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New Rock Band 4 will support your DLC song library and (hopefully) most controllers

New Rock Band 4 will support your DLC song library and (hopefully) most controllers

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Rock Band is coming to next-generation consoles later this year, and while we don't know much else, Harmonix made it clear that (almost) all the songs you purchased for past Rock Band titles will carry over to Rock Band 4. That goes for your hardware, too — most of it, at any rate. Here are the relevant snippets from our talk with Harmonix project manager Daniel Sussman.

We are working very hard to port all of the songs that we have had in our library forward to the Xbox One and PS4, and that's a time-intensive process, we're actually taking a library that took us five-plus years to accumulate, and we're doing all of that work in a very compressed window in a matter of months.
How many songs is that?
It's over 2,000. It's a big number. So it's our hope that players have access to the full catalog of music that has already been licensed to this game. Only a very small percentage actually own everything... but there are a lot of people that have bought lots of songs already, and to those folks we want to make sure your library of songs on the PS3 will carry forward to the PS4 and same on the Xbox 360 to the Xbox One.
Not cross platform?
Not cross platform. I wouldn't put the stake through that, but that's the one that would take a lot of support from Microsoft and Sony, and frankly that's a political rat's nest. I don't see it. And we have our hands full just getting everything up first. So building a library is kind of the first step and respecting the entitlements that people have.
All this — the legacy hardware and the legacy tracks —by launch?
By launch, yes. The one hedge there has to do with the volume of songs by launch. It is a process, and we have to go through all of the submissions process which includes [quality assurance] to make sure that nothing's getting lost in the transfer. So the number of songs at launch is directly proportional to the time it takes to get a song up; the challenge then is just dealing with the immense volume of songs that we're working with.

RB4 instruments (embargoed!)