There are several options when it comes to playing your own music library these days. You can use an online program like Instant Jam which is Java-based or you can purchase a full-on game to download and play. Rhythm Zone, from Sonic Boom, gives you the ability to plug in your own tunes to a single-player game experience like Guitar Hero or Rock Band. 
First off, to get started playing there are 20 songs freely available with the game. However, many of them are unknown artists and so playing them is rather difficult when you don’t know the music. But this is all about playing the music you know and so adding music to the game is what we’ll look at. Plus, as you’ll find out, not knowing the music has little actual effect in this game.
Where some games that allow you to play your own music library will search and find your music for you, here you must add each song, individually, if you want to play them. If you’re like me and took your 300 CD collection and dropped it onto your computer, you’ll have lots and lots of time lost to adding songs to the game. There is no apparent way to add multiple songs and so every time you want to play a song you must manually search for it, add it and then wait while it’s processed. Each song takes a handful of minutes for it to be recognized and then labeled.
Since the game is hooked into Steamworks you can do things like check your rank on global leaderboards, versus your friends who have the game and check particular types of stats like 100% expert finishes, number of times you activated the special power and the highest note streak (currently 5,054 which is crazy). The game also features achievements for doing things like scoring 1 million points overall, earning 100 multipliers and adding certain number of songs from your library, the top in that last category being 500 which would take you about 25 hours if you were to spend roughly three minutes per song.
Once that’s complete you can then play the song you’ve added on one of four difficulties: easy, medium, hard and expert. Since I never play games on easy if I can help it I dove into the songs on medium. This was pretty difficult even when I knew the songs in question extremely well. I figure this is probably because the game creates the tabs on the fly and they’re not actually handmade as they are in Instant Jam and various other games. What this means, to me, is that they don’t line up with the music very well. Often you’re switching buttons when the music is a stable note or you’re randomly moving from one side of the staff to the other. It’s really confusing in fact.
