adjusted if you are using this feature on a chart that is already synced and has notes. There are also two methods presented for processing the audio:
Stream Copy: This method uses a third party utility called "oggCat" to append the original audio to the silent audio by streaming the two audio files together, preventing the audio quality loss that would occur by having to re-encode the audio. This means that to use the feature, you will need to have oggCat (part of the OGG Video Tools) on your system (callable from any directory, such as in your PATH environment variable, or in EOF's program file folder). OggCat binaries are available for Windows on the OGG Video Tools website, but Mac and Linux users will need to build the OGG Video Tools in order to use the feature. There are some limitations to oggCat, so it is possible that afterward the audio may sound corrupted. If that happens, just undo the operation and retry adding leading silence with the "Re-encode" option detailed below. In most cases, oggCat will work as desired and will finish more quickly without any quality loss since re-encoding is avoided. You may notice that a slightly different amount of silence than you specified may be the result, due to technical limitations of how OGG files work. This should not prevent the chart from remaining synced though, as EOF appropriately adjusts the first beat marker.
Re-encode: This method decodes the currently loaded OGG file and re-encodes it with the leading silence. This method takes longer, but would be as accurate as possible with no slight difference in leading audio that could occur with using oggCat. This is also the only alternative if the OGG file you are using is incompatible with oggCat in that it resulted in corrupted audio. If you originally selected to use an MP3 file when you created your chart (in EOF 1.7 or later, see File>New), the MP3 file is copied to the chart's project folder and re-used with this re-encode operation. This means that if you created the chart with an MP3, using the re-encode leading silence feature will not lower the audio quality of your chart, since the same MP3 file is decoded and encoded to OGG just the same as when the chart audio was originally created. If you created your chart in an older version of EOF or by providing an OGG file in the New Chart wizard, the loaded OGG file is decoded and re-encoded, which will result in some quality loss. If you did create your chart with an MP3 file in a version of EOF before 1.7, and still have the original MP3 file, you can copy it to your chart's project folder and rename it to "original.mp3" (do note that Linux is case sensitive, and Mac may be, so use lowercase letters in the name).
If you have added leading silence and haven't saved, if you discard changes when exiting EOF, loading another chart or importing a MIDI or Feedback chart, EOF will restore the OGG files that were in use during the last save operation. This will prevent the chart from being left synced to the wrong OGG file.
Lock tempo map
Disables most operations that alter the beat marker timings, in order to prevent accidental changes from being made after creating the tempo map. The position of the first beat marker (the MIDI delay) is still allowed to be changed as it's common to need to change it for various reasons such as adding leading silence, resyncing the first beat marker after MIDI import, etc. When the tempo map is locked, EOF's title bar includes the text "(Tempo map locked)", and applicable entries from the Beat menu are grayed out to reflect that they cannot be used when the tempo map is locked. In addition, the keyboard shortcuts to those functions are disabled. To restore the ability to make changes to the tempo map, simply uncheck the "Lock tempo map" option from the Song menu. The act of locking or unlocking the tempo map does not cause the chart to be marked as modified, as no actual changes are made. However, if the tempo map is locked when a save (or undo state) is performed, the saved chart will have the tempo map locked when it is opened again.
Disable click and drag
Disables the ability to click and drag notes or beat markers, which will help prevent accidental editing of note or beat positions.
Pro Guitar
Performs various pro guitar operations. If the active track is not a pro guitar or pro bass track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Enable legacy view: Assists with down-charting a pro guitar track to a legacy (5 lane) track by showing the entire pro guitar track as it would paste into a legacy track, allowing you to fine tune the legacy values for each note easily. When Legacy View is active, you can use the standard method for editing regular guitar notes and it will act like a normal 5 lane instrument track. If you change a note in this mode, it won't automatically change all other identical pro guitar notes' legacy values in the track difficulty, but you can open the edit pro guitar note dialog menu for the desired note and just press OK to have EOF apply the changed legacy values to the appropriate notes. You can even create new notes or paste notes while in legacy view, and the new notes will be created with default fret values of 0 for applicable lanes. If you haven't manually set the legacy value checkboxes for any notes, those notes will render with a maroon background color in the piano roll to alert you. This way you won't be able to accidentally miss any notes when you work on down-charting a pro guitar chart.
Previous chord name:
Next chord name: When a note that matches multiple chord names is selected, the bottom of the information panel will indicate there are multiple chord matches. You can use these functions to view the other names the selected chord may go by. While the note remains selected, the selected alternate chord name will be displayed in the editor and 3D preview windows.
Highlight notes in arpeggios: Dynamically highlights notes in arpeggio sections, which will make it easy to identify notes that have fallen outside an arpeggio.
Rocksmith
Performs various functions tailored for Rocksmith chart authoring. If the active track is not a pro guitar or pro bass track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Correct chord fingerings: Checks to make sure each chord in each pro guitar track has the fingerings validly defined, which is required for authoring charts for the rhythm game "Rocksmith". If a chord's fingering isn't correctly defined, the function displays the offending chord's fret values and allows the finger values to be edited, at which point all matching chords (that don't have complete fingering defined already) in the project are updated to match. EOF will also run this check during save if the "Save separate Rocksmith 1 files" or "Save separate Rocksmith 2 files" import/export preferences are enabled.
Using chord shape definitions in the chordshapes.xml file in EOF's program folder, EOF will offer to automatically fill in missing fingering values for chords whose shapes are known. These definitions have the same formatting as chord templates in Rocksmith style XML files (so you can copy them from a chart's XML file if you don't want to type them by hand), where finger0 through finger5 define which finger is used to fret each string (0 being the thickest string), and fret0 through fret5 define which fret is played on each string. A name can also be given for each, such as to indicate that it is a D chord shape, but the names are not used by EOF. You can add, edit and remove as many definitions as you want, but EOF only loads these definitions when the program is started, so you may need to save, close and re-open EOF to use any definition changes you've made. During project save, if any chords don't have their fingering manually defined, it will try to match the chord shape against the definitions and if it finds one, automatically exports it with the corresponding fingering. The shape definition doesn't have to be defined on any specific string or fret position, so a D shape can be matched anywhere on the guitar neck without being defined more than once. If the same exact shape happens to be defined more than once (with different fingerings), such as an A shape played as a barre and an A shape played with three fingers, the first definition in the file is automatically used.
Check fret hand positions: Looks for various problems with any fret hand positions defined in the project, seeking to each and describing the problem, allowing you to opportunity to cancel the check to correct it or to continue looking for errors. During save, EOF will warn you if there are any problems with defined fret hand positions, and will offer to cancel the save and to show the problems to you. If you click the "ignore" option when prompted about a fret hand position warning, EOF will ignore other instances of that issue until the fret hand position check is started again.
Export chord techniques (RS1): Allows a chord with a technique (ie. bend, hammer on, harmonic, palm mute, pop, slap, slide, tremolo) to be written to XML as both a chord and an additional single note with the technique at the same position. This causes the note to display on top of the chord box with the appropriate technique in-game. This was a workaround to the original Rocksmith's inability to display chords with techniques. The sequel can display them through normal means.
Suppress DD warnings: Prevents EOF from warning about Rocksmith dynamic difficulty related issues during save.Second piano roll
Allows for the displaying of another piano roll in place of the information and 3D preview panels. The main piano roll (the upper one) is the only one that can be edited, so the secondary piano roll (the lower one) is only for display purposes.
Display: Shows or hides the second piano roll.
Swap with main piano roll: Swaps the primary and secondary piano rolls so that the track difficulty that was displayed in the secondary roll becomes available for editing. To control which track difficulty is displayed in the second piano roll, swap it for the main piano roll, change to the desired track difficulty, and swap the piano rolls back.
Sync with main piano roll: Enabled by default, this setting causes the primary and secondary piano rolls to keep the same seek position. If this setting is disabled, each piano roll has its own seek position, and swapping the active piano roll will cause the chart to seek to the position of whichever piano roll is becoming active, even if the chart is playing.Manage raw MIDI tracks
Allows management of MIDI tracks that have been imported and stored into the EOF project (ie. if prompted during MIDI import). The tracks listed here will be saved in the project, and written to MIDI files saved by EOF (except for notes_pro.mid, since the only tracks that MIDI should include are the pro guitar/bass tracks). The add button will allow you to browse for a MIDI or RBA file and select a track to store into the project, to be written to the MIDI file created by EOF during save operations. If you select to store a track with the same name as a track EOF is already storing in the current project, you will be prompted to either cancel or replace the existing stored track. If a song.ini file exists in the same directory as the selected MIDI/RBA file, EOF will prompt whether or not to apply the MIDI delay specified in the INI file, and it will be used to offset the timing for each event in the track as it is stored to the project. A negative MIDI delay is allowed during this process, but only if the delay would not cause any events to have a negative timing. The tempo and "BEAT" tracks are not allowed to be manually added for storage, as they are created by EOF during save. If a tempo track was stored during MIDI import, it will be used during save when the MIDI files are created, and all tracks written by EOF will used the stored tempo track for its timings instead of the tempo changes of the project's beat markers. If a beat track was stored during MIDI import, it will be written to the MIDI file during save instead of a beat track created from the project's beat markers.
The purpose of this function is to store unsupported tracks into an EOF project. For example, if authoring a chart where pro keys were authored in another program, the pro keys tracks can be imported into the EOF project and will be saved along with the other tracks even though EOF doesn't support pro keys yet.
EOF will allow you to import tracks that are natively supported in the editor (ie. PART GUITAR), but these will override the related track in the project when the MIDI is created during save. The lyric display in the 3D preview window will indicate when this is the case for the currently selected track. The capability to store natively-supported tracks is probably only useful for creating custom charts that work on Rock Band 3 if any title updates newer than #4 are installed (this includes the Mad Catz branded re-release), which is because newer versions of Rock Band 3 tighten the security on importing songs in a way where only customs that use one of the original RB1 songs' tempo maps can be used.
EOF will also allow you to import an EVENTS track into the project. The Beat>Events and Beat>All Events dialogs will display a notice if there is an EVENTS track stored in the project, and during save, the stored track will be written to the MIDI files instead of an EVENTS track created from text events defined within the editor. Similarly to storing MIDI tracks that are natively-supported in EOF, this capability is meant for getting custom charts into an updated copy of Rock Band 3.
Create preview audio
Stores the start and end times of the preview as INI tags (preview_start_time and preview_end_time) in the project and if chart audio is loaded, optionally exports the specified time range of the chart audio to (songname)_preview.wav and preview.ogg in the project folder. Phase Shift currently supports using the preview_start_time tag to affect the part of the song played in the song selection screen. Subsequent calls to this function will read existing start and time stamps from the INI settings and use them to fill out the input fields. It will default to a 30 second clip beginning from the current seek position, but if a seek selection has been made (Feedback input mode), the default start and stop position in the dialog reflect the selected area of the chart. Likewise, if start/end positions are already defined (see Set start point and Set end point), the dialog will reflect them.
