How to Make a Song on Stepmania

Last Updated: July 15, 2018

StepMania is a certain program used to simulate Dance Dance Revolution (or In The Groove). You can download pre-made songs and play those, or you can make your own songs. To make a song, it's requires patience, determination, a sense of timing.

Steps

1
Make sure you have StepMania in the first place! Now open up the StepMania Tools Main Menu that comes with StepMania, and click on the very last option that says "Create Song". Find the music file that you want to be your new dance song and select it! It should say "Success. Created song <file location>"
2
Open up StepMania. Go to "Edit/Share Songs" in the main menu and find the song that you just created. Select the dance-type and the difficult you wish to edit and choose "Create With Blank", OR you can start with a source of a different difficult and go off that (meaning that your taking the exact steps of one difficult of that song, and using them in the difficult you choose and you can add on). Edit those steps!

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3
You should now be in the editing screen. All is explained in the program, how to change the bpm, add/remove steps, even add mines. The basics push a number 1-4 to insert an arrow. 1=Left, 2=Down, 3=Up, 4=Right. The up and down arrow keys change the beat your on, left and right changes the what part of the beat your in (1/4, 1/8, etc.) Push F1 for more help.
4
Once you're done, push esc and select "Save" then esc again and then "Exit"!
5
You can either now test this song out in Game-Mode, or start making another difficulty by repeating steps 2-4. Congratulations! You just made a new song with a step chart!

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Community Q&A

Question

There is no Stepmania tools menu. Where on my computer can I locate this item?

Jayden Brown

Community Answer

The version of Stepmania 5 without the tools menu requires a different setup. 1. Go to the Stepmania installation folder. On Windows, by default it is C:/Games/StepMania 5/. 2. Open the songs folder. 3. Create a new folder, specifying the group that you want the song to be in. 4. Open the created folder and create a folder called the name of your song. 5. In that folder, you can put in your mp3 or ogg file. 6. You must also put in a "your song name".sm file for it to be recognized as a game file. 7. You can now edit the song in Stepmania.
Question

Is there a way to make a song while he is playing?

Community Answer

In some versions, while editing a song, you can press whichever key you have assigned to the green button to enter "rehearse mode" where you can hit the keys as the stave scrolls past and the music is playing. Before this, however, you need to make sure that the song is synced with the stepchart (i.e. starting point, BPM etc.) and that you have selected which type of note you want to record. Using the smallest setting increment will allow maximum accuracy however notes near 1/4 beats for example will not necessarily clip to them.
Question

What version of Stepmania is this guide written for?

Community Answer

This is Stepmania 5.10, I believe, however it is still relevant to recent versions of the game including those with add-ons (such as Simply Love).
Question

What are the dimensions for the background image and banner image, how do you add them, and what format do they need to be in?

Community Answer

For background and banner images, you put them into the folder with the MP3 and name them: Banner: .png Background: -bg.png The banner is 256 x 80, and the background is 640 x 480.
Question

What should I do if I don't have the tool?

Community Answer

Create a new folder in this directory. StepMania 5.0\Songs\Group\Blastix Riotz. You can put your music in that folder. Then open up Stepmania and search for the group that has your song in it in the edit menu. It should be there under what ever you named the song's folder. (In this case, it would be called "Blastix Riotz", but you can name this folder to what ever you want.)
Question

When I open StepMania 5, it says "Press ... to start game", without any tools menu! How can I open the tools menu?

Community Answer

You've got to change the coin mode to Home, to do that press F3 and key number 1 until it shows the tools menu.