Creating Full Album charts for rocksmith is possible and is relatively easy. This post hopefully goes over the process needed to make the full album charts, or if you want to combine a couple songs together.

Here are some links for the tools required to make an album chart:

• Orban Loudness Meter
• Audacity
• XML Combiner
• DLC Builder

Creating the individual files

Step 1 of creating a full album chart is having all the individual files ready to go first and foremost.
If you haven't already got them, you can read through the main how-to create guide that is on the forums, or watch through MageGage's how-to chart tutorial.

• Gage's how-to video
• Firekorn's written guide
• Charting Standards

It is important that charts are created in a way which are functionally correct as it will help some of the steps you have to do later on.

What about existing files on Customsforge?
As mentioned above, having a chart which is functionally created properly ensures the album file you make actually works properly. When using older files, it is very likely that they were made in a way which ignores a lot of the standards we now have and will increase the amount of problems you may run into later on.
Given it is also somebody else's work, it's usually best not to use them without asking permission from the original creator beforehand.

Cloning the files

Step 2 is about creating clone folders for all the songs you want to feature in the album chart.

When creating an album chart, you need to do some slight adjustments with the individual song files.
Creating a copy of the entire project folder allows you to keep the main version as it is, and any edits needed to be done for the album can be done in the clone.

I like to have a new folder in my Charting folder with the title of the album I'm going to work on and put all my cloned folders in that new Album folder.

Editing the charts

So when it comes to actually editing the charts, there are a couple of things we need to do.

• Reduce/ fix the sections.
• Check the information of the file.
• Tuning.

When creating charts, there is a hard cap of 100 available phrases before the ''skyline'' (the blocks of notes at the top of screen when you play a song) breaks. When that exceeds 100 total phrases and disappears it causes you to not be able to seek to certain parts of the chart via the riff repeater, and it can also cause the game to crash.
By creating a clone version of the songs, it allows you to open up the files in EOF, or Charter, and then reduce the total amount of sections/phrases the chart has.

So the first thing you should when opening up the notes.eof file and loading the cloned project up is go to Beat > Events > All Events.
Here is a screenshot of all the events I currently have in this chart:

What you want to do is go through that list and trim it down by deleting a lot of the excess phrases/sections. I personally like to aim for around ~10 events total. It's fine if it drops below 10, but if it is a lot more than that, you may end up running into the 100 limit later on.
Also note that I have checked the box which is specific to that track, you will have to repeat this process for each path in the file you have.

Here is a list of events for the same song after I have gone through and trimmed it down:

I usually aim to keep the starting point for each of the main structural points in the song, so I end up keeping only one phrase/ section for the Intro, Verse, Chorus, Solo, Outro.
A lot of the ''transitional'' parts of the song, like Pre Verses, Pre Choruses, Interludes, Bridges, Build ups etc. I will usually end up deleting.

As you can see, I ended up going from 28 total events down to 8. I like to keep a running tally going of the event count across all the songs being used and try and aim to get it just under 100 total events.

The second part of editing the file is looking at the file information.
In EOF, you can go to Song > Properties (or press f9) and it will open a box about the song.

Here, we just want to make sure that Song Title field is correct as this can be displayed in the final chart you make when it gets to each new song.

You want to repeat this process for every song you are including in the album chart.

One last thing to mention here is the tuning of the chart.
When combining multiple charts together, it's best that all the individual songs are in the same tuning across each arrangements. Doing this makes it so much each and the player doesn't have to worry about retuning after each song.
If there are songs which are in different tunings, you should try and edit the song if possible to bring it into the same tuning as the other songs.
If there is no feasible way to make all the songs in the same tuning, but they are close (like the majority of the songs are in E Standard, and one song is in D Standard), what you can sometimes do is have a pitch shift tuning for the one song in D Standard. There are drawbacks with this though because it will mean that a pitch shift tone is going to be mandatory. This is a drawback as you can only have 4 different tones for the entire album and sometimes this isn't feasible.
If you end up having lots of different songs in different tunings, it will unfortunately mean a full album chart can't be easily made and will require you to make a lot of edits to set it so it's in the same tuning as the rest of the album.