Test In FOF
Launch FOF with the current song, track, and difficulty for testing. This feature only works if you are using an RF-based mod (ie. Alarian Mod or FoFiX) and have correctly linked EOF to it (see File>Link to FOF). As of this release, it has been confirmed through testing and documentation that "Test in FoF" should work for Frets on Fire releases from MFH Alarian Mod 2.900 through FoFiX 3.100.
Test In Phase Shift
Launch Phase Shift with the current song in practice mode, allowing you to adjust the playback speed of the chart in 5% increments during play. Phase Shift will allow you to select which instrument and which difficulty to play. This feature only works if you using a supported version of Phase Shift (0.75g or later) and have correctly linked EOF to it (see File>Link to Phase Shift).
Pro Guitar
Performs various track specific pro guitar operations. If the active track is not a pro guitar or pro bass track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Set tuning: Allows you to set the tuning for each string. By default, guitar/bass tunings are in standard tuning and you define how many half steps each string is tuned up (positive number) or down (negative number). When entering a string's tuning, the name of the note the string would sound when played open (no frets held) is listed on the side to help you keep track. If you enter a tuning that EOF recognizes, it will display the tuning name (ie. "Drop D tuning"). In order for chord detection to work properly, you must set the correct tuning and number of strings for the pro guitar/bass tracks that are authored. If you change the tuning of a track in a way that affects any existing notes in the track, EOF will offer to transpose them up or down their current string so that they keep the same pitch. If this isn't possible for any notes (any that use a fret that is too high or low on the string), EOF will warn you that you need to transpose them manually and will highlight the notes.
Set number of frets/strings: Allows you to set the number of strings and frets for the active pro guitar or pro bass track. By default, all pro guitar and bass tracks use 24 frets as is supported by Rocksmith 2014. If the Save separate Rocksmith 1 files preference is enabled, the PART_REAL_GUITAR, PART_REAL_BASS, PART_REAL_GUITAR_22 and PART_REAL_BASS_22 tracks default is lowered to 22 frets to suit that game's limit. If the Save separate Rock Band files or Save FoF/GH/Phase Shift files preferences are enabled, PART_REAL_GUITAR and PART_REAL_BASS default to using 17 frets and PART_REAL_GUITAR_22 and PART_REAL_BASS_22 to 22 frets each as required in Rock Band 3. PART REAL_GUITAR_BONUS always defaults to 24 frets because this track was designed to be used for Rocksmith 2014 customs. By default, pro guitar tracks use 6 strings and pro bass tracks use 4 strings. If you set a fret limit that is lower than the fret value used on any of the track's notes, EOF will offer to cancel and highlight those notes so you can transpose those notes to another octave or string before going through with the fret limit change. This could be particularly helpful when transposing a 22 fret pro guitar/bass track to 17 frets for use in Rock Band 3.
Set capo: Allows you to define the placement of a capo for the active track, which will be displayed as C=# in the extreme lower left corner of the editor window. This capo information is exported to the track's Rocksmith 2 XML file, but it won't affect automated chord names unless you disable the "Ignore tuning/capo" option in the same menu.
Ignore tuning/capo: When enabled, which it is by default, alters the chord name detection for the active track so that the track's tuning and capo position is ignored and standard tuning is assumed. This allows more familiar chord names to be given when using tunings like Eb. If a drop tuning is defined in the "set tuning" dialog, EOF offers to turn off this option to ignore the tuning so that chord name lookups will be correct. EOF will automatically disable this option when importing a track from a Guitar Pro file that is in a drop tuning.
Rocksmith
Performs various functions tailored for Rocksmith chart authoring. If the active track is not a pro guitar or pro bass track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Enable tech view: Enables an overlay of specialized "tech notes" that are used in Rocksmith 2014 authoring to apply techniques to individual strings of a note or chord in the track. Also, it allows complex bend techniques to be authored, by defining bends (tech notes that have bend status applied and a bend strength greater than 0) and releases (tech notes that have bend status applied and a bend strength of 0) throughout the duration of a note, at specific timestamps. Tech notes are authored by entering tech view, placing gems the same way you would for normal notes, and then applying a technique to the tech note. A tech note effects the individual string of the note it overlaps, meaning that one string in a chord can have techniques that are different from those on the other strings (ie. a chord can have only one string that bends, or can have strings that each slide a different number of strings). When tech view is in effect, tech notes are color coded so that if a tech note begins at the same time as a regular note it renders with blue text on a white background, if it overlaps a regular note it renders with green text or if it does noes overlap (does not affect) any regular notes it renders with red text, if the tech note is selected it renders with white text. As long as the tech note is overlapping a note it isn't required to be at a specific position unless you are defining specialized bend notes. For example, a pre-bend needs to have a tech note with bend status at the start position of the note, so ideally you should ensure that tech note displays with blue text on a white background (you can use the "Note>Rocksmith>Move t.n. to prev note" function to move a tech note to the start of whichever note is is immediately before the tech note, if any), and then defines the release as a tech note with a bend strength of 0. Bend notes export to XML reflecting however many tech notes that have bend status, so you could author a note that bends and releases several times before it ends. If two tech note gems are in the same position, they are treated as a "chord", like with normal notes, and all gems in the same tech chord apply the same techniques to affected notes. If the strings that the tech note affects need to be affected differently, the tech notes must be spaced apart so that each gem can have separate techniques defined. The millisecond placement of tech notes doesn't matter for anything except bend tech notes, since the bend definitions are defined at the tech notes' millisecond positions. For all other tech notes, the techniques they add to regular notes are applied to the entire note. When tech view is not in effect, an asterisk is displayed in parentheses in a difficulty's tab if that difficulty contains tech notes, which aren't displayed when tech view isn't active. Likewise, the Song>Track menu will display an asterisk next to a track that contains any tech notes, even when that track has no normal notes, to indicate it is populated.
Fret Hand Positions:Set: Allows you to define the fret hand position at the current seek position in the active track difficulty, which are written as anchors during Rocksmith export. MIDI export will also write a track's expert difficulty's fret hand positions, as long as the song property to use a fret hand position of 1 for the entire track isn't enabled. If no fret hand positions exist for a track during save, they will be automatically generated. If there is already a hand position defined at the seek position, its value will be placed in the input box for editing instead of a new fret hand position being added. If you edit an existing fret hand position by clearing the fret number and clicking OK, the fret hand position will be deleted. The information panel will display the fret hand position in effect at the current seek position, but you can also use the Top of 2D pane shows preference to display "Hand pos" in the top of the 2D pane to easily see where these are in the chart. A fret hand position higher than fret 19 may not be set, because it would cause Rocksmith to crash.Popup messages:
List: Displays the active track difficulty's fret hand positions, allowing them to be deleted, automatically generated or seeked to. This dialog's title bar lists the number of fret hand positions present for the active track difficulty in parentheses. When launched, this function automatically selects the fret hand position in effect at the current seek position in the list, if applicable.
Fret hand positions that are generated will attempt to reflect the fewest number of position changes needed. You can control fret hand position changes by defining the fingering of notes to use the index finger (finger #1), such as to ensure that generated fret hand position moves to keep the same hand shape, like when playing power chords at different positions on the guitar. Ghost notes can also be added to influence the generation of fret hand positions with their fret numbering and fingering definitions. If a chord's fingering is not defined, EOF performs chord shape lookups similarly to when chord fingerings are automatically generated, and will take them into account, as chord fingerings and fret hand positions need to match as far as the index finger is concerned, or else it can display strangely in Rocksmith.
By default, the fret hand position generation assumes the player can only reach a total of four frets at any point on the guitar neck, as per the limitation of the original Rocksmith game that chord diagrams and highlighted lanes reflecting the current hand position were limited to a width of 4 frets. Rocksmith 2014 allows for more than this. The eof_4_fret_range, eof_5_fret_range and eof_6_fret_range preferences that can be manually edited in eof.cfg (while EOF isn't already running, after opening and closing EOF once) to alter the behavior of fret hand position generation. By default, eof_4_fret_range is applied at fret 1, meaning that beginning at fret 1, the player's fret hand is able to cover four frets without changing position. The other two preferences aren't in use when they have their default value of 0, but can be assigned a fret number to indicate the fret hand can reach more frets at a time (because frets get smaller as you go higher up the neck). For example, an eof_5_fret_range value of 7 and an eof_6_fret_range value of 12 might be reasonable. Keep in mind this affects the fret hand position creation for both bass and guitar arrangements. Also it's likely that Rocksmith 1 isn't designed to allow ranges other than 4, and charts with larger ranges could malfunction in that game.
Copy: Allows you to copy the fret hand positions from another difficulty in the active track.
Generate all diffs: Generates fret hand positions for all populated difficulties of the active track.
Delete effective: Deletes the fret hand position in effect at the current seek position, if there is any.In Rocksmith, a song can have popup messages to provide the player with information, hints or whatever you want. You can even use them to direct the player to use techniques the game doesn't display, such as string mutes, playing chords with palm muting, etc. The popup messages are stored separately for each track, so each can have unique messages. If a popup message is in effect at the current seek position, it is displayed as white text with a black background at the top of the 3D preview window. If the Loading text song property is defined, it is automatically exported as a popup message displaying from 5.1 seconds to 10.1 seconds from the beginning of the song.Arrangement type: Allows the arrangement type of the active track to be set. The 2 bass tracks for newly-created charts will default to the "Bass" arrangement type. If a track's arrangement type is specified, it is given accordingly in the track's XML file, otherwise the track's name is used for the arrangement name. When a track's arrangement type is bass, the track's default tuning reflects the standard for bass guitar (BEADGC), any other defined arrangement type causes it to reflect the standard for guitar (EADGBE). If a track's arrangement type is undefined, the default tuning reflects the default for that track (PART REAL_BASS and PART REAL_BASS_22 use bass guitar's standard tuning, the other tracks use guitar's standard tuning).
Add: Allows you to add a new popup message. When adding a new popup message, if one or more notes in the active track difficulty are selected, the start and end positions are automatically filled in to reflect the selected notes. If a seek selection is in use (Feedback input mode), the start and end positions are filled in to reflect the selected area of the chart. Otherwise the start position is filled in with the current seek position. You cannot use parentheses () characters in a popup message, since Rocksmith uses these as part of each message's formatting.
List: Displays all popup messages that have been defined for the active track and allows you to delete, edit or seek to each.
Copy from: Allows you to copy popup messages from another track into the active track.
