Astro's Guide to Cutting Songs for Stepmania [56K]

This is a guide for how to cut songs effectively. This is slightly WIP.

You will need:

Stepmania (any version will do, I'm using 3.9 but you can use whatever)
Any BPM analyzer (I personally use MixMeister, and this guide will demonstrate how to use it effectively)
Any Audio editor (this guide focuses on Audacity)
A song that needs cutting (obviously, duh)

Please note, this is just my method, yours may be different.

Anyway, you'll want to start out by obtaining an audio file of your song. I like using a Youtube downloader to obtain my songs from video owners that work hard at providing excellent content that we get using immoral methods.

Once you have the audio file, load it into a BPM analyzer, or find the BPM in some way, shape or form. It's imperative that the analyzed BPM is as accurate as possible. When using Mixmeister, load the folder in which the audio file is located, and the BPM should be displayed.



Once obtaining your BPM, load the song into Stepmania and find the song's offset. Try to make the offset as accurate as possible. It should also be self-explanatory to modify the default BPM of the chart to match the BPM of the song. In other words, change it from 60.00 to whatever the song's BPM is.

NOTE: Sometimes, in Mixmeister, the BPM will be off by a few hundredths or thousandths of a BPM. In this case, feel free to round down/up. Alternatively, in SM 5.0, there's an option to sync a song's BPM. Feel free to use that. I did not.



Find the sections of the song you want to cut. For my file, I will cut M34-M54, as well as everything after the third beat of M96. If cutting out a chunk of a song (such as M34-M54), it's recommended to cut from 4th note to 4th note, as well as possibly cutting in the same position of the measure. For example, cutting from the first beat of M34 to the first beat of M54. Do whatever sounds right. You can test it out later on in Audacity anyway.

Find the specific time on which the beat lands- i.e. Instead of cutting from M34-M54 and the third beat of M96, I will be cutting from 57.57-91.86 and anything after 164.74. Audacity can't recognize when measures/bars begin, so you'll need to meet it halfway.



Load up Audacity and open up the song you would like to edit. Near the bottom, type in the times you would like to cut out. It is recommended to work from right to left; if there are multiple cuts you would like to make, start from the last cut and work your way to the first cut. This way, you won't have to adjust for the times you cut out. Type in the times you want to cut in the "selection start" and "end" boxes near the bottom of the program. You can make sure the section you want to cut is selected if the selection is darkened on the track itself. Then, press the handy dandy cut button near the top of the page.



If you're ending your cut where the song doesn't normally end (like myself), feel free to use a fade out by highlighting the area you want to fade out and clicking on Effect > Fade Out. This isn't necessary, but it may make the cut sound more... crisp. You can also repeat the effect to make the fade out even sharper. I've only done one, but feel free to experiment.



If you're not ending your cut where the song doesn't normally end, cut out any portions of the song you need by typing the selection start and end and pressing the cut button. If done correctly, it shouldn't be too obvious that the song was cut unless if the listener has heard the original song. The cut should sound clean, similar to the original track. If it doesn't, try a different selection start/end until you find good boundaries. I'm cutting from 57.57-1:31.86, as I've mentioned prior to this.



Once again, test the audio out. Don't forget you can undo mistakes by going Edit > Undo or pressing ctrl + z (option + z on macs). Repeat this process for each cut made.

Once you're done making your cut and it fits the audio constraints (typically anything shorter than 2:30), save your project and export it as whatever format you may choose (File > Export). Stepmania accepts .mp3 and .ogg files. If you don't have a specific plugin, you will only be able to export the file using the .ogg format. Don't worry about it because it doesn't make a huge difference.



You will want to replace the original audio file with your new cut. Find the location of your song's simfile. If you're playing Stepmania 3.9, it should be Stepmania 3.9 > Songs > (folder containing song) > (song name) > (song title).mp3/ogg/whatever format. The procedure is more or less the same for Stepmania 5.



Load up Stepmania and go into your options menu. From there, select "Reload Songs/Courses." This must be done before Stepmania acknowledges you replaced your audio file.



Congratulations. You are now ready to make an edit to your song cut. Keep in mind you will likely need to re-adjust the offset, as Audacity kinda messes with it when files are loaded.

I hope you found this useful, and I wish you the best of luck in your future song-cutting endeavors.

Special thanks to:
ddrstepper (for his amazing addition to this guide on how to ensure minimal drifting when cutting music)
chewi (for criticism)
MUTE (for criticism)
dechristofarodm (for saying it's a good guide and boosting my self-esteem a bit)

I thought I would add onto this post by sharing how I make sure there is very minimal drifting when I cut my music. This method uses Audacity as well and best works on a song that has repeated sections (like a chorus of a song). Also, for my example I have used Orange Caramel's 아빙아빙.

1) What you want to do first is figure out what part of the song you want to cut. I decided I wanted to skip the first chorus and second verse. So what you do is select the rest of the song that is going to be kept using the Selection Tool (in this case, the second chorus, the bridge, and the final chorus were kept). Once that is done copy the selection.



2) Next you go to Tracks > Add New > Stereo Track and paste the selection you copied into the new track.



3) Then what you want to do is bring the new track closer to the part of the original track that it is similar to using the Time Shift Tool. In this instance, I brought the second chorus closer to the first chorus at around 0:38 of the song.



4) Now is the part where we zoom in to compare wave lengths. If the similar parts you overlayed are similar enough, you should see similar wavelengths in the tracks as well. Move the bottom track some more using the Time Shift tool. Continue to zoom and adjust until the waves look practically congruent and are aligned accordingly.





