YAK 4000

I got Rock Band 1 for the PS3 this Christmas, and I've been loving it. The drums are my favorite, and I'm getting a lot better at them -- I can play pretty much every song on hard, except for Foreplay/Long Time (DAMN YOU LOUD PART 1!). Unlike the guitar, when you play the drums on Rock Band or Guitar Hero, you actually gain experience you can use to play real drums. Realizing this, I wanted to create my own beats and write my own songs. Naturally, I wanted to use them on the computer instead of the Freestyle Mode provided by the game.

I did a bit of research on programs for Linux that allowed the drums to be played. I didn't find anything that looked too promising, but this post opened my eye to a very useful detail: the Rock Band 1 drums are recognized as a joystick. That post goes on to display a C example of a drum sounds simulator using SDL. I don't like C, because of all the problems it tends to effect (linking errors, the verbosity it requires, etc), so I went about writing my own drum program in snakes Python.

Using pygame, a Python SDL wrapper, I wrote a simple test program that associated drum pad hits with audio samples. When a pad or the pedal was hit, it would play a sound -- quite basic. I Googled for drum sounds and discovered this page to my good fortune. With the drum samples found there, Yak's Rock Band PS3 Drums was born. (I couldn't think of a better name.)

Since writing that simple script, I have added the ability to record and replay beats and a rough GUI designed in Glade.

As you can see, the GUI is mostly a picture of the PS3 drum set. When you hit a pad, it's filled with its respective color. That's all I can pull off in GIMP...

Anyways, I've zipped up the whole package, including the sound samples -- I could not find any sort of copyright notice, so I'm going to assume that they are in the public domain *cough*. Yak's Rock Band PS3 Drums requires Python, pygame, and GTK+2. While I have not tested the program on Windows, it should work.

Grab it here: http://y4kstudios.com/rockband.zip

Happy drumming!

Edit (02/15/2009): There was a *slight* problem with the first GUI release: the main loop used 100% CPU. I remedied that by having an internal clock with 30FPS. I believe that's a high enough rate that the delay between hitting the pads and the sound being played is unnoticeable, or at least very hard to notice. (30FPS == 1 update every 33.3ms)