Question: Making .sm files

I was wondering if there was already a HOW TO posted in this forum on making your own .sm files for a custom song of your own? Is this easy to do? I have a bunch of music that I would love to recreate into Stepmania, it seems like a fun task at hands. Thanks for any and all responses!

-Lewis

I'll give you a start.

Step 1; Go to your start menu and find the Stepmania folder, then click "Stepmania Tools".

Click "Create Song" on the window that pops up, select an mp3/ogg file, and the game will set your song up, ready to be stepped.

I'll post Step 2, how to actually add arrows and all that other stuff to the song later.

An important key is you should know the BPM of the song.

put this into a blank .txt document, fill out the stuff for the song that's going with it (title/artist/bpm if you know it offhand if someone else stepped it), go to save as, save as type should be set to "All Files", then make sure the file name ends in .sm

I like to just keep all this stuff blank in my Simfiles to do folder so that all I have to do is copy paste it into whatever song folder I want and fill it out in there; keeps me from having to make a seperate .sm file every time for a new simfile of mine.

---

Edit: Whoops, this was supposed to be an append to my previous post.

it's rare to already know the bpm of the song before even making the .sm for it, you can use audacity or acid or whatever audio editing program to help with that later.

---

A trick I use is to grab one of the DDR background videos (that goes at 1x speed, not higher like Bear3 or something), drop it into Sony Vegas (with the current file at 120 fps) with the song (I used an example, a song from Scooch (same masterminds behind "MORE THAN I NEEDED TO KNOW"), Syncopated Rhythm, and dropped Kaliedoscope14 on it), and sync it to the entire music (always looping every 4 beats) very carefully, fixing any lag. I use Ctrl+Resizing the video to do this. Then I right-click the video, click properties, and look at it's playback rate, and multiply it by 90 (the key here is that the BGVideos always go at 80 frames at 30 fps, which is 90 BPM). In this case, Kaliedoscope14's speed is 1.511, and multiplying that by 90 results in... 136 BPM. That's the BPM of your song. (Don't worry if it isn't round, like say 126.40 BPM.) Unless your song has BPM changes, then things will get complicated. :/

Thank you for getting me started SM MaxX and CuzcoBlocko! I will start messing around with some songs and if I have any questions I will add them to this post. Thanks, it truly means a lot!

You're quite welcome. If there's anything you need help with, let me know.

I couldn't find a "Stepmania Tools" in the Stepmania folder. I looked in each folder in the SM folder and also searched "tools" in the SM directory. I use SM 5.0 beta2A

And you looked through the start menu?

It should be in the Programs directory, named "smpackage".

I searched "smpackage" and nothing comes up throughout my C:/. Weird.

Unfortunately, I never used SM 5.0 beta2A, only the classic SM 3.9. :/

I used the .sm template that SM MaxX posted above and placed it in a notepad, edited all the pertinent information for my song/songfile/background/bpm and found the edit of the song in the main menu. I am now able to edit the dance charts from scratch and I must say this is where the challenge begins! First song pick, Bassnectar- Ping Pong. I probably should choose an easier song, but will post updates.