Re-downloading your Rock Band DLC is a giant pain in the ass on Xbox One

Hope you like spreadsheets

In preparation for Rock Band 4‘s release next week, I figured it’s about time to start downloading the songs I bought on Xbox 360 for use on my Xbox One. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I have friends over to play and all the tracks they love aren’t there, well, I may have a small mutiny on my hands.

I am decidedly less excited to go through this process now that I’ve seen what a pain in the ass it is. Here are the necessary steps, as outlined by Harmonix:

1. Turn on your Xbox One.
2. Sign in to the Xbox Live Gamertag that you originally purchased your legacy Rock Band DLC on.
3. Navigate to the Xbox Live Marketplace titled “Store”.
4. Select “Search”.
5. Search for “Rock Band 4“
6. You will see multiple products for the title. Select the game “Rock Band 4“.
7. Navigate to “Add-Ons” and select the ellipses (the big “…” at the bottom of the featured Add-Ons) to view all Add-Ons.
8. Select the individual Add-On you want to download and select “Install”.
9. The download should automatically begin. Once completed, you should see that where the “Install” prompt used to be on this individual Add-On, it will now say “Installed”.

• There will be no update to notify you that this content has completed downloading. There is no visible way to confirm if your DLC has been installed to your console until you first launch Rock Band 4 on that console. The content should be on your hard drive, but will remain invisible until you first play Rock Band 4.

The problem (and the blame lies at the feet of Microsoft, not Harmonix) is that there is absolutely no way of sorting the songs. So, for those of you who have potentially hundreds of songs to download, you just have to know what they are and then find them. That’s impossibly convoluted when scrolling through more than a thousand tracks.

The best solution that I’ve found — and it’s far from good — is to pop in Rock Band 3 on your Xbox 360 and fill out a spreadsheet of all the tracks you own. (Remember to only include the a la carte DLC you’ve bought over the years. Export licenses from other base games don’t apply here.) Then go through the Xbox One storefront and hunt down your songs one by one. Check them off your spreadsheet when you install them. It’ll be tedious and bad; maybe set aside a night to do it if you own enough tracks.

Oh, yeah. Don’t think that you can work around this by using the browser. Xbox.com doesn’t recognize which songs you’ve already purchased. Even if it did, it’s not populating anywhere near all the songs. It’s worthless.

Thankfully, PlayStation players don’t have this issue. For them, it’s possible to sort the songs by price, and the free/owned ones all show up at the top. Just work down the list until you have them all. That sounds so easy and convenient by comparison.

Actually, Xbox owners, it might be worth waiting. There’s a chance that Rock Band 4‘s in-game storefront has a convenient method of picking these songs out. That’s the only merciful hope. But, if you want everything ready to go on day one, have fun slogging through this mess.

 [Harmonix Forums]