Slopsmith Is Back and Renamed Feedback (fee[db]ack): What's New in the 0.3 Update

June 24, 2026by OpenFret Team

If you have been searching for Slopsmith and hitting dead links, here is the update: it is coming back, and it is getting a new name. Starting with the 0.3 release, the first one since Ubisoft's DMCA takedown, Slopsmith is now called Feedback, styled as fee[db]ack (the [db] is a wink at decibels). Same project, same developer, new name, and a long list of changes.

We have written about this app twice already: a fair look at what Slopsmith is back in May, and what happened when Ubisoft DMCA'd it in June. This is the next chapter: the Slopsmith name change to Feedback, why it's happening, and what the 0.3 update actually does.

Quick recap: why Slopsmith went dark

On June 15, 2026, Ubisoft filed a DMCA takedown and GitHub pulled the project along with 131 forks. The short version: Slopsmith could read and decrypt the encrypted song files from Rocksmith 2014, which let you play Rocksmith's custom songs outside the game. We covered the whole mess in Ubisoft DMCA'd Slopsmith. The developer, who goes by Zas, says work never actually stopped. They went quiet to regroup and make the next version compliant, and reportedly want a lawyer who specializes in this kind of thing to look it over before it ships.

Why the name change to Feedback (fee[db]ack)

The rename isn't just cosmetic. “Slopsmith” leaned hard into being a Rocksmith clone, and part of getting clear of Ubisoft is putting real distance between the project and the game it used to depend on. Feedback is the clean-slate version: the same core idea, a music game that listens to your real playing, rebuilt so a single legal letter can't sink it again. If you're searching “is Slopsmith back” or “Slopsmith new name,” that's your answer. It's Feedback now, sometimes written fee[db]ack.

The big change: no more Rocksmith CDLC, hello .feedpak

The headline change in the 0.3 update is that Feedback drops the old psarc and CDLC files completely. Old Slopsmith opened Rocksmith's .psarc archives. Feedback won't. It moves to its own format instead, the .feedpak (people are already calling them feedpaks).

If you've got a giant library of Rocksmith custom DLC, that stings: Feedback can't open those files natively anymore. Maybe someone builds a conversion tool down the line, but nobody's promising one. The trade is that the .feedpak format holds far more than a note chart. It can carry separated stems so you can mute the guitar, bass, or drums, generate karaoke tracks, and pack in drum and piano parts. It also handles 7, 8, and 9-string instruments. Forcing everything into one native format is what makes all of that possible, and not touching Rocksmith's files is exactly what keeps the project out of trouble.

What else is in the 0.3 update

The first thing you'll see is a calibration screen on first launch. It walks you through getting your cable or audio interface connected and dialing in latency. Anyone who set up Rocksmith 2014 will recognize the idea.

There's an in-house rig and tone builder too, a virtual setup where you build amps and pedalboards. The interesting part is that the VSTs in it are reportedly all built in-house, not borrowed from Tone3000 or NAM. Song files map their tones to your rig, so the goal is that you hop in and play without downloading any plugins or amp captures yourself. Plug-and-play has always been the biggest barrier for software like this, so that's a smart thing to chase.

There's also a tuner built into the dashboard, a minigame engine (the previous 0.29 release added it, and there's a goofy “toilet tuner” minigame to show it off), and a charting editor for making your own songs, with Guitar Pro file import and drums and piano treated as proper instruments. The whole thing is shaping up to be less “Rocksmith clone” and more an open canvas people write plugins for.

All of the Feedback details here come from the Feedback (formerly Slopsmith) Discord, where the developer has been posting 0.3 teasers and answering questions. Credit for the specifics goes to that community, and it's the place to watch for the latest features and an actual release date.

The honest catch if you just want to learn

Same caveat as last time. Feedback is great at one job: scrolling a song down the screen and checking whether you played it. What it still can't do is tell you what to practice. It hands you a song, you play the song, you get a little better at that song. That's how a lot of people quietly plateau for years, grinding the same handful of tunes and never actually learning the fretboard or the scales under their fingers.

The deeper lesson is the one the takedown already taught. When a project is built on top of someone else's game and someone else's files, it can vanish overnight. The whole fee[db]ack rebrand is an attempt to fix exactly that, which tells you the risk was real.

Where OpenFret and Guitar Quest fit

This is the part where I'm biased, so I'll be straight about it. OpenFret's Guitar Quest goes after a different job, and it sits on ground nobody can pull out from under it. It listens to your real guitar through the browser, and the curriculum, the monsters, the scales, and the drills are all ours. There's no Ubisoft, no third party, no encrypted game files. Nobody can send a letter and make it disappear.

It's also guided where a note highway isn't. Instead of handing you a song, it hands you a path: start at the beginning, drill the fretboard, run scales, and level up in an order that makes sense. There are six modes (Battle, Wisdom, Technique, Magic, Crafting, and Gigging) plus nine procedural arcade trainers, with XP and loot doing the job a high score does in a rhythm game. They get you to come back tomorrow. There's a full breakdown in what is Guitar Quest.

On price I'll be straight: Feedback (fee[db]ack), like Slopsmith, is free and open-source and runs on donations. Guitar Quest is $30 once, paid once, with no subscription and no ads. The demo is free and asks for no signup, so you can plug in and play before you decide anything.

Try it

If Slopsmith going dark left a hole in your practice and you'd rather not wait around for the 0.3 update, the Guitar Quest demo needs no download and no account. Plug in, or let the mic pick up an acoustic, and you're playing in about a minute. Here is what it looks like:

The reference side of OpenFret is free and not going anywhere either: chords, scales, modes, and a Studio that puts a tuner, metronome, and fretboard in one tab. Still weighing the bigger names? We wrote an honest comparison of Yousician, Rocksmith, and OpenFret.