SingStar Developers’ Response To The Community

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to update you all on the current issues we know some of you are finding with SingStar at the moment.

First of all, I am really sorry to hear about the problems that you encountered after our software update (4.2). I am grateful to you for alerting us to these problems and I am aware that several serious bugs seemed to have slipped through our normally rigorous Quality Assurance (QA) testing.

These bugs included:

• SingStore songs being deleted from the hard drive
• Game crashing in the middle of a song
• Media file corruption

As soon as we were aware of these issues, the senior SingStar development team came together and have been working flat out to fix these issues with the aim of getting a patch out as soon as possible.

Due to the severity of these bugs there was a very real possibility of a “quick fix” actually making these problems worse and that is why we have opted instead for a very thorough development and QA test process to ensure that the problems that you are experiencing are resolved.

The good news is that the bugs have now been fixed and SingStar v4.30 is currently with our First Party QA (FPQA). The patch should pass by the end of this week. Once passed the patch will be sent to our Format QA teams (FQA) in Europe and America for final sign off which takes approximately 10 working days. After FQA approval is given the patch will be uploaded to the servers, this will take a day or two, and will then be ready for you to download. This gives us a target release date of the 1st of December (but, as always there could be a delay of a few days if FQA find any issues).

With regards to deleted songs some users unfortunately have been experiencing a reoccurrence of this bug preventing them from re-downloading their content. I wanted to emphatically reassure you that you have not lost anything. We have a receipt of everything you have bought and you will be able to safely re-download everything once SingStar v4.30 is released.

Whilst this has been a really unfortunate experience both for me, my team and especially for you, the positive side of this story is that we have now put in place several steps to ensure that this does not happen again, including a more vigorous QA period and, starting next year, a Closed Beta where SingStar fans will be able to experience new features before they are released.

I really am genuinely grateful to you for keeping the faith, and I would really appreciate your contribution to participate in future closed Beta sessions and feedback on these thus helping to identify any problems before the release of any future SingStar update. More details of how to participate in these will follow.

I sincerely apologise for the problems you are experiencing. This has been our top priority and the team and I have been working all hours to resolve these unfortunate issues.

In a bid to be as open and honest as we can with you, the team and I are online now to answer any questions you may have about this, and we’ll be here all day, so please let us know your comments below. We’ll do our best to answer as many as we can.

Thank you once again for being patient,

best wishes,

Dave Ranyard
SingStar Game Director