In a music video game, a player's performance is digitally sampled while the player performs a musical composition. The player's performance is compared with a reference performance of the musical composition provided by the music video game. Performance feedback is presented to the player based on the results of the comparison. In some embodiments, sample times associated with digital samples of the player's live vocal performance are compared against timestamps of data records embedded or otherwise accompanying the reference performance audio track. Pitch and rhythm information is retrieved from the data record having a timestamp that most closely matches the sample time of interest. The pitch and rhythm data is used to compute pitch and rhythm errors, which are used to generate performance evaluation data. The performance evaluation data is used to present performance feedback to the player while the player is performing the musical composition.