Playing through Audiosurf I have yet to drop below 60 FPS. Sure it fluctuates between 55 and 65 sometimes but it never "hiccups" as you put it. Same with Frets on Fire, though some mods require more computing, of course. The end result is that it if you know how to manage your computer then theree wouldn't be any surprise processes. Just set everything so that it doesn't run without your say so (which SHOULD be the default, but I guess it's not anymore).

How familiar are you with Guitar Hero and Rock Band? You seem to be under the impression that this is the same experience, just free. It's not. Either that or this is just another chest thumping "PC is superior" thread.

It's not the same experience at all, however the products are diferent in quite some ways. One is free, the other one comes with the peripherals right there. The biggest difference is that FoF gets all its songs for free, not the 99 cents price tag on the Rock Band songs, which also are the songs the developer decides to put out. Meanwhile FoF has just about any song mapped, and if it isn't mapped already you can map it itself for everyone else. Also the lyric support is currentl very meh in FoF (but supposedly getting updated in the upcoming release along with online MP and other godies). I won't lie, no one in this dorm shelled out the money for GH5 so we still play World Tour/RB and the music creation tool in World Tour is very meh compared to what FoF offers.

Now just plug it into your TV and put a lil extra work at getting proper peripherals and you indeed do have a superior product. I'm thinking of figuring out a way to get these thing to work on the PC hooked up to the TV so we can all play, well minus the singer.

Well here were the problems I faced when I was using the game a while back.

1. There's no whammy bar support. There's a rudimentary thing called a killswitch or something that acts as a whammy bar but warps the entire track and in cases I've used it the track can become permanently warped for the rest of the song. This isn't just a problem for me either. It's well documented on the help forums for the game.

2. The game is generally very glitchy in nature, especially when using mods and playing on poorly constructed user created music.

3. A lot of the songs are poorly constructed, not just in note structure, but in sound quality, and the construction in building them. Many songs, instead of dropping the guitar track out of the song will just stop playing the song altogether as you miss a note. 

4. Guitar Hero and Rock Band use master tracks. Frets on Fire song creators for all major label music and much of the indy music don't have access to the master tracks to build a created track around, forcing them into covering it. GH and RB moved away from cover songs for a reason.

5. As you previously mentioned, so much of the basic features you pay for in GH and RB don't even exist in Frets on Fire.

6. The best quality music, skins and mods are the ones that were stripped from Guitar Hero and Rock Band, effectively meaning that they are better than FoF since they are offering the best assets for the game. 

With all that said, I wonder what it is that makes FoF so great that GH and RB should become like it. It seem the two you pay for are more polished, off better quality music, work with instruments out of the box, and offer far more features. So kindly explain why Guitar Hero should become like Frets on Fire? I just don't get it. FoF is a fantastic little freeware game, but it's far too open source, untested, and has a community far too scattered to make the experience as stream lined as any sane person would hope it would be. 

It's open-source. There are no viruses/spyware.

Wait so this game also supports 4 player simultaneous play with different instruments and vocals?

I think you pointed out the biggest problem of the game at the end. The community is still scattered with many people doing their own thing. The more people pick up the game the better it should get, as I said the new release that's coming out will fix up a bunch of stuff and add more to it, also a reason why I posed it here, to increase the potential community of the game. Overall the game can only go up and will constantly be updated with new features and mods. Quite possibly there will be mods that outshine the RB/GH mods they have out there. Ultimately it's an open source game and the game quality depends entirely on the community itself.

Ultimately a better question is why people aren't allowed to import their own songs t RB/GH and the publishers can still release the premium songs for money, but allow the community to add songs as well, as you mentioned, with lowe quality.

@mendicate

Yes 4 players on different instrumets though the  support for lyrics is very limited, which they say they will upgrade more with the next few releases.

RB is about to allow user created content to be uploaded and put up for sale, using a tool much the same as the developers use.  They will be hopping onto the back of XNA to accomplish this I believe.  They will not be able to use copyrighted material, but the ability is there to do whatever you want.

I did not even think about the fact that regular people creating songs graphs for FoF would not have access to the seperate instrument tracks.  One person hitting or missing a note corresponds to a successful hit or miss on all instruments in terms of audibal feedback?

The game itself don't, but most of the songs I downloaded did.

To recreate a full commercial song for the game, you would need the following:

1. Separate note sheets for the bass, guitar and drum sections of a particular song, along with either a note sheet for the vocals or enough knowledge to differentiate pitches so you can map the correct vocal notes to the song.

2. You need either the master tracks from the original song or the master tracks of a cover of the song, which would be separate drum, guitar and bass audio, along with the acapella voice track, or you need to re-record the song yourself.

These are not easy things to accomplish, and that's why I'd rather just plunk down my money on a quality product like Guitar Hero or Rock Band and have the experts do it for me. Frets on Fire is a nice alternative if I'm totally hung up on playing a song neither game has, but otherwise it's just nowhere near the same level of quality. 

The title of this thread seems backwards. It should read "Guitar Hero (aka What Frets on Fire is TRYING to be)".