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

Indeed it has nothing to do with the cut, but it also has nothing to do with the offset. It has everything to do with the bpm, which is supposed to be 140.000. You have it at 139.960, which causes the arrows to fall 33 ms later than the correct point in the music by the end of the file.

My main point here is to not use Mixmeister's values verbatim.

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If it doesn't have to do with the cut itself, then there's really no adequate reason to mention that here instead of PMing me and saying that, unless you're trying to reiterate a point you've made before, in which case I've even addressed that in the guide itself.

Yeah, you seem to have added that after the fact, as evidenced by the edit time on your original post. If you had known about the rounding errors in Mixmeister's readings beforehand, why is the bpm value of the simfile 139.960? It's alright if you made a mistake, but it's kinda silly to lie about it and try to cover yourself for no reason.

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I did.

Yeah, I got that. What I'm saying though is that you claimed your guide does not endorse using Mixmeister's values verbatim, yet the example you show (and have uploaded to the simfile database here) clearly shows otherwise. Just wondering why that is.

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Because I made a mistake, and I'm not [currently] in the mood to take another screenshot and fix the error. I'll get around to that when I have more free time.

Alright, fair enough. As a parting note though, I would recommend re-wording that addendum to your guide. It should explicitly state to never take Mixmeister's values verbatim, but also to not automatically round whatever value it spits out. There are songs whose true bpm goes out to several decimal places; I've stepped songs that are exactly 124.999 bpm and others that are 175.341 bpm. Mixmeister can be used to get an estimate, but figuring out the true bpm should be done in Stepmania's editor while examining position markers and waveform beat spikes in Audacity. (And don't use SM 3.9; two decimal places is not enough.) Either that, or drop the song waveform into a DAW (Logic, Acid, GarageBand, etc.) and line the waveform up with measure markers by adjusting the project file's bpm.

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It clearly states that Astro's syncing and cutting skills are both questionable. Citation already explained.

1) It's fine to hold an opinion. I'll accept that.
2) Everyone else here [who has spoken on the matter] seems to prefer Audacity. If you want to explain why Sony's products are clearly the better choice, go for it.
3) I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to accomplish by being a dick right now. I've already pointed out that I made a dire mistake in this guide that I'll be fixing. I didn't spend much time polishing my file last week because a lot of stuff was going on in real life.

Really? 124.999BPM?

Did you know you can go beyond three decimal points, but you will have to open the CACHE file and make the change manually to the .SM file in the cache, same with STOPS you do not have to round stops up and then down to balance out the sync while being slightly off every time you do, you can give them as many decimal points as you want but you have to open the cache file and change it manually. You can prove it by using my "Prince Fleaswallows Rap" in Hellrazor simfiles. Play the song in stepmania then copy the STOPS and open the cache file and PASTE the stops over the existing rounded data, then play it again and the difference by the end of the song is terribly offbeat vs. perfectly onbeat.

But 124.999 BPM after 1000 beats would only drift
480.00384 vs. 480.0000
That is literally 3 milliseconds after 1000 beats or 8 MINUTES. More than likely the true value is 125.000 although I absolutely feel you that values can be very close to an integer value or even somewhere not close, but unless the song was really long .001 is negligible.

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@Astro: i should have mentioned it "poor" instead of "questionable" if I'm a dick.

I already started making simfiles with those tools you use some years ago. In some circumstances when I encountered problems using those tools due to their limited features, i was looking for better programs and that after a year of usage, I found beatmapper from sony acid useful for tracking simple and multiple bpms and another year I found sony vegas more suitable for cutting audio (because audacity lacks beat measure ruler). Vegas is more easy to snap than audacity. Whoever said anything against those 2 obviously don't know how to use them. You'll see the true bpm to the nearest thousandth place if you know how to move the slider properly in beatmapper, be it in simple or multiple bpms. No need for bpm formula or long explanation for it because you'll see the evidence by looking through the beatmapper workspace, not by ear.

BPM formula?

Hmm, beat per minute or beat/minute. BPM conversion is hardly a formula unless you have trouble converting minutes to seconds or milliseconds or converting seconds per beat by inverting. Basic math is not complex. It's like driving 60 MPH and determining how long it will take to get somewhere say 200 miles away, you don't need a GPS do to it for you.

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Even if yours got complex method, your way also is questionable too, like what you did in ITG1 and ITG2 simfiles in user simfiles (which got deleted for unknown reason after I updated them).