What’s that, you say? Your shiny new Guitar Hero: World Tour drums aren’t registering drum or cymbal hits? Well, that’s exactly what some OTHER people are saying, in the Guitar Hero forums over at the community site. In response, Activision, Red Octane and Neversoft have created a piece of software that will allow you to connect up your drum kit to a PC running Windows and increase the sensitivity of the drums. Pretty cool news, huh?
Actually, it’s not cool news because faulty peripherals should never make it to retail. But here’s to hoping this solution will get you up and running. We know that a USB Midi Cable is required, but in most cases Activision is supplying these for free. Your best bet is to call Activision Support, and in the meantime, steal a buddy’s Rock Band drums :-(
We know that Boot Camp support for Mac is there, but if any Mac users have tried running the software under Parallels, let us know about your experience.
Linux users, we’re afraid you’re out in the cold, unless you’re running something like VMWare.
Now THAT is slick. Nice to see developers responding almost immediately to a problem.
No it’s NOT slick at all actually! It freakin sucks! For starters there is no Mac compatible version, only windows XP or Vista. Then on top of that you need a USB MIDI interface and MIDI cable to connect to your drum kit and your Windows computer. Since your using a Windows based operating system you need to install the proper drivers for the USB MIDI interface which takes a few tries because Windows is crap. Then you also need to have your drum kit connected to your video game system while in Guitar Hero: World Tour’s Music Studio to see how the sensitivity is effected when you change it in the Drum Kit Tuning program on your PC. Now once you finally get everything installed, connected and communicating it’s pretty simple to use. BUT come on! Why should the consumer have to deal with all of this? Why couldn’t they make this part of the game or at least as an update to the game? Not everyone has a PC. Not everyone has a MIDI cable and a USB MIDI interface laying around or wants to wait for Red Octane to send them MIDI-USB cable. Make an easy solution that helps EVERYONE or back to the drawing board! Just my two sense.
@Future Audio: We didn’t realize a MIDI USB cable was involved. Hell, we don’t even have any of those lying around.
Now, we posted this before any hands-on experience – in fact we’d love to have you write a ‘counter-point’/rant regarding this. Interested? We like to present both sides of the coin…
Sorry if my rant seemed directed at you Jason. That wasn’t my intention. I was just expressing my frustration with the situation that Activision and Red Octane have created.
@FutureAudio: No, it didn’t come off that way whatsoever – I”m actually a bit upset we didn’t have the opportunity to thoroughly test out the software.
Still, it would appear a followup article is necessary – this is a major snafu created by the publishers.
Mmm i guess that kinda sucks for people who dont have all the required stuff to fix it. Im using a mac, but im pretty sure it will work through parallels – if not i’ll just go use my old pc. I have all the midi stuff already – its actually one of the main reasons im getting GH4 is to use the drums with my existing music software just for some fun.
you can just go to the redoctane website and they’ll send you the midi/usb cable for free. just need to fill out the warranty doohicky and it asks for the serial number on the drumset. Only took a couple days to arrive, easy breezy after that… if you have a legit version of windows
Where to download?
@jalla: http://community.guitarhero.com/forums/55708/forum_topics/131841
i have the cable but when i connect the drum on pc it’s detected as USB speaker why? i can’t tune it!
(excuse me for the bad english i’m italian)
same problem! how do you fix it?
They have released at MAC compatible
http://redoctane.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/redoctane.c...