For charters
Tool-assisted charting, one step at a time
Charting a song is a sequence, and each step below has a tool that does the repetitive part of it. Every tool hands you a draft in the chart editor.
- All processing happens on your computer. Your audio file and chart are never uploaded to a server.
- You review and edit the drafts, or throw them away.
The tools support the repetitive work, not the judgment. Why I think automated tooling for these steps is good for the community.
Step 1 · Tempo
Create the tempo map
A beat-tracking model marks the beats and the downbeats. A postprocessing step tuned for charts fits the tempo map. A song that stays in 4/4 usually comes out workable, even through a speed-up or a drift; a song that changes meter should still be mapped by hand.
Step 2 · Drum notes
Get the drum notes proposed for you
A trained transcription model predicts drum hits on eight lanes: kick, snare, three toms, hi-hat, crash, and ride. This step is drums only. A guitar or bass chart starts in the editor instead, and its notes are yours to place.
Step 3 · Difficulties
Build Hard, Medium, and Easy from Expert
Once the Expert track is right, the lower difficulties are generated from it, for drums and for guitar. This step has been automated for years, and the player base got three more difficulties on far more songs than anyone was going to chart by hand.
Step 4 · Lyrics
Sync the words to the vocals
Paste the lyrics and they are aligned to the vocals, syllable by syllable, so the words land with the notes rather than with the line.
What comes out is a first draft
The drafts are meant to save you the hours that were never musical. Placing hundreds of notes you already know are there is work a machine should do. Deciding which lane a cymbal belongs on, and what a chart should feel like to play, is the craft, and two good charters given the same song will make different calls about it.
So the output opens in an editor instead of a download, and each tool’s own page tells you which parts of its draft to check first. If a tool of mine ever makes it easier to publish something bad than to publish something good, that is a defect in what I built, and I want to know.
Why I think automated tooling for these steps is good for the community.
Other tools
SNG File Manager reads, modifies, and converts Clone Hero .sng files. Build a package from a folder or from loose files, open an existing one to see what is inside it, add or remove files, and convert between .sng and .zip.