Is Rock Band needed for the Rock Band track packs

There's a brilliant tutorial on completely manual calibration here by a pro-level RB player:

I can't express enough how useful this video is. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about this topic, it's worth a watch.

How to calibrate, per this video:

1. Completely turn off audio (set volume to 0), so you can focus on the video and hitbox.
2. Go into quickplay and hit purposely early and late to figure out where the hitbox is for you. How early can you hit? How late can you hit? That's the size and position of your hitbox!
3. Based on your measurement of the hitbox, move the hitbox using the positive video bias (towards you) and negative video bias (away from you) to get a centered hitbox that allows you to hit equally early and equally late
4. Now it's time to focus on the audio.
5. Ideally this takes two people and a simple song with a steady beat; one person closes their eyes and plays to the beat, the other person observes to see if you are hitting early or late. I know, this sounds freaky, but per the author, this is very very difficult bordering on impossible to do by eyeballing it solo.
6. If you are hitting early, set negative audio bias to compensate. If you are hitting late, set positive audio bias to compensate.

Warning: different types of instruments may have different lag -- wireless/wired, guitar vs drums vs keyboard, etc. There's only one global audio/video lag setting, no way to set it per instrument. Thus, you should think of the hitbox as the "all controller" compensation area you use to deal with this.

The Wii has had access to the Rock Band store since the release of Rock Band 2. Your Wii needs to be connected to the Internet, and you need regular Wii points in order to purchase the songs. The usual price is 200 points per song, but there are some priced at 100 points.

Also, due to the lack of a hard drive, you will want a good sized SD card in the Wii in order to store the songs. I have a 2GB in mine, but that is because Rock Band 2 does not support a larger card, even though the Wii does. My guess is that Rock Band 3 will support larger SD cards.