Tone change:Contains functions for defining tone changes for use in Rocksmith 2014, which supports the use of 4 different tones in any arrangement. In order for a track's tone changes to export to the track's Rocksmith 2 XML file, it must have at least two different tone names referenced in its tone changes. In addition to defining the tone changes themselves, you must define the "default" tone, which is automatically in effect at the beginning of the song, with the "Names" function in this menu. In most cases, you do not need to define a tone change at the beginning of the song that sets the default tone. The exception is if the track begins with one tone, then changes to one or more tones throughout the course of the song, but never changes back to the first tone again. Since a tone name has to be used in a tone change in order to be made the default tone, you will need to place a tone change near the beginning of the song that activates the tone you want to make the default. This will allow it to show up in the list of tone names and you will be able to select it as the default. This workaround has no adverse effect in-game because EOF optimizes the tone changes when it writes the XML files in a way so that it skips writing tone changes that set a tone that is already in effect.Remove difficulty limit: Removes the limit of 4 difficulties for pro guitar/bass tracks, allowing additional difficulties to be authored for Rocksmith. When this feature is enabled, the difficulties are displayed by number instead of by name and the tabs display 3 selectable difficulties at a time. The << tab changes to the lowest difficulty in the track and the >> tab changes to the highest difficulty in the track. The Tab key commands can still be used to change to the next higher/lower difficulty. When this feature is enabled, the BRE difficulty will not be exported to MIDI since it is assumed that difficulty 4 will include a track difficulty for use in Rocksmith instead of BRE notation. When this feature is NOT enabled, the BRE difficulty will not be exported to XML since it is assumed that difficulty contains BRE notation instead of a Rocksmith difficulty.
Officially, Rocksmith 1 doesn't support automated tone changes in a song, but it's been found that by adding a new scripted function to the scripts used in Rocksmith, control events can be placed in a chart to change to a specific tone, even if it is a custom one. This requires you to alter or add a file to your Rocksmith installation. The knowledge of how to do this may be lost since most people produce customs for Rocksmith 2 now, and older Rocksmith 1 era details are more scarce. It has been found that if your chart begins with a "clean" tone and then changes to another tone (ie. one with distortion), Rocksmith 1 doesn't seem to properly apply the entire tone (ie. it might leave out one or more pedals or settings). To avoid this, you could try making the song's default tone a non-clean one, and then change the tone back to clean before the first note in the arrangement if this tone is needed for the beginning of the arrangement. Keep in mind that Rocksmith's handling of tone changes in the middle of the song (even when done manually by pressing F# keys) is somewhat buggy, and the game may stop responding to your guitar playing. If this happens, people often find that pausing and reconnecting their real tone cable resolves this issue.
Add: Allows you to define a tone change at the current seek position by providing the tone's name. If a tone change already exists at the current seek position, the existing tone change is edited instead of a new tone change being placed at the same position.
List: Displays all tone changes that have been defined for the active track and allows you to delete, edit or seek to each. Instances of the default tone, if one is specified, include a (D) after the tone name.
Names: Lists all unique tone names referenced by tone changes in the active track, allowing a tone to be selected as the default tone the track starts with or allowing all instances of a tone name to be renamed. If any of the tones is set as the default tone, (D) is listed next to its name. During save, EOF will warn if the default tone needs to be set for a track.
Insert new difficulty: Adds a new difficulty to the active pro guitar/bass track, inserting it above or below the active difficulty. Using this function will automatically remove the difficulty limit of the track. If the difficulty immediately higher or lower than the new difficulty is populated, EOF will offer to copy their contents to the new difficulty as a timesaver. A pro guitar/bass track can contain up to 255 difficulties.
Manage RS phrases: Displays all phrases in the active track, and the max difficulty level of each. This dialog includes an "add level" function that allows you to insert a new difficulty just for the selected phrase (or all instances of that phrase), leaving the rest of the notes as-is. Any existing fret hand positions, arpeggios and track-specific tremolo sections within the phrase are also copied/transferred appropriately. This makes it easier to create additional difficulties for just a specific phrase. The more phrases and difficulties for each phrase are present in a Rocksmith chart, the more responsive the dynamic difficulty feature reacts. If any notes are positioned 1 to 10 ms before a phrase that is being leveled up, EOF will offer to move these notes into the phrase before leveling up the phrase. When leveling up a phrase, the track's difficulty limit is removed if it's still in effect. This dialog also includes a "del level" function that removes the active difficulty of a selected phrase.
Flatten this difficulty: Merges notes, tremolo phrases, arpeggio phrases and fret hand positions from all difficulties at or below the current track difficulty into the current track difficulty. If a note in a lower difficulty is within a user specified distance of a note in an upper difficulty, the upper difficulty's note is the one that is added to the active track difficulty. This function will allow you to create a full transcription based on several lower difficulty levels, by inserting a new blank difficulty after all populated difficulties in a track and merging the lower difficulties into it. By using this function and selectively deleting unflattened difficulty levels, a Rocksmith chart authored to use dynamic difficulty can be transformed into a chart suited for a rhythm game using a traditional 4 difficulty level system (like Rock Band), or to create a single-difficulty version of a Rocksmith chart. If some of the difficulties are out of sync with each other, you may need to increase the merge distance threshold to compensate, but if this is an issue for your chart, it's recommended to correct the note sync instead.
Un-flatten track: Essentially does the reverse of the "Flatten this difficulty" function. Each adjacent difficulty of each RS phrase is compared, and if the notes in a particular phrase are identical, the phrase is leveled down to remove the duplicate difficulty of the phrase. This will make it easier to convert a chart authored in the style of Rock Band/Guitar Hero (each difficulty defines all playable notes) to one authored in the style of Rocksmith (each difficulty only defines changes to the previous difficulty's phrases).
Phase Shift
Enables features available in Phase Shift.
Enable open strum: Enables or disables the option to chart open strum guitar or bass notes, which require a strum with NO frets held in-game. The method to chart these notes is offered in EOF as a sixth lane, which can be used similarly to the other 5 lanes, using the 6 number key and/or the right mouse button or Insert key. Due to what open strum notes represent, they may not be used in a chord or overlap with another note, because that would make it cease to be an open note. For this reason, open strum notes are not allowed to be marked with the "crazy" note status. Open strum notes can be assigned a HOPO status, but this will only export to the Guitar Hero World Tour MIDI because Frets on Fire and Phase Shift do not support this combination of features. If open strum notes are enabled during a save operation, a "sysex_open_bass = True" tag is written to the song.ini file for the chart to indicate that Sysex open bass phrase markers are present. Frets on Fire and FoFiX do not currently support open strum notes, but Phase Shift supports them for the PART BASS track. Since Power Gig charts can have open strum notes in the guitar track, you may need to copy the guitar track's contents to the bass track in order to make the open notes playable in Phase Shift, since Phase Shift will ignore open strum notes in non bass tracks.
If a chart has open bass notes and you disable the open strum bass note feature, the notes in lane 6 are hidden from view in the piano roll and 3D preview window but are not deleted. When open strum bass is disabled, if you place any gem on lanes 1 through 5 at the position of a hidden open bass note and then open strum bass is enabled again, those gems are removed to satisfy the requirement that open bass does not overlap with any notes. During note toggle and transpose operations, lanes will be emptied and HOPO/crazy statuses removed appropriately if lane 6 is populated in PART BASS by the operation.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Enable five lane drums: Enables or disables the option to chart with an additional drum lane, for a total of five lanes and a bass pedal, similar to drum charts in Guitar Hero World Tour. Five lane drums is a feature that is supported in Phase Shift, but it is not supported by Frets on Fire or FoFiX. If you have authored any gems (displayed in purple) on this extra drum lane, "Enable five lane drums" must be enabled when you save the chart, otherwise they will not be added to the MIDI file that is created. Disabling the feature will not remove any purple gems you may have already added, it will just not display them. If this option is enabled during save, a "five_lane_drums = True" INI tag will be written. This tag forces the chart to be treated as a 5 lane drum track (ie. Guitar Hero) even if there are no gems on the fifth lane, for use in future versions of Phase Shift. It will also signal for Phase Shift to display the lanes in the same order as they are presented in EOF. If this tag was omitted for a MIDI that included a five lane drum track, the two right-most lanes are swapped as part of a backwards compatibility mechanism present in the game.
Unshare drum phrasing: By default, the drum and Phase Shift drum tracks both share the same solo, star power, drum roll and special drum roll phrases, as this is expected in Phase Shift. Enabling the "Unshare drum phrasing" option disables this behavior so that you can define different phrases for each of the drum tracks in case you have a reason for doing so.Set difficulty
Allows the difficulty raiting (AKA tier) of the active track to be set. Doing so when PART DRUMS is active will also allow you to define the pro drum difficulty and the Phase Shift real drum difficulty, since those difficulties apply to the drum track. Doing so when PART VOCALS is active will also allow you to define the harmony vocal difficulty, since harmonies will eventually be charted as separate "difficulties" (tabs) of the one vocal track. You can set the band difficulty tier in Song>Properties.
Rename
Allows you to rename the active track. The new name is used for the track's XML filename and arrangement name during Rocksmith export as well as the name for GHL format tracks during MIDI export (so that PART GUITAR and PART BASS can contain normal guitar and bass tracks, and PART RHYTHM and PART GUITAR COOP can have GHL tracks and be renamed as PART GUITAR GHL and PART BASS GHL so that a single chart can have both normal guitar/bass and GHL guitar/bass, for use in Clone Hero). When a custom track name is in use, it is also displayed in EOF's window title when the track is active, and the track's original name (which is still used for MIDI export) is given in parentheses.
Disable expert+ bass drum
Prevents expert+ double bass drum notes from being written to MIDI files during save. For example, if a chart has single and double bass drum notes charted, having this option enabled during save causes only the single bass notes to be written. This option also suppresses the creation of the expert+.mid file during save, since that file would subsequently not have double bass drum notes. As a visual cue, when this option is enabled, double bass drum notes will appear with a blue center in the piano roll and entirely blue in the 3D preview (instead of the usual red). Also, EOF's title bar will include the text "(expert+ drums off)". This option will mostly be useful as an easy way to create a single or a double bass drum MIDI from a chart that has double bass authored, especially when authoring for Rock Band Network, where single and double bass charts are sold as separate, otherwise identical charts.
Erase track
Erases all content in the active track.Erase track difficulty
Erases all content in the active track difficulty.Erase highlighting
Removes any highlighting from notes that had been applied by functions such as Song>Pro Guitar>Highlight notes in arpeggios.
Thin difficulty to match
Thins notes in the current track difficulty by comparing them with another track. When the function is used, EOF checks each note in the active track difficulty against the notes in the active difficulty of the specified track. If a note in the active track is not close enough to a note in the specified track (within 2 ms), it is removed. This function makes it easier to thin the number of notes in the lower difficulties of a pro guitar track to be similar to the note thinning that was done for lower difficulties of a five lane instrument track or vice versa.
