Does anyone know if it is possible to break say, a .wav file into individual notes? I'm thinking of making a rudimentry "Guitar Hero" spinoff just to play with music files and syncing notes to music and am just looking at all of the options for easily getting notes from a song into some other form. On that note, does anyone know (or think they have an idea) of how the producers of Guitar Hero or Rockband got all of their "songs"? I assume that they just made custom files for all of their "notes" in the game and didn't take them out of a music file. Anyway, thanks for your help... I'm not sure if I worded these questions very well so if you have some clarifying questions let me know.

You might want to look at MIDI files as well as the open source Frets on Fire game.

If you have someone that will create the audio content for you, then this can be very easy. All you have to do is create the song and then only export out a single instrument (or track) at a time. Then the audio engine will play the tracks in sequence and reflective to the game play.

The important thing to know is it is practically impossible to separate individual tracks from one single, mixed down track. While it might be possible to "remove" some of the vocals, to export the drums, bass guitar, guitar and vocals all into clean, separate tracks from on master track is very hard (if not impossible) to achieve.

You want to automatically generate notes from a wav file? That's an open area of research, and by 'open area of research' I mean nobody really does it well. Especially if you want to separate instruments.

The Haronix guys did implement something fairly decent for an iPod game (Phase, I think it's called), but they haven't published anything on their methods to my knowledge. You may be able to find something by scrounging in academic papers; I checked about a month ago, but couldn't find any silver-bullets or even anything reliable. That's not to say it's not possible, but it certainly isn't easy. :-)

Cheers,
--Brian

Thanks for your fast replies. I will take a look at Frets on Fire, which will probably answer my second question of if they actually use the songs in any way shape or form other than just threading them in the background. I think (at least, I probably would) just make a file that keeps track of what type of "notes" there are and the time delays between them.

Anyway, thank you for your help.

I recently saw a job opening for a MIDI expert to make Guitar Hero games...so I believe the data being received is definitely MIDI. Probably synched up with the audio file that you hear...

Google agrees!