Manually adjusting the audio

One of the perks of using the DLC Builder is that when you import the audio, it will auto-calculate and adjust the volume of the song for you.
As this is an album chart and more than one song is going to be used, each song is going to vary slightly and we will need to go through each audio file and just make sure everything is set at the same volume.

If you have sourced your audio files legitimately from the artist themselves like from their bandcamp, then the difference in volume between each song is likely going to be pretty insignificant.
If you have acquired the audio in other ways, then you will need to go over each song and adjust them.

So how do we actually do that?
The easiest way to do adjust the volume of the song audio is using Audacity and using their Loudness Normalization feature.

You first want to import the audio into Audacity, I usually just import the guitar.ogg file that's in the project folder.
You then want to select the audio file > go to Effect > Volume and Compression > Loudness Normalization

In the box that opens, you want to change the Normalize type from RMS to Perceived Loudness and then set the LUFS box at the end to be -16 and then click Apply.
-16LUFS is the standard that all the ODLC files are set to be in Rocksmith and is what the DLC Builder's auto-calculate aims to set the audio to be equal to.

Once you have Normalized the audio track to be -16LUFS, that should be all you have to do. From there, you just have to export the audio file into your Album folder and to rename the file so it's something easy to remember when importing into the XML combiner later on.
So this file would I would AlbumMaidofSteel.ogg.
(Either .ogg or .wav files will work, I personally prefer the smaller .ogg files.)

If you want to make sure the files are actually -16LUFS, you can double check the file by running it through Orban Loudness Meter.
Here, you would just go to the Analyze tab in Orban > import that new audio file you just saved and see what it is set to.

As you can see by the top number underneath the waveform graphs, the Loudness of this file is set to exactly -16.
So long as all your files end up being around that -16 level (± 0.1db), you should be fine to continue on to the next step.

Creating the album chart

After you have adjusted the sections/phrases for all the songs and all your song volumes have been altered, the next step is to start compiling the album chart itself which you do in the XML Combiner tool.

The first thing you want do is click the Add Track button at the top and then select the xml files for the first song in the tracklist for the album.
For this example, I'm doing the Sabaton - Legends album, so the first song I should import is Templars:

After that, you just want to do the same thing for the rest of the songs and add them in tracklist order.
It should end up looking like this:

After you have added all the arrangements, you want look at the left side of each track and click where it says None selected under the Audio and then import all them new audio files you just created for each song.

Under the Audio box, there is an option to Trim the audio. Generally speaking, you can leave them numbers as they are - the number that gets set automatically here just cuts the empty space you have at the start of the EOF projects and is why we ask people to have 10s leading silence. This cuts away that excess silence so you aren't sitting for 10s in between each song.
The smaller you set that number, the longer you will have to wait in between each song.

There have been some occasions where the sync of the song slightly goes out when transitioning from song to song. One thing you could try and fix that desync is to round the Trim times down to the next number.
So if the Trim time currently says 9.855 seconds, you will want to round it down to 9 seconds. (you always want to round down to add more silence in between each song.)
Another option would be going back over Step 1 and creating the files which comply with the new Charting Standards.
One of the things we ask for is you to have some outro silence added at the end of the chart so the song doesn't just abruptly end after the last note and you have at least a full empty measure. If the song doesn't have that little padding at the end, that has also been a cause for album charts to fall out of sync when transitioning from one song to the next.

From here, you may notice some of your tracks have a red box where it says Tones.
When it comes to the tones, full album charts are a little tricky since you can only have a total of 5 tones per arrangement. You sometimes have to make some compromises and have to settle by not having certain tone changes.

If you click the Common Tones tab at the top it will take you to a new screen where you can set the tones.

Here you can see each arrangement has 5 empty tone boxes that you can populate.
Base = the tone the song will load in with.
Tone A, B, C, D = the tone switches you have elsewhere in the chart.
Base and Tone A by default will set to be the same tone as you usually want to recall to use the main tone again at a later point in the song.

If you click the drop down box under where it says Tone Name in Files, it will list all the different tone names you have used in all of the tracks currently.
For my bass paths, I'm only using 2 tones total, so I can just click the tones and then click Add and it will set them in the tone boxes above

For the Lead path however, you will see I have a total of 7 different tones which we obviously can't have.
Fortunately, some of them can easily be left out.