Delete active difficulty
Deletes the active track difficulty and lowers the difficulty level of each of the higher difficulties by one. Each track will always retain at least 5 difficulty levels, even if they are empty.
Clone from
Replaces the active track's content with that of another track of the same format (ie. pro guitar).
Toggle
Toggle the desired gem color on/off in all selected notes.
Clear
Clear the desired gem color for all selected notes. Combining this with the toggle function makes it easy to have a specific gem color toggled, set or cleared for all selected notes.
Transpose Up
Transpose (move) all selected notes up one color. If any of the selected notes have a gem in the highest lane, the transpose will be prevented.
Transpose Down
Transpose (move) all selected notes down one color. If any of the selected notes have a gem in lane 1, the transpose will be prevented.
Resnap
Resnap all selected notes to the closest grid snap positions according to the current grid snap setting (see "Edit>Grid Snap"). If two notes are going snap to the same position you will be notified so that you can stop the operation early if you want. An exception to this is if the notes are notes in question are completely ghosted, as stray ghost notes is a common side effect of moving notes after defining arpeggio or handshape phrases. It is often best to use either 1/32 or 1/48 grid snap when resnapping.
Let's say you imported a song and some of the notes appear to be slightly off of the beat markers. Setting the grid snap to 1/32, selecting all the notes, and doing a "Resnap" can set the notes in their proper place without you having to manually move each note.
Solos
Perform various operations related to solo sections. "Mark" marks the currently selected notes as a solo section. "Remove" removes all solos in which selected notes lie. To delete one solo section simply select at least one note within that solo and select Note>Solos>Remove. "Erase All" erases all solo sections from the current track. "Re-Mark" will modify an existing solo section. If you mark a solo and later need to modify it, simply select the notes that belong in the solo and select Note>Solos>Re-Mark. "Re-Mark" is only available when at least one of the selected notes lies within a solo section.
Solo sections are not supported by all mods. For FoFiX (the only mod with solo support as of this writing) solo sections will only work correctly if you define at least two Star Power sections (see "Note>Star Power") as well. This is due to the way FoFiX detects solo sections. Guitar Hero and Rock Band use different conventions to define Star Power (Overdrive in RB) and Guitar Hero's SP markers happen to use the same MIDI note as Rock Band's solos. If you don't define Star Power, FoFiX will detect your solos as Star Power except under certain circumstances.
If you want your solo sections to be compatible with older mods (such as MFH) you can use the older Text Events method of marking solos documented here.
It's important to note that solos are not automatically treated as sections by FoFiX so you will need to add Text Events (see the Events section of Editing Songs) in the appropriate places if you want to have your solos listed in Practice mode.
"Copy From" allows all solo sections from one track to be copied into the current track. This is convenient when up-charting a 5 lane guitar track to pro guitar or vice versa, because they should have identical solo sections.
Star Power
Perform various operations related to Star Power sections. "Mark" marks the currently selected notes as a Star Power section. "Remove" removes all Star Power sections in which selected notes lie. To delete one Star Power section simply select at least one note within that section and select Note>Star Power>Remove. "Erase All" erases all Star Power sections from the song. "Re-Mark" will modify an existing Star Power section. If you mark a Star Power section and later need to modify it, simply select the notes that belong in the section and select Note>Star Power>Re-Mark. "Re-Mark" is only available when at least on of the selected notes lies within the Star Power section.
Star Power sections are not supported by all FoF mods. Currently (at the time of this writing) the only version of Frets on Fire that allows user-defined Star Power sections is FoFiX.
"Copy From" allows all solo sections from one track to be copied into the current track. This is convenient when up-charting a 5 lane guitar track to pro guitar or vice versa, because they should have identical solo sections. This is also useful if you want to create a chart with lots of unison star power sections (Rock Band 3).
Delete
Delete: Deletes all selected notes.
Delete w/ lower diffs: Deletes the selected notes as well as those in lower difficulties that are at the same timestamps as any of the selected notes. This is helpful when authoring lower difficulties for a chart where the lower difficulties are already defined.Edit Name
Allows a name to be provided for the selected notes. For notes except those in pro guitar, these are stored internally only and not saved to MIDI. For pro guitar tracks, notes that are manually named will override the name that is determined by the chord detection system, affecting how the chords will be displayed in Phase Shift and Rock Band 3. If you intentionally want a chord to display with no name, you can provide a name of white space (ie. one spacebar press). If you use the edit name function on one or more pro guitar or bass notes, leave the name field blank (including no spaces) and click OK, EOF will prompt to apply automatically detected chord names to the selected notes so that they will appear with those names in games that don't perform chord name detection, such as Phase Shift. Brackets [ ] are not allowed to be used to manually name notes, because they are used to indicate when notes are NOT named and their names are being detected automatically. It is not recommended to use parentheses in note names either, because this can cause Rocksmith 1 and/or 2 to hang.
Crazy
Toggle: Allows the selected notes to overlap other notes, overriding EOF's default behavior of truncating note tails to prevent this. Use this feature to create "extended sustain" notes, where the notes in a sustained chord are played separately but are all held for the duration of the chord.
For Phase Shift authoring of guitar/bass tracks, only notes in higher lanes are allowed to be played on top of a sustaining note (ie. a sustaining note on lane 1 with short notes on higher lanes). If notes are not authored this way, they will appear as expected in-game, and the bot can score the notes, but a human player is not allowed to hit all of the notes. Keys tracks do not have this limitation.
For Rocksmith authoring, this status has another use: When consecutive notes in a track difficulty are the same chord, and they are within 10 seconds (by default, unless the chord density threshold preference has been changed) of the previous matching chord, they are exported to XML so that they appear as a "chord repeat" line instead of as a chord diagram. If a chord is marked as "crazy", it will export so that it forces the chord diagram to be displayed no matter how close it is to the previous matching chord.
Remove: Removes crazy status from selected notes.HOPO
Set the HOPO status of selected notes. Currently, FoFiX only makes a note a HOPO (Hammer On/Pull Off, meaning that a note does not have to be strummed) if it is close enough to the previous note. What amounts to "close enough" depends on the tempo, the presence of the eighthnote_hopo option in the chart's song.ini file and the user's in-game HOPO settings. Eventually, FoFiX may be updated to support notation where a note is manually defined as having HOPO forced on or off, as Rock Band charts have this feature. You can force HOPO status to prepare your chart to have this functionality for future versions of FoFiX, or for other rhythm games that may support this already (such as Phase Shift, which does support forced on/off HOPO notation). A note that has HOPO forced on will be drawn smaller than normal in the piano roll area, and a note with HOPO forced off will be drawn larger than normal. You can also use the H key to cycle the HOPO status for the currently selected notes (between HOPO On, HOPO Off and Auto).
An open strum note (see Enable open strum) can be marked as a forced HOPO, but this will only export to the Guitar Hero World Tour MIDI as this technique isn't supported for open notes in Frets on Fire or Phase Shift.
If the active track is a pro guitar track, the contents of this menu are changed to allow you to set notes as being specifically hammer on or pull off.
Trill
Perform various operations related to trill sections. "Mark" marks the currently selected notes as a trill section. "Remove" removes all trill sections in which selected notes lie. To delete one trill section simply select at least one note within that section and select "Note>Trill>Remove". "Erase All" erases all trill sections from the current track. "Re-Mark" will modify an existing trill section. If you mark a trill and later need to modify it, simply select the notes that belong in the section and select Note>Trill>Re-Mark. "Re-Mark" is only available when at least one of the selected notes lies within a trill section.
Trill sections were introduced in Rock Band 3, and generally a set of notes that alternate between two different values (ie. for legacy guitar: Green, red, green, red, or for pro guitar: Fret 15, 17, 15, 17, etc.), and should generally be similar to HOPOs in a legacy guitar track. In a pro guitar track, the pull off must be timed correctly so that you pull off when the lower fretted note is to be be played (the oppose of a hammer on). In PART DRUMS, trill sections are known as "special drum rolls", basically drum rolls that use multiple lanes, such as cymbal swells. EOF renders the background of the lanes used in trill sections with that lane's color to make it easy to identify where these sections exist. Since they look similar to tremolo sections, EOF will add "tr" notation at the bottom of the editor window for each trill section, and will add "~" notation for each note within the sections. Trill sections are currently only supported in Rock Band 3.
"Copy From" allows all trill sections from one track to be copied into the current track. This is convenient when up-charting a 5 lane guitar track to pro guitar or vice versa, or creating an additional 17 or 22 fret version of the track, because they should have identical trill sections.
Tremolo
Perform various operations related to tremolo sections. "Mark" marks the currently selected notes as a tremolo section. "Remove" removes all tremolo sections in which selected notes lie. To delete one tremolo section simply select at least one note within that section and select "Note>Tremolo>Remove". "Erase All" erases all tremolo sections from the current track. "Re-Mark" will modify an existing tremolo section. If you mark a tremolo and later need to modify it, simply select the notes that belong in the section and select Note>Tremolo>Re-Mark. "Re-Mark" is only available when at least one of the selected notes lies within a tremolo section.
Tremolo sections were introduced in Rock Band 3, and generally are just a set of identical notes (using the same fret) that are played very quickly. Theoretically (in-game), you can pick as quickly or slowly as you want without losing streak as long as the notes specifically authored in the phrase are hit. In PART DRUMS, tremolo sections are known as "drum rolls". EOF renders the background of the lanes used in trill sections with that lane's color to make it easy to identify where these sections exist. Since they look similar to trill sections, EOF will add the tremolo symbol (looks like 3 diagonal lines) at the bottom of the editor window for each tremolo section, and will add "-" notation for each note within the sections. Tremolo sections are currently only supported in Rock Band 3 and Rocksmith.
"Copy From" allows all tremolo sections from one track to be copied into the current track. This is convenient when up-charting a 5 lane guitar track to pro guitar or vice versa, or creating an additional 17 or 22 fret version of the track, because they should have identical tremolo sections.
If the active track's difficulty limit has been removed (see Track>Rocksmith>Remove difficulty limit), newly created tremolo phrases will apply to the active track difficulty instead of all track difficulties. Since the difficulty limit is not altered for Rock Band authoring, this change will only affect Rocksmith authoring. During save, only tremolo phrases that apply to all difficulties are written to MIDI and only tremolo phrases that apply to a specific track difficulty are written to XML. If a tremolo phrase is not applicable it is not displayed (ie. if the track's difficulty limit is disabled, only tremolos added while the limit was disabled will appear).
Slider
Perform various operations related to slider sections. "Mark" marks the currently selected notes as a slider section. "Remove" removes all slider sections in which selected notes lie. To delete one slider section simply select at least one note within that section and select "Note>Slider>Remove". "Erase All" erases all slider sections from the current track. "Re-Mark" will modify an existing slider section. If you mark a slider and later need to modify it, simply select the notes that belong in the section and select Note>Slider>Re-Mark. "Re-Mark" is only available when at least one of the selected notes lies within a slider section. EOF renders a purple rectangle above the piano roll where these sections exist to make it easy to identify them. In addition, the 3D preview will draw a purple line between slider notes, similarly to how they would appear in Guitar Hero World Tour.
