How I Destroyed Rock Band 1 Talkies (Read Description)

Alright, so I wanted to make a StephGH-style edited clip breaking down this exploit, but I don't have a lot of free time for the next two weeks. So this will have to do for now.

Two nights ago, me and SuperZero discovered a game-breaking exploit to use in Rock Band 1 on Vocals. You know how talkie phrases are super broken in this game? What we found is that, using the Onyx Music Game Toolkit, if you convert any RB song file to an RB2CON, and then convert that in C3 ConTools to a RB1 Live file, it completely changes how talkies register in RB1. They auto-hit.
This applies to every single talkie, in every song. No input is required from the player, it just plays itself. Even songs where it was believed in the past to have no programmable data for certain talkies, it still works.

As of now, we have no idea why this exploit works. We know it has something to do specifically in the conversion in Onyx. I tested converting songs to just a RB1 Live file, and talkies stayed just as broken as normal. It's a bit of a headscratcher. This will only work on an RGH Xbox 360 btw, it unfortunately doesn't work on standard 360s since the CON exploit doesn't exist there.

So naturally, I took a bit of time to "FC" some songs that immensely suffer from the broken talkie glitch in this game. I'll break down the examples of songs in this video, ranging from barely FCable to flat-out impossible under normal circumstances.

0:00 - There Goes My Gun by Pixies

2:05 - Cherry Bomb (as made famous) by The Runaways

4:39 - One Way or Another by Blondie
An RB2 disc song in RB1? Blasphemy. This song is considered the hardest on the RB2 disc for the talkies at 5:19 and 6:01. I just converted this for the novelty lmao.

8:50 - The Kill by 30 Seconds to Mars
Now this one surprised me to read about. The talkie at the climax of the song at 11:13 is impossible to hit normally. I also choked this on the final phrase on the previous run because I suck whoops.

13:18 - Sabotage by Beastie Boys
The song that confirmed to us that this glitch exists. This RB1 disc song is entirely talkies, so you can just let the song play itself and it'll FC. Depending on the console, this song can range from tricky to near unFCable normally. Xbox 360 is probably the hardest console to FC this on, and I can't come anywhere close. I think my best is an 88%.

16:28 - Rock Band Network Megamix 01 by Various Artists
This one I also did for the memes. This song is pretty infamous for a few reasons - the first release of this in RB2 had completely unhittable talkies at 19:13, making this FC not only impossible, but the song unpassable on vocals. It received an update that fixed this a couple of months later. But not only that, apparently this also wasn't playable in RB1 at all and would crash your game??? I've heard conflicting points for this so I can't vouch for how true it is. But either way, this might be the first documented video of this song in RB1, so that's neat. It's also a tricky FC in this game even with the glitch talkies so hey, I'm happy with it. I might experiment with converting the first released version of this song to see if it works since I think the file I converted is the updated one.

I may take a look at some other broken songs and make a follow-up video soon. We'll see.

[BIIIIGBODDY]

Also, I wanna make it clear that I personally don't find these FCs legitimate using this! It's just something I wanted to mess around with lol

[trombovox]

This is huge man! Hope to see more info on this over time.

[GoulartGH]

hopefully this is the start of people figuring out why the heck talkies are broken on RB1; they hitting themselves because some files are missing are probably another symptom of this broken-ness. great find!

[BrianTheDrummer]

Well i must say this is super interesting even if I'm not into vocal stuffs. I love how clearly and precise your description is :D

[PuppetMasterIX]

If you're still looking for songs with problematic talkies, "Alive (Live at Drop in the Park)" by Pearl Jam and "Inside Out" by Eve 6 each have a talky phrase that is 100% broken and it doesn't read input at all, even in RB2.

They have only been FCed in RB3 and onward, where broken talkies in general basically don't exist (aside from the occasional bug that's easily fixed).

[addymillscustoms]

I'm willing to put money on this being related to those files found alongside the mid and mogg files in RB1 songs. The usr, vnn, and xvocab files wouldn't be present when converting with Onyx, and we still don't know exactly what they do (other than taking up about 2-3MB per song). Or the weights file being blank might have something to do with it too.

[DanDanUwU]

It also makes me think, what other songs post-RB1 era DLC is even FCable/Passable. 🤔

[sebastiankuka]

I remember it taking hours for me to FC ballroom blitz and Timmy and the Lords on Vox so this would make those songs ten times easier

[PixelGH]

it is truly uncanny seeing sabotage FC'd on rb1. amazing find! hopefully someone can crack the code on why the hell talkies are so broken in this game