In The Groove 2 - Custom Songs On Revision 21

Custom Songs On Revision 21

On October 11, 2006 (a week prior to the official announcement of Konami's acquisition of the intellectual property rights to In The Groove), Roxor released Revision 21 (also referred to as r21). The patch adds a feature that allows players to play custom songs with an accompanying .sm file (see StepMania) stored on their USB card. The songs are stored in a Songs folder contained within the In the Groove 2 folder generated by the game.

Limitations to this feature include:

• The music file can be no more than 120 seconds (2 minutes) long.
• The music file must be in Ogg Vorbis format.
• Ogg music files must be less than 5 MB in size.
• Banners and song samples aren't loaded, and are thus absent from the song selection screen.
• Background images (whether still or video) aren't loaded; instead, random background videos run during play. However, background scripts that use In the Groove's background videos do work within r21.
• 50 songs maximum are loaded per player; sometimes fewer are loaded if the USB load time exceeds a certain limit.

An unofficial patch was later released online to circumvent the song length limit. It worked by changing the metadata in the header of the OGG file to make the game think the song is only 1:45 long. The program which performs this patch is commonly referred to as the Ogg Length Patch program. This allows songs of any length to be played on the machine, provided the music file is still under 5 MB in size. Playing songs that are longer than 3 minutes is looked down upon by some arcade operators due to the possibility of losing money, and in some cases bans have even been issued on players who excessively play long songs when others are waiting in line to play. The Ogg Length Patch vulnerability as well as other bugs and timing issues were fixed in R23. While R23 has timing corrections and bug fixes, it forces all custom songs to end at 120 seconds of play regardless of the use of the Ogg Length Patch.

Despite the timing fixes, Revision 23 is unpopular with the majority of ITG players. Even though some professional players prefer r23 due to the timing fixes, the strict time limit of 120 seconds was looked down upon since some official Dance Dance Revolution songs and even some official songs on the In The Groove 2 cabinet itself go beyond this time limit. Some players feel that RoXor should have implemented a system similar to Dance Dance Revolution 5th Mix (and already implemented in StepMania) in which songs longer than 150 seconds (2½ minutes) are deemed a "long version" song, which takes up two stages (two songs' worth) of the player's credit, instead of just counteracting the Ogg Length patch.