FAQ

Q: Where can I get more songs?
A: While the in-game songs are admittely awesome, one does start craving for a little variety before long. Lucky for you there are a number of ways to get more tunes for the game:
  • Compose a new song with the game's built-in song editor. All you need is an OGG music file and some patience. There are some tools to help you out as well.
  • Go out and buy Guitar Hero™ 1 or 2 and use the built-in importer to bring the songs into the game.
  • Check out the songs on community sites such as Keyboards on Fire, FretsOnFire.net, FOF.Spain, etc. Once you have a new song downloaded, just extract it under the data/songs folder.
Q: Some chords don't work.
A: Some keyboard manufactures reduce costs by making some key combinations impossible to press. This is especially true with laptop keyboards and some cheaper PC keyboards. The solution is to change the keys to different ones. For example, swapping the Enter key with Shift should help a lot, or changing the frets to i.e. numbers 1-5. Use the key tester in the settings menu to check your chosen key set.
Q: The game works poorly on Windows Vista.
A: The current OpenGL graphics drivers for both NVidia and AMD cards are quite poor in comparison to their Windows XP counterparts. Unfortunately, until the graphics cards companies manage to get their drivers optimized for Windows Vista, you might see graphical glitches or poor performance with Frets On Fire on Vista. Always make sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card installed.
Q: I get a weird cx_Freeze error on startup.
A: This cryptic error is most commonly caused by old graphics card drivers. Please upgrade them and try again. We will improve the error message received in cases like this in the future.
Q: The game says I'm missing a file called MSVCRT71.DLL.
A: This file was mistakenly left out from a version of the game, although it is required on some computers. This will be fixed in the next release, but for the time begin, please download that file from the web and copy it to the game folder. Make sure you check the file for viruses!
Q: I get some other strange error not listed here.
A: Please refer to the Frets on Fire Wiki.
Q: The sound crackles.
A: Increase your audio buffer size or change to 22050 Hz sampling frequency. You can do this from the Audio Settings.
Q: The colors look ugly on my ATI video card.
A: Don't use tweaked drivers (e.g. Omega Drivers) that reduce the color depth to 16 bits.
Q: I can't hit those notes!
A: You either need to practice more or adjust the A/V delay option in the audio settings. Try increasing or decreasing the delay by 50 and seeing if it helps.
Q: I can't see my scores on the World Charts.
A: You need to enable score uploading in the settings menu first.
Q: I get a strange OpenGL error on startup.
A: If your desktop color quality is set to 16 bits, increase it to 32 bits. This was fixed in version 1.0.192.
Q: I only see a red screen when I choose Play Game from the main menu.
A: Press Escape and choose Play Game again. This was fixed in version 1.0.192. If you still get this problem, disable your firewall or make an excemption for the game in it.
Q: How can I reset the game settings?
A: This depends on your operating system:

Windows: Click Start | Run, type %APPDATA%\fretsonfire and press enter. The settings are stored in the fretsonfire.ini file and will be reset if you delete that file.

Linux, Mac OS X: The settings are stored in the .fretsonfire directory under your home directory in a file called fretsonfire.ini. You can delete that file to reset the settings.

Q: Why don't you add support for the whammy bar?

A: At the moment the main issue standing in the way of whammy bar support is the limited functionality of the PyGame audio library used by the game. It only offers simple audio playback; for the whammy bar a pitch shifting function would be needed. The recently added streaming audio system might offer a way around this, but don't hold your breath.

Another problem is that most PS2 guitar controller adapters do not report whammy bar data, so the real whammy bar can't be used. Some more recent controllers, such as the PS3 and XBOX360 guitars do not have this limitation.

Q: The Mac OS X version only shows a blank screen or crashes.

A: The Mac OS X version is known to be buggy, especially on PPC machines. Unfortunately, as none of us inthe development team have Macs, we can't really improve the situation. This thread in the forums may be helpful. If you're a Mac developer willing to help out with this, please get in touch.

Q: No matter what I do, I get lousy scores.
A: Sell your gear.