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The EVENTS track holds the text events that apply to the whole song: practice sections, the coda and the song’s end. Each is a text event, FF 01:
It’s the .mid form of a .chart file’s [Events] section. One thing differs: a .mid file holds its lyrics in its vocal tracks.
  • A file has at most one EVENTS track, after the tempo track. See Tracks.
  • A scanner matches every event below in the letter case shown.
  • Square brackets around the text are optional, as in a .chart file: [section Intro] means the same as section Intro. Recommended: no brackets.
  • Required: the event is the whole text, with no spaces around it or just inside its brackets.

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Practice sections

A practice section marks where a part of the song starts, such as the intro or a verse. It runs until the next practice section:
  • Required: a space or _ between section and the name. Recommended: a space.
  • Required: one practice section at most at a tick.
  • Recommended: at least one practice section in a chart.
Edge case: the names Clone Hero shows. Clone Hero has a table of Rock Band section names, and shows a name from it when it finds one there, such as Verse 1 for verse_1. It shows any other name with each _ replaced by a space. It does the same in a .chart file. Edge case: a chart with no practice sections. When a song with no practice sections is played, Clone Hero makes ten, named 0% - 10% to 90% - 100%. They start at tenths of the chart’s length, which ends a beat after the last note. It does the same in a .chart file. YARG makes none. scan-chart reports noSections.

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Lyrics

A .mid file holds its lyrics, and the phrases that group them, in its vocal tracks. See Vocals and harmonies.

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The coda

coda marks where the song’s big ending starts. A drum fill at or after it is a Big Rock Ending. See Drum fills. Required: one coda at most.

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The end of the song

end ends the song before its audio does, as in a .chart file. See The end of the song.
  • Required: end at least one beat after the end of the last note of every track, sustain included.
  • Required: one end at most.

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Deprecated

  • prc_<name>, an older word for section: prc_verse_1 is a practice section named verse_1. Write section <name> instead.

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Ignored

  • Any other text. YARG acts on a few more events, such as crowd_clap, and reads midcoda and midcoda_end as the start and end of a coda. Other scanners ignore them. An exporter should keep them when rewriting a file.
  • Notes and other events that aren’t text, such as Rock Band’s practice notes 24, 25 and 26. scan-chart keeps them, and writes them back.

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Invalid forms

Clone Hero, YARG and scan-chart read section Intro and [section Intro], with spaces around the text, as a practice section. Only YARG reads [ section Intro]. scan-chart keeps such text as it is.
Clone Hero and scan-chart keep the spaces: [section Intro ] is a section named Intro there. YARG removes them.
Clone Hero skips the character after section, so [sectionIntro] is a section named ntro. YARG reads a section named Intro. scan-chart doesn’t read it as a section.
Clone Hero and scan-chart read [section ] and [prc_] as a section named "", and YARG ignores them.Clone Hero also reads [section] and [prc] as a section named "". YARG and scan-chart ignore both. scan-chart keeps the text.
Clone Hero, YARG and scan-chart use the later one.
Clone Hero ignores them. YARG reads lyric events, phrase_start and phrase_end as lyrics, mixed with the lyrics of PART VOCALS. scan-chart reports invalidLyric, invalidPhraseStart and invalidPhraseEnd, and keeps them.
A scanner reads a coda as Clone Hero does: only from a text event, FF 01, whose text is coda or [coda], with nothing around it but white space. So [coda and coda] aren’t a coda, nor is a [coda] that starts with a byte order mark, U+FEFF, or a [coda] written as a lyric, marker or cue point event. scan-chart reads them so, and keeps them as text. YARG reads neither [coda nor coda], but reads a coda after a byte order mark, and in a lyric, marker or cue point event.
Clone Hero and scan-chart use the first coda and the first end, and YARG uses the first coda. YARG looks for end among the song’s last 10 song-wide events, and uses the last one it finds there. scan-chart reports badEndEvent for each end after the first. Its export writes a coda at the start of each Big Rock Ending instead of where the file had it, so Clone Hero reads the same Big Rock Endings.
Clone Hero ignores it, and plays until the later of the end of the audio and the end of the last note. YARG uses it when it comes after the end of every note, phrase and lyric, with no one-beat margin. scan-chart reports badEndEvent when it comes before the last note starts.
Every scanner reads the first EVENTS track and ignores the others. scan-chart’s export leaves them out.