Songs Keep Disappearing in Stepmania?

Hey all, just thought I should share my issue and hopefully this helps out anyone who has the same problem.

I'm running SM on my Thinkpad Yoga, and was working smoothly and without hiccups for months until recently. For some reason, whenever I sort songs anything other than group sort, (for example, changing default sort to ABC sort) A LOT of my songs are missing from their respective folders. This continues to happen even when I change it back to default sorting, or after I play a song. Upon further testing, I realized it isn't a theme-related issue, as every theme I have played on has the same exact problem.

I tried refreshing the theme, redownloaded both an old and new version of SM, and tried numerous methods after scrubbing through old forums, and I cannot find a solution to the problem. I really need help on this because we are starting a DDR club at my college relatively soon and this is really frustrating!

Thank you to anyone who can help!

Link to a specific song that is "missing" from its folder after sorting. Maybe there's something strange going on.

Also, if you're going to be running Stepmania, call it a Stepmania club, please. People should know the difference.

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Ah, oops! Gotcha, thanks for the club name correction!

I'm sorry, but could you clarify on how I can link (I'm guessing) the simfile onto here? I don't know how to do that..

If you downloaded it somewhere, post a link to where you downloaded it from.

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http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/viewsimfile.php?simfileid=569

AM-3P is an example of the sims that disappear. Basically, I downloaded all of them from ZIV and coming from the main AC version packs. Which is funny, because certain songs from the exact same category stay in the song wheel, like this one:

http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/viewsimfile.php?simfileid=594

So, this doesn't happen to me with AM-3P, but I have a guess that could explain what is happening.
Stepmania uses the TITLETRANSLIT (transliterated title) field when sorting (unless it's blank, if TITLETRANSLIT is blank, then TITLE is used). If a song has "foo" in TITLETRANSLIT, and "bar" in TITLE, you'll think it's named "bar", but stepmania will stick it in the "f" folder, because the transliterated title starts with "f".
Here's a specific example: The correctly synced version of "been so long" that used to be on here had this:
The 0 at the beginning of the TITLETRANSLIT field makes Stepmania stick it in the 0-9 folder, with the other songs that start with numbers.

You can view or edit the transliteration field in Edit Mode:

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This also happens to me in stepmania 5.0.6 build on win 7 64bits, happens with various themes (DDR2013,DDR2014, DDR NEXT GENERATION)

When i sort songs by ABC some dissapear, this happen mostly with X-specials.
Example:
First i select paranoia from 1rst mix, then i switch to ABC and i cant find Paranoia Dirty mix X-special versions. After i play some songs, X- special songs like PARANOiA~DIRTY MIX~(SMM-Special) can be selected again, but when i try to find paranoia from the first mix it has gone



Paranoia from ddr 1st mix sorted in ABC


Paranoia dirty mix X-specials are not here


After playing some random songs, X-special are back( but now original paranoia, paranoia dirty mix and others are missing)

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I've had a similar problem with this. Do you have "Only preferred difficulties" on? That's what caused the problem for me and turning it off fixes the problem.

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Oh my god it works! Thank you so much! : I can't believe it was under my nose this entire time. That is so weird though, what does "Only Preferred Difficulties" do?

Also thanks Kyzentun for trying to help

From what I understand "Only Preferred Difficulties" only shows songs with the difficulty you last played. Someone correct me if I'm wrong though, this is just an assumption from what I've seen it do.

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The preferred difficulty is changed whenever you change the difficulty you're currently playing, not when the game changes the current difficulty for you. So let's say you start on a song with the normal set of difficulties: You change to the chart. This sets your preferred difficulty to Then you scroll to a song that only has The steps are automatically picked, but your preferred difficulty is still So when you scroll back to a song that has , stepmania knows to pick the steps, because that's what your preferred difficulty says.

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That was my problem too, thank you very much

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That's three people in one thread that all had the same problem. When a feature causes problems like this, it makes me want to remove the feature entirely so that people will stop stubbing their toes on it.

This doesn't mean I'm going to remove it, just that it's starting to look like a source of problems, and not something that is helping people.

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