Slider notes are special type of note introduced in Guitar Hero World Tour that allow notes to be played without strumming, using a touch sensitive strip on the guitar released for the game, also allowing various effects such as whammying and sliding. EOF currently only allows slider sections to be authored in 5 lane guitar tracks. If any slider sections exist during save, a "sysex_slider = True" song.ini tag is written. Frets on Fire and FoFiX do not currently support slider sections, but Phase Shift does.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Drum
Performs various drum note operations. If the active track is not the drum track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Cymbal notation: Allows yellow, blue or green drum gems to be marked/unmarked as cymbals. This notation is in the style of Rock Band 1's and 2's unused pro drum notation and Rock Band 3's Pro Drum mode, differentiating which notes require hitting a drum instead of the cymbal of the same color. Rock Band 3's drum kit has 4 pads (red, yellow, blue and green), a bass drum pedal and 3 cymbals (yellow, blue and green). By default, EOF will render drum gems with the same colors as they appear in Rock Band, but EOF's original color set displayed green drum notes as being purple, in order to differentiate them from bass drum, which were drawn in the color green in EOF.
A pro drum phrase applies to all drum notes in the track contained between the start and end of the phrase, regardless of which difficulty the drum notes are in, similar to overdrive and solo sections. At the moment, for practicality reasons, EOF is not implementing this notation in the editor as phrases. However, when notes are added or moved to a location where a cymbal note exists (in any drum difficulty), those notes are marked as cymbals where appropriate. You will be able to tell which notes are marked as cymbals as they will be drawn as triangles in the piano roll editor and as cones in the 3D preview window. During save, the MIDI is created to have the appropriate pro drum phrase markers for the drum notes based on the contents of the Expert difficulty. This means that for the tom notation to work correctly, any note that exists at a position should exist at the same position in each higher difficulty.
For EOF to create a MIDI having pro drum notation, at least one normal Green/Yellow/Blue drum note must be marked as a cymbal and at least one must not be marked as a cymbal (which denotes it as a tom drum note). If there is not at least one tom and one cymbal note in the chart, the drum notes will be saved to MIDI in the original style, with no pro drum phrases. Even if this occurs, EOF writes a song.ini tag (pro_drums = True) so the game playing the chart knows to display cymbals even through no tom markers are in the MIDI file. EOF will check for the presence of this INI tag and will correctly import a cymbals-only drum chart MIDI if the tag is present. If at least one cymbal and one tom are charted, the drum notes will be saved with pro notation: Green, yellow and blue drum notes that are outside their respective pro drum phrases are treated as cymbals. They are shown as tom drums instead of cymbals if they are in the appropriate phrases. Frets on Fire does not currently support pro drum charts, but it should still allow them to be played as 5 note drum charts. Phase Shift has support for pro drum charts, requiring the player to hit cymbals instead of drums where appropriate.
Commonly, a chart will have more involvement with cymbals than it will with tom drums. For example, the hi-hat is properly charted as a cymbal (traditionally the yellow cymbal), and in all likelihood will be used more often than any tom drum charted on that color. With this in mind, you can use the "Mark new notes as cymbals" option to allow you to chart several cymbal notes in a row without having to manually highlight and mark notes as cymbals. When this feature is activated (it will show as checked in the "Pro drum mode notation" menu), all yellow, blue or green (previously displayed in EOF as purple) drum notes that are toggled on or created will be automatically marked as cymbals. Drum notes in other difficulties that are at the position of the toggled/created cymbal notes are also marked as cymbals. This remains in effect until the feature is de-activated. This feature does not apply to pasted notes.
The "Mark as non cymbal" function removes cymbal notation from all selected drum notes and drum notes at equivalent positions in other difficulties. If you wanted to select a range of notes and ensure that toggling cymbal notation turned on cymbal notation for those notes, clearing cymbal notation and then toggling on would be a guaranteed way of achieving this without having to make sure none of the selected notes were already marked as cymbals.
Expert+ notation: Enables or disables the selected bass drum notes (lane 1 drum gems) from being associated with the Expert+ drum difficulty. This difficulty is similar in theory to Expert, but it includes faster use of the bass drum pedal in what people usually refer to as "double bass". Besides the specially marked "double bass" notes, all other notes in the Expert+ difficulty will be the same as those in the Expert difficulty. Only bass drum notes in the Expert difficulty can be marked this way, which will cause the affected notes to show with a red center in the piano roll and entirely red in the 3D preview. When the chart is saved and the MIDI file is created, affected notes will be written to exist in the Expert+ difficulty instead of Expert (written as MIDI note 95). Phase Shift version 0.71 implemented this notation, allowing people to create a chart so that the game will offer the "Expert+" drum difficulty if there are any gems using note 95. Since there are no immediate plans for FoFiX to support this feature, if the chart being saved has any bass drum notes marked for Expert+, EOF will automatically create an "expert+.mid" file in addition to "notes.mid" during save. This "expert+.mid" file will contain only the Expert+ difficulty, which is composed of all notes from the Expert difficulty and the Expert+ bass drum notes. Until FoFiX implements MIDI note 95 for Expert+ bass drum, people will be able to rename the "expert+.mid" file to "notes.mid" or "notes-unedited.mid" in order to play the Expert+ drum difficulty in FoFiX.
Similarly to with cymbals, you can use the "Mark new notes as Expert+" option to have new bass drum notes places in the Amazing difficulty to automatically be marked as double bass. This should make it more convenient to upgrade an Expert drum chart to Expert+.
Hi hat and rim shot notation: Allows yellow or red drum notes in the Phase Shift drum track (PART REAL_DRUMS_PS) to be marked as either open hi hat, foot pedal controlled hi hat, sizzle (half open) hi hat, or red drum notes to be marked as rim shots. If any hi hat marking exists during save, a "sysex_high_hat_ctrl = True" song.ini tag is written. Similarly to with cymbals, you can use the options in the "Mark new Y notes as" menu to have new yellow drum gems automatically converted to open, pedal or sizzle hi hat status. If the "Drum modifiers affect all diff's" preference is enabled, any hi hat or rim shot status applied to new or existing notes will apply to notes at the same positions in other difficulties. If any rim shot marking exists during save, a "sysex_rimshot = True" song.ini tag is written. These drum notations are a unique feature of Phase Shift, and will not work in FoF, FoFiX or Rock Band. Red drum notes (which usually indicate snare drum notes) are allowed to be marked with hi hat notation because when a disco flip is in effect, hi hats are instead authored as snares (and vice versa), to improve playability of fast hi hat sections on standard Rock Band drum kits. Disco flip is a mechanism that exists in the Rock Band series of games.
Cymbal+tom notation: Allows yellow, blue or green cymbal notes as being both cymbals and toms simultaneously, for future use in Phase Shift. As far as the deselection functions are concerned, notes with this status are treated as cymbals and not as toms. This feature is only supported in the Phase Shift drum track.
Accent notation: Allows drum gems to be marked as accent notes (indicating that the player should hit the note harder than normal), for use in GHWT authoring.
Be aware that hi hat, rim shot and cymbal+tom notation is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.Pro Guitar
Performs various pro guitar note operations. If the active track is not a pro guitar or pro bass track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Edit pro guitar note: Allows various properties to be changed for selected pro guitar notes. The field immediately next to each string defines the fret that is being held for the string. If the string is not being played, leave the field blank. If the string is played open (no frets held), enter a 0 into the field. If the string is played muted (fret held weakly so that the string does not ring out when played), enter an X into the field or select the "Mute" checkbox to the right of the string's fret number field. As per Rock Band 3's notation, a muted string can have a fret value specified, and this may be useful to help control the direction of muted slide notes without using a ghost note at the end of the slide. If no fret value is specified, or the fret number field contains the letter X, the note will export to MIDI as if the string was not fretted (fret 0) but was muted. Next to each string is a "Ghost" checkbox, which us used when authoring notes within an arpeggio section (detailed below). When OK is clicked to close the edit pro guitar note window, EOF will update the selected note(s) and offer to apply naming to/from other identical (same used pro guitar lanes and same used fret values) pro guitar notes in the track. If the name field was left empty, it will search for names already applied to other identical notes in the track and offer to fill in the name for you. If the name field is not empty, EOF will offer to apply the name to all identical notes in the track. Just as with the "Note>Edit Name" function, brackets [ ] cannot be used to name notes, and parentheses ( ) should be avoided if you are authoring for Rocksmith. If all 5 legacy value checkboxes are unchecked, EOF will offer search for other identical notes in the track difficulty and offer to fill in the legacy values for you. If at least 1 of the legacy value checkboxes are checked, EOF will offer to apply the legacy value checkboxes to all identical notes in the track difficulty. This should help minimize the amount of duplicated work needed to chart a pro guitar track and an accompanying expert legacy guitar track.
There are 5 "Legacy" checkboxes, representing how the pro guitar note will behave when pasted into a 5 lane instrument track. For example, if the lane 1 and 3 legacy checkboxes are checked for a pro guitar note, if that note is copied to EOF's clipboard and pasted into PART_GUITAR, it will paste as a Green+Yellow chord. This is especially useful for ensuring that all instances of a chord paste the same way into a 5 lane guitar track when down-charting a pro guitar chart. For example, when you have completed authoring the pro guitar track, you can select a C chord and edit the legacy settings for the note. When you click OK to close the Edit pro guitar note menu, EOF will offer to update all identical C chords with the same legacy settings. A helpful way to maintain consistency when down-charting will be to configure the legacy settings for all chords in the expert difficulty (Using the "Enable legacy view" feature will make this process easier) and then pasting the pro guitar notes all at once into the expert difficulty of a 5 lane track. Afterward, manually adjust the frets as desired to improve the flow between chords and single notes, and then chart lower difficulties for that 5 lane track like normal.
Many other Rock Band 3 pro guitar mechanics can be set in this dialog menu, and while some techniques like "Tap" and "Palm mute" options aren't supported in Rock Band 3, they are in Rocksmith. The pro guitar tutorial describes the techniques that are supported in Rock Band 3. Any of the techniques in this dialog that aren't supported in that game generally are for use in Rocksmith or Rocksmith 2014. A brief summary of the non obvious Rocksmith authoring mechanics are as follows:
Linknext: Indicates that one note is "linked" to the next note that uses the same string(s) and causes notes to be combined and shown as a single note in Rocksmith 2014. For example, you can have a long note that links to another note that slides and in-game this will appear as one note that sustains before sliding as defined by the latter note.Do note that you can only add gems to strings that are enabled for the track. Set number of frets/strings allows the number of strings for a pro guitar or pro bass track to be set to 4, 5 or 6. Also note that you cannot use a fret number higher than a track's current limit, which can be viewed or changed with Set tuning. In order for EOF's chord detection system to work properly, you must set the correct tuning for the pro guitar/bass tracks.