Dis (Distortion) would be the first tone I add here because I know the first tone used in Templars is my main distortion tone.
Lead and Solo, are the same thing and I just forgot what I used between files, so I can use either solo or lead and it will be fine.
Intro and Low I also know are usually the same thing and just a quieter version of the distortion, so here is another place where I can easily just use one of those and leave the other one out
Clean is a pretty important change since there are some clean parts in a couple of the songs and I need something clean in the chart so this is one that I need to include.
Verb (Reverb) is going to be one of the tones that I omit to include. Since I know that the reverb tone is only used once and it's not too dissimilar to my distortion tone, I can get away by just using one of the previous tones instead; I would opt to just use the Low (Low output) tone here instead.

Once you do this for all your arrangements, you can go back to the Tracks tab and then click on red Tone boxes and start updating the tones.
When you click on them red Tone boxes, it will open up a new box for you to set the tone names you just filled out in the Common Tones page.
Here you just fill out the tones with one of the options which best fits the tone name.
Like mentioned above, Dis is my main distortion tone and one that's recalled to a lot and matches with the tone name already set. Lead I will mark as solo since they're pretty much the same thing.

Repeat the above for all the tracks with red Tone boxes. Some tracks may have grey empty boxes. Those means that track only has 1 tone used. You should click those boxes and set the tone which is the best fit for that track. Since you already charted the song, you should have an idea of what tone you need to use. For me, I can just use the main Distortion tone for the guitar tracks and the Bass tone for bass.

From here we're almost done.
If you haven't already, I highly advise clicking Save Project at the top and saving the combine file into that Album folder you created at the start.
At the bottom there is a box to set a Combined Title, here I would just put in the album name followed by (Full Album) - so for me it would be set to Legends (Full Album)
To the right of that box, there are 4 check box options you can toggle:

• Hopefully you did edit your individual charts earlier on and cut down the phrases/sections each song has and had a running tally going. Doing that means that the Coerce to 100 Phrases option can be left unchecked as the total for all the phrases should be less than 100 phrases total.
• One Phrase Per Track can also be skipped if you have less than 100 phrases total.
• Again, Generate Dummy DD can be left unchecked too.
• Add Track Name to Lyrics is one I would check as it can be a nice indicator to whoever plays the album chart what song they're about to play.

On the left there are 2 buttons:

• Combine Audio you need to click to create the audio file of all the songs combined into one.
• Create Preview you can also click which will create short clips from each song and merge them together too.

On the right, there is the Combine Arrangements button.

• Clicking this will combine all the Lead tracks into one xml file, all the Rhythm tracks into one xml, all the Bass tracks into one xml and all the Vocals.

Once you have combined both the audio and arrangements, you can head on over to the DLC Builder to create the psarc file.
It should be fairly straightforward from here and be familiar to what you do when creating a normal psarc file.

• Import the Combined xml arrangement files from the Album folder you created. This should fill in some of the boxes on the left.
• Import the combo.wav file and the combo_preview file for the audio. - Hopefully you did your calculations earlier and added the right audio files into the XML combiner. If you did, the volume should get auto-adjusted to something around 0.0db (which is correct and means it's the same level as ODLC, you shouldn't need to adjust this.)
  Hopefully the song timer also updates which is roughly inline with the actual album length; this album is 45:42 long according to wikipedia - my timer shows up as 46.09 which is roughly about right if we take into account there are 10 songs on the album and each song has an extra second added before and after the song.
• If the song volume isn't set to be 0.0db and is more like -4.5db, then something somewhere was done wrong and you need to go back and try and figure out what's wrong. You may have made a mistake doing the Audacity volume calculations which will need redoing. Or you may have just selected the wrong audio file in the XML combiner.
• Import and set your tones correctly.
• Set your song info boxes on the left correctly; like mentioned earlier, as a community we seemed to have agreed that adding (Full Album) at the end of the Song Title box is the standard we have when naming full album charts.
• Edit the DLC Key box at the top so it says Chartername-Artistname-Albumname-FullAlbum-Versionnumber.
  (for this chart, my DLC Key is DellSabatonLegendsFullAlbumV12)

• Click Build Test/ Build Release and give your newly created album chart a playtest. Try and get someone else to give it a test by posting it in the #Chart-Feedback channel in the Customsforge Discord.

Congratulations, you have hopefully created a working Full Album chart.