1. Purpose. Features. Advantages.
2. Brief description of song entry.
3. Usage.
4. Controls.
5. License.
6. Contact information.

UltraStar Song Editor: User Manual

1. Purpose. Features. Advantages.

This program is intended to create new or edit existing songs for UltraStar karaoke game (or compatible games).

Features:
- Visual editor with intuitive interface allows you to draw notes and type syllables.
- Spectrum analysis.
- Multi-level undo/redo.
- Block operations with clipboard.
- Mix MP3 track and melody track with zero latency between them.
- Unicode support (UTF-8 encoding) for multi-language support.

What it doesn't:
- It doesn't support any MIDI files.
- It doesn't do any automatic recognition - you should "draw" the melody yourself.

2. Brief description of song entry.

Song entry is a directory with main TXT file and support files. Main TXT file contains song's tags/properties, notes and lyrics. It is always treated as UTF8-encoded. Other files are MP3 music, background video or still image, thumbnail image and other similar stuff. MP3 file is required, other files are optional.

Main TXT file should be named like "Author - Title.txt". The directory which contains it should have the same name.

3. Usage.

Create or load a song
When you start the editor it prompts to load an existing song, i.e. it's main TXT file. If you don't want to edit existing song and want to create a new one from scratch - just close that open file box and use "File->New" menu item, then select song's destination and file name.

Add or change MP3 track.
Use "Song->Choose Music" menu item and select a MP3 file. It will be analysed in background and you'll see it's spectrum when this process is done. Set audio gap value, then adjust BPM value until it perfectly matches the songs rhythm.

Create melody.
Use mouse to draw new notes or move/resize existing notes. Click on the grid to insert splitter. Use [Del] key to delete a note or splitter under mouse, if multiple items are selected - they are deleted at once. Use playback ("Play" button or [space] key) to check your work.

Use right mouse button to select multiple objects. You can cut/copy/paste selected objects. Objects are pasted into the current cursor position.

Use [G] key to mark or unmark note as "golden" or important notes.

Use [F] key to mark or unmark note as a "freestyle" notes.

Lyrics.
Enter lyrics into the right panel - one line per syllable. Pay attention on spaces between words - they're part of syllables, so be careful!

Transpose.
In song files notes are represented with numbers. And different songs use different ranges for these numbers. Although UltraStar doesn't care about octave number during the gameplay, you'll want to match your melody representation with the most suitable playback pitch. The editor tries to guess the best transpose settings, but you can change this at run-time. Changing transpose value changes nothing in songs file - the only thing it influence is the melody pitch during playback.

If you want to change your melody pitch by altering actual values, you should use "Edit->Octave Up" or "Edit->Octave Down" menu items.

Finish
Don't forget to fill tags ("Song->Edit Tags") with proper information and save your work.

The file is always considered to be in UTF-8 encoding. It assumes that a file can start with a special invisible BOM ("byte ordering mark") character. However, BOM character can also cause problems, so it's up to you whether use it or not. You can choose to use BOM or not when you create a new song. BOM is preserved during editing any existing songs.