Song format

How Ultrastar knows how to grade your singing?

Before you start adapting a song for Ultrastar, you need to understand what is required by the game. If you go to the directory where the songs are stored, you will see that each song has its own sub-directory which groups all files related to that particular song.

If you open some folder, it will contain files similar to these:

What are these files?

Each of these files has a role in the way how the song is displayed or graded in Ultrastar. Audio & txt are the crucial ones, the other ones improve the player's experience.

Audio file

One of the crucial files that always have to be in song's folder is an audio file. This is the file that will be playbacked when you play the song in Ultrastar.

TXT file

This is the most important file of them all. It contains all the metadata related to the song in the form of tags (e.g. artist, title, tempo etc.) and the actual transcription of the vocal line. It contains all of the syllables of the lyrics, their timing (when they begin and end) in relation to the supplied audio file, pitch, how they are grouped into lines and in case of duet songs - which track do they belong to.

You will learn more about it in the next article.

Video file

Will be played in the background by the game.

Cover file

This file usually ends with [CO] suffix to differentiate the name from the background file (they are both image files after all). This is the album cover that will be displayed in the game when you go through your song's catalog.

Background file

If the song has no video file, this background image will be displayed instead. Make sure that resolution and quality is good as this will be displayed on the whole screen.