Ignore: Causes the note to not be scored in-game. It is reported that ignored notes have their tails drawn, but not the rectangle at the note's beginning (ie. the note's head). This can be used to define articulation that you don't want to be required to be played.
Sustain: By default, notes within a chord do not export in a way where they individually show sustain unless certain techniques are defined for the chord. Applying the sustain status will cause the affected notes in a chord to export with the sustain that EOF shows them to have.
Stop: By default, single notes export with the full sustain they are defined to have, but applying this status with a tech note will cause the note to be written to XML so that it is ended at the position where the stop tech note is placed.
Ghost HS: The "ghost handshape" mechanism is a specialty use feature that affects how partially ghosted chords (chords containing at least one ghost gem and one non ghost gem) export for Rocksmith 2014. The handshape tag (which defines the in-game chord and fingering display at the bottom of the screen) written for an affected chord reflects all its gems including ghost gems but the chord tag (which defines the scorable notes that scroll across the screen) written for an affected chord only reflects non-ghosted gems. You can use this in specific scenarios (such as consecutive chords that have some gems in common with matching fret values as well some differing notes on other strings) so that they all display with the same chord and fingering animation in-game. In most cases, it would be simpler to use the Note>Rocksmith>Handshape mechanism instead.
Hi Dens: In Rocksmith, a "high density" chord is one that is displayed as a repeat chord line instead of as a chord box (which is instead referred to as a "low density" chord). Certain conditions control which way a chord will be exported, such as whether it's a repeat within the chord density threshold preference's amount of time (10 seconds by default) of the previous chord, whether it has any techniques that require the chord's individual notes to be drawn, whether it's marked with crazy status (which forces EOF to export it as low density). Applying "hi dens" status to a chord will force EOF to export it as high density regardless of all of those conditions. This does prevent the chord's notes and name from scrolling down the highway so it should be used carefully because it can make a chart hard to read if misused.
Split: This causes a chord to be exported as a single note for each gem in the chord instead of exporting as a chord as it normally would.
Arpeggio:Mark:Slide:
Remove:
Erase All: Perform various operations related to arpeggio sections. "Mark" marks the currently selected notes as a arpeggio section. "Remove" removes all arpeggio sections in which selected notes lie. To delete one arpeggio section simply select at least one note within that section and select "Note>Pro Guitar>Arpeggio>Remove. "Erase All" erases all arpeggio sections from the song. "Re-Mark" will modify an existing arpeggio section. If you mark a arpeggio section and later need to modify it, simply select the notes that belong in the section and select "Note>Pro Guitar>Arpeggio>Re-Mark." "Re-Mark" is only available when at least on of the selected notes lies within the arpeggio section.
Arpeggio sections allow the authoring of "broken chords", where instead of playing all notes at once, they are played in a spread out fashion, often sequentially by string order. The correct way to author these so that they work in Rock Band 3 is to place pro guitar notes normally at the start of the arpeggio section. Then for notes further into the arpeggio, mark them as "ghost" notes by editing each with the "Edit pro guitar note" menu (ie. select the note and press the N key). The note for each string can be marked as a ghosted note by enabling the ghost check box next to the string's input field. If you use chords within an arpeggio phrase, you may want to ensure those chords don't display in-game with chord names by adding whitespace to their names.
If the import/export preference to export either Rocksmith 1 or Rocksmith 2 files is enabled, EOF will also automatically place the ghost gems at the beginning of an arpeggio when you mark it.
Note: Ghost notes are not written to XML files during Rocksmith export, since these aren't supported in-game. However chords that use ghost notes (ie. the base chord authored at the beginning of an arpeggio phrase) are still reflected by the hand shapes written (the hand shape extends from the beginning to the end of the arpeggio phrase), so you can author Rock Band 3 style arpeggios to allow Rocksmith 1 to display the desired fingering for a series of single notes. Rocksmith 2 displays arpeggios in a similar fashion to Rock Band 3. Just make sure that the chord fingering for the base chord is correctly entered.
Copy From: Allows all arpeggio sections from one track to be copied into the current track. This is convenient when authoring both a 17 and a 22 fret version of a pro guitar or pro bass track so that you don't have to manually place them a second time.
Toggle slide up:Strum:
Toggle slide down:
Remove slide: Allows you to specify whether a note slides up or down, where the player must slide the fret hand up or down the fretboard while keeping the played strings held down. Custom Sysex notation is also used to allow Phase Shift to play pro guitar slide sections. Rock Band 3 however uses MIDI notes to define slide markers, and unfortunately there is no publicly known reliable way to make all slides go the expected direction. As a workaround, if a slide goes the wrong direction when playing the chart in Rock Band 3, you can open the edit pro guitar note dialog for the offending note and enable the "Reverse slide" status. This will cause the note to be written to MIDI using Harmonix's mechanism to reverse the direction of a slide. Doing this instead of explicitly marking a slide that should go up as going down instead allows you to keep the intended slide direction noted in the EOF project as well as identifying that the game made the slide go the wrong direction.
Reverse slide: Explicitly changes an upward slide to a downward slide and vice versa, as opposed to the "reverse slide" status which just affects the note as it is written to MIDI for usage in Rock Band 3. When this function is used to reverse a slide, the "reverse slide" status is removed from any selected notes that have it, such as for porting custom pro guitar charts from Rock Band 3 to Phase Shift (which doesn't require reverse notation in the MIDI files to properly support slides).
Set end fret: Allows you to specify the fret at which a slide ends, a chart feature used in Rocksmith. If the "Save separate Rocksmith 1 files" or "Save separate Rocksmith 2 files" import/export preferences are enabled, this dialog is automatically opened when a note has slide status toggled on. If a slide's end fret is not defined, it will export to the Rocksmith XML file as ending 1 fret above or below the start of the slide, depending on the slide's direction. If a slide's end fret is not valid (ends on the same fret it starts on or is a non-fretted note with slide technique), a question mark will be displayed beneath the slide note. In the event of a sliding chord, the end fret position refers to the lowest fret being held at the end of the slide.
Caution: Do note, however, that it has been found that a bug in all versions of Frets on Fire and FoFiX (up to the latest release: FoFiX 4.0 alpha 2) prevent them from working correctly with MIDI files that use Sysex. In such an event where you want to make a full featured chart for use in Phase Shift and also have a MIDI usable in FoF/FoFiX, you can enable the "Save separate Rock Band files" import/export preference and use the notes_rbn.mid file (which you will need to rename to notes.mid) for FoF/FoFiX.
Toggle Strum Up:Clear legacy bitmask: Clears the legacy settings for all selected notes.
Toggle Strum Mid:
Toggle Strum Down:
Remove strum direction: Allows the strum's focus area to be specified as Up (U), Mid (M) or Down (D). Rock Band 3 allows these notations to indicate which strings are checked in order to decide whether a note is hit or missed, relaxing the scoring system and otherwise guiding the player's strumming style during fast strumming sections, having a net effect of indicating which strums are upward/downward. Upward strum markers cause the G, B, and E strings to be checked. Mid strum markers cause the A, D, G, and B strings to be checked. Downward strum makers cause the low E, A, and D strings to be checked.
Toggle tapping:
Remove tapping: Allows you to chart notes that are tapped. Although Rock Band 3 doesn't display these in-game, Harmonix charts them on channel 4 (instead of channel 0 like regular notes).
Toggle bend:
Remove bend: Allows you to chart notes that are bent. Although Rock Band 3 doesn't display these in-game, Harmonix charts them on channel 2 (instead of channel 0 like regular notes).
Set bend strength: Allows you to define how strong the note should be bent (measured in half steps for Rocksmith 1 and either half or quarter steps for Rocksmith 2), a chart feature used in Rocksmith. If the "Save separate Rocksmith 1 files" or "Save separate Rocksmith 2 files" import/export preferences are enabled, this dialog is automatically opened when a note has bend status toggled on. If a bend's strength is not defined, it will export to the Rocksmith XML file as a 1 half step bend.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Toggle palm muting:
Remove palm muting: Allows you to indicate notes that are played palm muted, where the guitarist rests the palm of his strumming hand on the guitar strings to muffle them, causing them to not ring out as long as they normally would. Custom Sysex notation is used to notate this playing style. Phase Shift may eventually add support for this feature.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Toggle harmonic:
Remove harmonic: Allows you to chart notes that are played as harmonics. Although Rock Band 3 doesn't display these in-game, Harmonix charts them on channel 5 (instead of channel 0 like regular notes).
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Toggle vibrato:
Remove vibrato: Allows you to indicate notes that are played with vibrato. Custom Sysex notation is used to notate this playing style. Phase Shift may eventually add support for this feature.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Toggle ghost:
Remove ghost: Allows you to indicate notes that are played as ghost notes, used for defining arpeggio sections.
Toggle string mute: For each selected note, makes its gems all string muted if any of them weren't string muted already, or otherwise removes string mute status from all gems.Rocksmith
Performs various note operations tailored for Rocksmith chart authoring. If the active track is not a pro guitar or pro bass track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Handshape:Mark:Edit frets/fingering: Allows the fret and finger values for selected pro guitar notes to be altered, as well as which strings are string muted (muted with the fretting hand). Since none of the notes' other properties are altered, this function is useful for modifying multiple notes at once when they need to keep any unique features/techniques that they may have.
Remove:
Erase All: Creates or removes handshape phrases, for use in Rocksmith 2014. Handshape phrases are exported similarly to arpeggio phrases, in that the base chords and any chords within the phrases are exported as individual notes inside a handshape tag (causing the border highlighting used for chords), but without the "-arp" suffix in the handshape tags' display names. This difference will prevent the affected chords' names from being displayed. Unlike arpeggio phrases, chords inside of handshape phrases are not split up into single notes, although they will be if marked with "split" status. The first chord in a handshape is explicitly exported as low density (chord box) unless marked with the "hi dens" status. Other chords in the handshape export as high density as normal unless there's a chord change or the chord is marked with crazy status.
The finger values are used in Rocksmith when defining the fingering of each string of a chord (1 = index, 2 = middle, 3= ring, 4 = pinky, 0 or T = thumb). It is unknown if Rocksmith 1 allows a string to be specified as being fretted with the thumb, but Rocksmith 2014 does. When the fingering for any string is altered in this function, EOF will offer to update all instances of the note (based on the fret value of each used string) to use the specified fingering. Some edit operations, such as adding a gem, will cause a note's finger definitions to be removed, since the fingering is assumed to no longer be correct.
Clear fingering: Removes the fingering definitions for selected notes.