5) Here is where you make sure there won't be any sort of drifting and it's actually kind of cool. Once you have your tracks aligned, select the bottom track and go to Effect > Invert. This will cause the bottom track's wavelengths to reflect vertically. Hit play, and if you have done it right, you should hear a significant amount of the song to be cancelled out by the inverted track. Here's an example of what that may sound like.



6) Finally all that's left to do is to Undo the invert and cut the top part of the track where the bottom track starts or wherever else it may sound natural.



And voila! You're done! Here's how the cut came out.

Now let's say you wanted to make this cut shorter or just cut it differently, but the section you want to cut it to is only slightly similar. Then in this case you can still use this method, but instead you can do a fadeout rather than a complete cut. For this example, I'm going to cut to the final chorus in the middle of the first one. The difference in the choruses is that there are some extra background vocals in the final chorus that don't appear in the first one. The goal is to make the fade sound as natural as possible.

1) Follow steps 1-5 of the first part of this post.

2) Cut everything you plan to cut from the top track except for the section you plan to fade. Here I cut everything except for the beat before the second part of the chorus which is about .7 seconds long.



3) On the top track select the second half of the fade out area and go to Effect > Fade Out. The select the entire fade section in the bottom track go to Effect > Fade In. If you select both areas completely, there will be an awkward drop in volume, and it will sound unnatural.




And that's it! And here is how that cut turned out.

Hope this helps someone out!

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I'm not impressed with your method because the programs you use don't always applies in some cases. Use sony beatmapper for getting the bpm and sony vegas for cutting audio instead.

I'm not impressed with your method because the programs you use don't always applies in some cases. Use sony beatmapper for getting the bpm and sony vegas for cutting audio instead.

I didn't say it would work in every case.


Also, Audacity and Freemake are free which is why we're using them for examples in the first place. In fact, I have Sony Vegas and I've found that making cuts is easier using on Audacity. It's all about preference though. If you want to work with/spend money Sony ACID and Sony Vegas that's completely fine, we're just demonstrating a method and giving instructions.

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Who the fuck uses Sony products to make music cuts?

I've used audacity for years. +1 Great Guide. Would recommend.

Sony products are fine for making cuts, no need to be so rude.

Great guides you two, though ddrstepper's seems a little complicated, but if you want a good cut you should try it.

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No. I don't want to. Audacity works fine, and I've been doing it this way for a few years now. It's quick, and it's effective, so I don't see why I should do it another way. Plus, sony products cost money.

No. I don't want to. Audacity works fine, and I've been doing it this way for a few years now. It's quick, and it's effective, so I don't see why I should do it another way. Plus, sony products cost money.

Thanks chewi.

Thanks chewi.

Thanks dechristofarodm.

Thanks dechristofarodm.

Ah, the comment wasn't meant to be rude. I just have never heard of someone using them. Do you chewi?

Oh, my bad. Guess I was just being overly defensive lol. Yeah, I used a Sony program a long time ago to try cutting songs but I found I liked Audacity better.

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Exactly

Uh...you are aware that Mixmeister is wrong a majority of the time, right?

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Not if you use common sense and round down/up or halve/double according to the number it gives and using your brain.

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It's usually accurate enough for me that I manage to create good cuts. Even if it weren't right the guide doesn't explicitly say to use Mixmeister to find your BPM.

True, but it's bothersome that this guide doesn't even mention that. Also, this is ignoring the fact that there are plenty of songs that do have non-whole number bpms that go out to three decimal places, which Mixmeister will always get wrong. For example: DJ Sharpnel songs contain pitch-shifted samples and samplers don't always produce whole number bpms. Some chiptune artists use older tracking programs which are archaic enough to not output perfect whole number bpms as well.

Good cuts? Or perfect cuts?

Also, your guide kinda does say to use Mixmeister to find the bpm. And then it states to plug that bpm into Stepmania verbatim. And if you're using that faulty bpm, the current second markers aren't going to be giving you accurate cut points.

For example: If you are stepping a song that's actually 125.000 bpm, Mixmeister will typically give a value like 125.010 or 125.020. Say your song is 5 minutes long and you're cutting out approximately a 3-minute chunk of it, from the m33 mark to the m126 mark. We'll be conservative and say you use a bpm of 125.010, which would give you cut points of 61.435 seconds and 239.981 seconds. That's 178.546 seconds you're cutting out. If you used the correct bpm of 125.000, you would get cut points of 61.440 and 240.000, a difference of 178.560 seconds. That's kind of a big discrepancy when we're talking about a game with timing windows measured in milliseconds. And again this is a conservative estimate in a song with only one cut and with the bpm value wrong by just a hundreth of a bpm.

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Fine. Perfect cuts. Geez. At least they're usually quite perfect. But is that really the point here? Just having the most accurate timing when cutting a song won't always lead you to a perfect cut.


No it doesn't. I said that I personally use Mixmeister but it doesn't say you have to.


If using SM 5.0, there's an option for syncing BPM so that it's more accurate. In the odd chance that the BPM would actually be 125.010, I would plug it into Stepmania and resync the BPM. This became a habit and when I converted back to SM 3.9 this isn't an option anymore. I'll make sure to note this in the guide itself.

Thanks for your criticism.

Mute doesn't know what he's talking about, clearly.

Do audacity have measure/beat ruler already? If none yet, sony products are still the best.
Song and bpm sync through any stepmania are BIG NOS to a very meticulous simfile maker like me.

Please elaborate.

Did you know that your Last Unicorn file drifts 33ms late?

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I discovered that later on and I fixed it on my own accord. From my acknowledgement it has nothing to do with my cut and has everything to do with my poor job at syncing the offset on SM 5. I then played the song again [SM5 judgment 7] and the results from hitting the arrows after my cut were more or less the same as before the cut.