Toggle pop:
Remove pop: Allows you to indicate notes that are played with pop technique, a bass guitar chart feature used in Rocksmith. When exported to Rocksmith 1 XML, notes with this status have their tails removed because Rocksmith 1 will crash if a sustained note has this status.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Toggle slap:
Remove slap: Allows you to indicate notes that are played with slap technique, a bass guitar chart feature used in Rocksmith. When exported to Rocksmith 1 XML, notes with this status have their tails removed because Rocksmith 1 will crash if a sustained note has this status.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Toggle accent:
Remove accent: Allows you to indicate notes that are played more strongly than the other notes, a chart feature used in Rocksmith 2014.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Toggle pinch harmonic:
Remove pinch harmonic: Allows you to indicate notes that are played with pinch harmonic technique, a chart feature used in Rocksmith 2014.
Be aware that this feature is marked in the MIDI using Sysex, which FoF and FoFiX will have compatibility issues with.
Define unpitched slide:
Remove unpitched slide: Allows you to indicate notes that have an arced slide shape at the end of the note (which isn't scored for pitch accuracy like with regular slide notes), a chart feature used in Rocksmith 2014. If an unpitched slide's end position is not valid (ends on the same fret it starts on or is a non-fretted note with unpitched slide technique), a question mark will be displayed beneath the unpitched slide note. In the event of a sliding chord, the end fret position refers to the lowest fret being held at the end of the slide.
Mute->Single note P.M.: Converts selected notes that have string or palm mute status into palm-muted single notes. This will make it easier to author string mutes as a way that's viewable in Rocksmith, such as authoring them as palm muted open note chords, since Rocksmith cannot display chords with either muting technique.
Toggle force sustain:
Remove force sustain: Allows you to indicate that a chord's sustain is displayed even when it does not use any techniques that are normally required for this to happen. This is an authoring mechanism used in Rocksmith 2014.
Toggle ignore:
Remove ignore: Allows you to indicate that a note exports with "ignore" status, which will display in-game without a note head and will not be a scored note. This is an authoring mechanism used in Rocksmith 2014.
Toggle linknext:
Remove linknext: Allows you to indicate that a note has linknext status, a chart feature used in Rocksmith 2014.
Move t.n. to prev note: A function that moves each selected tech note (see "Track>Rocksmith>Enable tech view") to the note immediately before it, to make it easier to define complex techniques that require the position of the tech note to match the position of the note it affects, such as with pre-bend notes.
Generate FHPs: Generates fret hand positions for the selected notes, removing only the existing fret hand positions that already exist anywhere within that range of notes in the active track difficulty. Does nothing if only one note is selected.
Remove FHPs: Deletes all fret hand positions between the positions of the first and last selected notes in the active track.Lyrics
Performs various lyric note operations. If the active track is not the vocal track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Edit Lyric: Allows you to edit the text of the currently selected lyric. See the Manipulating lyrics section of the vocal tutorial for details. This function can also be performed by middle clicking on a lyric.
Split Lyric: Allows you to split one lyric into multiple lyrics by inserting spaces in the lyric text. If the lyric already contains spaces where you want to split it, you can click OK without having to add any more of them. See the Intermediate vocal charting topics section of the vocal tutorial for details.
Lyric Lines: Allows you to mark/unmark/remark the selected lyrics as being in a lyric phrase. See the Intermediate vocal charting topics section of the vocal tutorial for details.
Freestyle: Enables/disables/toggles the freestyle status of selected lyrics. See the Intermediate vocal charting topics section of the vocal tutorial for details.
Import GP style lyric text: Replaces the text of the vocal track's lyrics with text from a text file where lyric texts are defined in the style of Guitar Pro (ie. a space or new line ends a syllable as well as the current word, a hyphen at the start of text represents a pitch shift of the previous lyric, a hyphen after one or more letters represents the end of that lyric's text). This function can be used in combination with the FoF Lyric Converter to import pitched lyrics from a Guitar Pro file. The process is as follows:
1. Export the GP file to MIDI format.Remove pitch: Changes selected lyrics to be pitchless.
2. Use FoF Lyric Converter to read the vocal pitches from a specific MIDI track and ignore the fact that there is no text. The exact commands are:
foflc.exe -in midi [input filename] -out midi [output filename] -nolyrics -intrack "[input MIDI track]"Replace the items in brackets with the appropriate names. Remember that if any of those items contain spaces, you must enclose them within quotation marks. For the input MIDI track, it should be the exact same name as in the GP file.
3. Use EOF's MIDI import function, or Lyric import if you prefer, they should both have comparable results for a cleanly formatted MIDI file.
4. Adjust the sync of the imported pitches as necessary. You can enable vocal tones by pressing the V key, so you can hear EOF's piano play along with the vocal track when you play the chart in the editor.
5. In Guitar Pro, open File>Score Information, select the Lyrics tab, copy the lyric text for the desired track, paste it into a new file in a text editor like Notepad and save it someplace convenient like with your EOF project's files. Guitar Pro 6 (and future versions) may require you to access the lyrics from a different location, such as clicking on a microphone icon for the track.
6. In EOF, select at least one lyric in the vocal track, access the "Note>Lyrics>Import GP style lyric text" function, browse to the text file you created in step 5 and click OK.
7. If the lyric text was correct, each of the lyrics in the vocal track should have updated lyric text, otherwise you will need to manually edit the texts in EOF or in the text file and re-import it.
8. To make the lyrics more accurate, consider marking proper lyric lines by selecting a range of lyrics that should be in one line and use Note>Lyrics>Lyric Lines>Mark (CTRL+M), repeat for each appropriate line of lyrics. Also consider shortening lyric lengths so that one lyric doesn't run all the way up to the next. These steps aren't needed for Rocksmith customs, but they are for proper pitched lyrics for better use in some other rhythm games like Rock Band and Phase Shift. If the guitar pro formatted lyric text file used line breaks, those are automatically used by EOF to place lyric lines, so if you prefer, you can just format the lyrics before importing that file into EOF.
Reflect
Vertical: Modifies selected notes so that a gem on the lowest lane becomes a gem on the highest lane, a gem on the second lowest lane becomes a gem on the second highest lane, etc.
Horizontal: Modifies selected notes so that the first selected note is swapped with the last selected note, the second selected note is swapped with the second to last selected note, etc.
Both: Performs both vertical and horizontal reflect on selected notes.Remove statuses
Removes all statuses from selected notes. An exception to this is string mute status for pro guitar notes, as it is handled on a per gem basis instead of simply a per note basis.Simplify chords
For each selected chord, removes the gem on the highest string. Notes with only one gem are not affected. This is a common way to reduce chords for lower difficulties.Move grid snap
Move all selected notes one grid snap position forward or backward, or otherwise to the closest grid snap in that direction if not already on a grid snap.
BPM Change
Change the BPM of the currently selected beat. If "This Beat Only" is selected, only the current beat will be set to the new BPM. Further beats will remain at the old BPM setting. "Adjust Notes" causes any notes within beats affected by the BPM change to be scaled to fit (the same as the ""Note Auto-Adjust" option when moving beat markers with the mouse).
Time Signature
Set the time signature starting from the currently selected beat or remove all time signature changes from the project. You may use any of the preset time signatures or provide a custom time signature. If you provide a custom signature, the denominator (beat unit) must be a power of two (ie. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 or 256). The use of a denominator that is not a power of two is not considered a standard practice in music theory so it is disallowed. EOF will currently allow you to otherwise specify any number between 1 and 256 for the numerator and denominator. If the "Import/Export MIDI TS" import/export preference has been enabled (see Preferences in the Configuring EOF section for details), time signatures are exported to the MIDI that is created during save and are loaded during MIDI import. Setting up a time signature can make it easier to see where you are in the song as each measure begins with a brighter beat line. Each measure will also have its beat marker labeled with the measure's number in yellow text.
If a time signature change occurs part-way through a measure, EOF will warn about this during save and will suggest a time signature to place on a beat to correct the error. If this problem isn't resolved, it can cause defective behavior in some rhythm games, such as causing incorrect star power durations.
If the "Use accurate time signatures" song property is enabled for a chart (on by default for new projects), the denominator (beat unit) alters the length of a beat as it does in music theory. To prevent unwanted alteration for existing projects' beat timings, this is not enabled by default for existing projects. When this option is changed, if the project uses any non #/4 time signatures, EOF will offer to alter tempos so that beat positions remain the same. Time signature changes that change the denominator are forced to be anchors, to prevent the ability to accidentally corrupt the tempo map.
The Convert function (only accessible if the accurate TS chart option is enabled) will allow you to define a time signature for the selected beat and have EOF calculate the appropriate tempos for affected beats to allow them to keep their existing positions. This will help authors to update existing charts that have wild tempo changes to use time signature changes instead.
Key Signature
Place a key signature change at the currently selected beat. Phase Shift uses the key signature to select freestyle notes that in the same key.
Add
Add a beat to the song and adjust the BPM of the previous anchor to make all the beats fit evenly between the previous anchor and the next. Useful if you have two anchors and you need to add some extra beats in between so there are enough beats to match the music. This function is only available when there is at least one anchor after the selected beat.
Delete
Delete a beat and adjust the BPM of the previous anchor to make all beats fit evenly between the previous anchor and the next. Useful if you have two anchors and more beats in between them than are actually in the music. Just delete the extra beats and EOF will automatically calculate the correct BPM to make the beat markers fit between the anchors.
Push Offset Back
Move the first beat marker back one beat length based on the BPM of the first beat marker. Useful if the first audible beat occurs after the first note of the song. You can create the tempo map starting where the first beat is audible and after the tempo map is done "Push Offset Back" until the first beat marker occurs before the first note.
Push Offset Up
Delete the first beat marker and make the second beat marker the first (and so forth). Useful if you want to get rid of the first beats of a song (for instance if there is a lot of silence) after you have already synced it.
Reset Offset to Zero
Inserts a beat at the beginning of the chart to fill in the space being used by the MIDI delay, which is then reset to 0. All pre-existing notes, beat markers, text events, etc. keep their original positions. This function is useful for preparing a fully synchronized chart for uses that require a MIDI delay of 0, such as other rhythm games or building for use with Rock Band. If the MIDI delay is larger than the length of the first beat, EOF will offer to insert as many such-sized beats as possible before putting a dislike-sized beat to fill in the remainder of the MIDI delay. This results in a more professional chart, as the beats leading into the chart are evenly sized, making them better for using with count-ins.Anchor Beat
Anchor the currently selected beat to a specific location. Functions the same as dragging the beat marker to that location.
Toggle Anchor
Toggle the currently selected beat between being an anchor and not being an anchor. It can be useful to set anchors every measure or two while creating a tempo map even if the beat marker is in the right location as adjusting a beat marker later in the song will adjust all beats between that beat marker and the previous anchor.
Delete Anchor
Delete the currently selected anchor and adjust all beats from the previous anchor to the next so that they fit evenly. If there is no next anchor, the BPM from the previous anchor will be applied to the rest of the song.
Reset BPM
Delete all anchors and tempo changes occuring after either the first beat marker or the selected beat marker, keeping the BPM from the specified beat marker throughout the rest of the song. EOF will offer to auto adjust any existing notes so that affected notes will remain grid snapped after the operation is completed.
Calculate BPM
Calculates the BPM based on the selected notes, assuming that the selected notes occur on sequential beats, and applies it to the selected beat marker.
Estimate BPM
Uses the MiniBPM source package to estimate the tempo of the current chart audio and offers to apply that tempo to the first beat. The results should be comparable to using a third party tempo estimation tool like MixMeister BPM Analyzer.
Double BPM
Doubles the tempo at the selected beat (affecting all beats up to the next tempo change) or for all beats in the project. This allows an easy way to make beats scroll faster during gameplay while keeping the chart in sync, effectively doubling the number of beat markers present in the affected portion of the chart. When authoring for Rock Band Network, Magma requires that no tempo is slower than 40 BPM. This function can help fix a tempo by bringing it above the minimum requirement.
Halve BPM
Halves the tempo at the selected beat (potentially affecting all beats up to the next tempo change) or for all beats in the project. This allows an easy way to make beats scroll slower during gameplay while keeping the chart in sync, effectively halving the number of beat markers present in the affected portion of the chart. In FoF/FoFiX, this will also make existing notes more prone to appearing as HOPO notes in-game, as their proximity is now closer to each other in terms of beat lengths. Since an odd number of beat markers cannot be cleanly halved, if there are an odd number of beats between the selected beat and the next tempo change, the last beat before the change is anchored and left as-is while the other beats are affected. This keeps the chart sync intact. When authoring for Rock Band Network, Magma requires that no tempo is faster than 300 BPM. This function can help fix a tempo by bringing it below the maximum requirement.
Fix tempo for RBN
Uses the tempo halving and doubling functions to automatically alter the chart tempo whenever it drops below 40 BPM or goes above 300 BPM. If a halving operation encounters an odd number of beats until the next tempo change, that last beat will have been anchored and will still have the tempo that is above 300BPM. EOF will alert if this happens, will halt the operation and will seek the chart to the offending beat so that it can be manually resolved by other beat operations such as anchoring the previous beat marker and deleting the problem beat marker, effectively combining the two beats into one beat. After such a tempo is manually corrected, the function can be used again to finish processing the chart. If all tempos are within Magma's requirements, EOF will indicate that no tempo adjustments are necessary.
Events
All Events: Display all events for the entire song, allowing them to be edited or deleted. If an event is track-specific, you will only be allowed to edit it if that event's track is active. You can optionally filter the events that are displayed to only include those that are specific to the active track, those that are section markers (ie. an event beginning with "[section", "section" or "[prc_" or an event that is marked as a "Rocksmith phrase") or those that are Rocksmith sections. Using "Find" in the "All Events" dialog will seek to the beat marker on which the selected event is defined and select that beat so that you can quickly use Beat>Edit to access the event. Using "Copy to selected beat" copies the selected event to the currently selected beat, making it easy to create new instances of an existing event (each Rocksmith phrase instance must match the other instances in order to work). If the copied event is track specific, the copied event is made specific to the currently active track. See the Events section of Editing Songs for event details. Additional indicators are displayed for events if they are Rocksmith phrases (P), Rocksmith sections (S) or Rocksmith events (E).
Events: Display events associated with the selected beat marker for viewing or modification. If an event is track-specific, you will only be allowed to edit it if that event's track is active. There are options available for making the event specific to the current track (ie. drum mix events for Rock Band), making the event a Rocksmith phrase marker or making it a Rocksmith section marker. It's recommended to use the Place RS Section function to place Rocksmith sections, but you can still define them manually. If you do so, EOF will warn you if it doesn't match one of the valid, case sensitive section names (intro, outro, verse, chorus, bridge, solo, ambient, breakdown, interlude, prechorus, transition, postchorus, hook, riff, fadein, fadeout, buildup, preverse, modverse, postvs, variation, modchorus, head, modbridge, melody, postbrdg, prebrdg, vamp, noguitar, silence) or their corresponding display names as shown in the Place RS Section function. Likewise, you can manually define Rocksmith events, but it is recommended to use the Place RS Event function instead. Rocksmith phrases, Rocksmith sections and Rocksmith events can all be track specific, so if one is marked as track specific, it will only export to the associated track's XML file. If an event is marked as being more than one of these Rocksmith items, it will export as one of each to the XML files. Although EOF will allow you to define multiple RS phrases or RS events on one beat, only one of each per beat (the first one that is found to be visible to the track) will be exported to XML. For special purposes such as this, EOF allows you to change the order of events that are assigned to a beat, by selecting an event and using the "Move up" and "Move down" buttons. Additional indicators are displayed for events if they are Rocksmith phrases (P), Rocksmith sections (S) or Rocksmith events (E).
Clear All Events: Erase all events from the current project.
Place section: Simplifies adding/editing section markers for use in FoF and Phase Shift. This function automatically inserts the specified name into a "[section NAME]" formatted text event assigned to the selected beat.Rocksmith
Performs various functions tailored for Rocksmith chart authoring. If the active track is not a pro guitar or pro bass track, this sub-menu is grayed out and inaccessible.
Place RS phrase: Opens the add event dialog with the option to place a Rocksmith phrase automatically checked. If the selected beat already has a RS phrase, that phrase is edited. Otherwise the new event is placed on the selected beat. When an event is marked as a Rocksmith phrase marker, EOF will consider it a section (the type of section used in other rhythm games such as Rock Band) marker, regardless of the name it is given. In Rocksmith, phrases are parts of an instrument track that occur in multiple places (ie. a guitar riff), and when the difficulty for that phrase is leveled up in one part of the song, the phrase is automatically leveled up in the other places it occurs. You can also use the Top of 2D pane shows preference to display "RS phrases" in the top of the 2D pane to easily see where these are in the chart. Using this preference will help when adding multiple difficulty levels for phrases, which makes for better dynamic difficulty functionality in Rocksmith. A RS phrase can optionally be made applicable only to the active track, in which case it will only export for the active track's XML file and not for the other tracks' XML files. Although EOF will allow you to define multiple RS phrases on one beat, only one per beat (the first one that is found to be visible to the track) will be exported to XML. If a beat contains a RS phrase that is in effect for the active track, the beat line is drawn in red.
If no "COUNT" RS phrase applies to a track during save, one will be added to the first beat during XML export. If no "END" RS phrase applies to a track, one is added to the first beat after the end of the track's last note during XML export. This helps ensure proper dynamic difficulty functionality in-game. If you manually place an "END" RS phrase, EOF will warn you during save if any beat markers beyond that END phrase contain any RS sections or RS phrases applicable to the same track, since this could cause the chart to malfunction in Rocksmith.
Place RS section: Displays a list of all the valid sections names that are usable in Rocksmith. If the selected beat already has a RS section, that RS section is edited. Otherwise the specified RS section is added to the selected beat. In Rocksmith, sections are different from sections in rhythm games such as FoF/Rock Band/Phase Shift because in addition to having naming restrictions, each section is given an instance number, ie. each verse would typically be marked as a section marker with the appropriate number. EOF automatically tracks each section's instance number without you having to provide it. These sections are used in Rocksmith to build a bar graph showing where each part of the song changes (ie. from verse to chorus) and to offer individual practiceable pieces of the song in the game's Riff Repeater tool. To function correctly, Rocksmith needs a RS phrase to be defined on each beat that contains a RS section, so there is an option included to add the RS section as a RS phrase. If you opt not to add this, you can add the RS phrase manually, but if you don't, EOF will add one automatically to the XML file created during save. You can also use the Top of 2D pane shows preference to display "RS sections" in the top of the 2D pane to easily see where these are in the chart. A RS section can optionally be made applicable only to the active track, in which case it will only export for the active track's XML file and not for the other tracks' XML files. Although EOF will allow you to define multiple RS sections on one beat, only one per beat will be exported to XML. If a beat contains a RS section that is in effect for the active track, the beat line is drawn in red.
If no "intro" RS section applies to a track during save, one will be added to the beat containing the track's first note during XML export. If no "noguitar" RS section applies to a track, one is added to the first beat after the end of the track's last note during XML export. This helps ensure proper dynamic difficulty functionality in-game.
Place RS event: Displays a list of all known usable events that are usable in Rocksmith, the known ones of which control count-in ticks and crowd reactions. When one is selected, the native event name is added to the selected beat.
Copy phrase/section: Copies the Rocksmith phrase and section in effect at the selected beat of the active track, if any, to an event clipboard file. They can be pasted to another beat by selecting a beat and using the "Paste Rocksmith phrase/section" function, even in a different instance of EOF.
Clear non RS events: Removes all non Rocksmith text events (anything that isn't a RS phrase, RS section or RS event) from the project.Place Trainer Event
Simplifies the process of adding pro guitar and pro bass training sections when authoring pro guitar content for Rock Band 3. When a number is entered into the Place Trainer Event dialog's input field, EOF will place a check mark next to each trainer section for that trainer number that already exists in the track, making it easy to avoid duplicate trainer events and typos. When OK is clicked, EOF will prompt you to confirm placing the event if it would be a duplicate, and the appropriate text event is placed on the selected beat. As per Rock Band 3's use of these events, both the 17 and 22 fret pro guitar tracks use trainer events from the 17 fret pro guitar track (PART REAL_GUITAR), and both the 17 and 22 fret pro bass tracks use trainer events from the 17 fret pro bass track (PART REAL_BASS).Copy Events
Copies the selected beat's visible events (ie. those not assigned to a track other than the active track) to the event clipboard.Paste Events
Pastes the contents of the event clipboard file onto the selected beat. If any of the events in the clipboard were track-specific, they are made specific to the track that is currently activated when the paste is performed.
Manual
Display the documents you are currently reading.
Tutorial
Display the Tutorial. If you are new to EOF, look here for a guide to making songs.
Vocals Tutorial
Display the Vocals Tutorial. Look here for a primer for creating vocal charts to use with FoFiX or even just scrolling or subtitle lyrics that are compatible with older versions of FoF.
Pro Guitar Tutorial
Display the Pro Guitar Tutorial. This will guide you through the basic process of authoring pro guitar and bass tracks for Phase Shift and Rock Band 3. This also provides foundational knowledge for authoring guitar and bass tracks for Rocksmith.
Keys
Display the keyboard and mouse controls used for editing songs. Almost all EOF functions can be activated using the GUI interface but using the keys can speed up the editing process considerably.
About
Display the current EOF version information.