TXT format basics

What does the TXT songfile contain?

As explained in the previous section txt file contains all necessary metadata about the song and the transcription of vocal line in a format that Ultrastar understands.

At the beginners level you don't need to understand everything you see in there. Just the basics.

Let's see an excerpt from some example txt file contents:

#ARTIST:David Amber
#TITLE:Second Time Around
#MP3:David Amber - Second Time Around.mp3
#COVER:David Amber - Second Time Around [CO].jpg
#BACKGROUND:David Amber - Second Time Around [BG].jpg
#VIDEO:David Amber - Second Time Around.mp4
#BPM:392.08
#GAP:5220
#YEAR:2015
#LANGUAGE:English
: 0 3 5 Can
: 8 3 2  we
: 16 6 5  start
: 24 3 5  o
: 28 13 7 ~
: 42 4 5 ~
: 48 9 5 ver
- 60
: 62 5 5 or
: 71 2 2  is
: 79 3 5  this
: 87 6 7  real
: 96 5 9 ly
: 104 3 7  the
: 111 6 5  end
- 124
(...)
E

Tags

At the beginning of the file you can see the tags in format:

#KEY:VALUE

This is where the metadata is stored.

ARTIST, TITLE, YEAR (of release), LANGUAGE tags are pretty self-explanatory.

We also have tags which specify the filenames of the other files for this song - audio (MP3 tag), cover (COVER tag), background (BACKGROUND tag) and video (VIDEO tag). These files must be present in the same directory as the TXT file and have same names as written in here. Otherwise Ultrastar won't be able to find them.

BPM - this tag is very important. It specifies the tempo of the song in beats per minute and therefore it determines the duration of one beat.

Beat is the basic (and at the same time smallest) unit of time in Ultrastar TXT file format. Notes positions and lengths are all specified in beats instead of milliseconds.

If you are interested, you can find exhaustive explanation of BPM here.

GAP - another important tag. It specifies when the first note of the song's vocal track begins in milliseconds. Remember that note's positions are expressed in beats. First note should always start from beat 0. However the singer almost never starts singing at the very beginning of the audio file, usually there is some intstrumental intro first. This is where the GAP tag comes to the rescue.

There could be more tags in the file but these are the basic ones.

Vocal track transcription

Beneath the tags the vocal line transcription begins. If you look closely you will see 2 types of entries:

: 0 3 5 Can

and:

- 60

The first type represents a note, in this case a note with lyrics "Can".

The second type represents a line break - it tells the game when some line of the song ends and when the next line should begin.

So in this excerpt we see first 2 lines of the song:

"Can we start o~~ver"

"or is this really the end"

The ~ is usually used to prolongate the preceding syllable in a different pitch. So if you see "o~~" it usually means that the singer changed the pitch twice while singing the syllable "o".

The whole file ends with an end-of-file marker "E".

Summary

The major takeaway from this section for you is:

• Ultrastar song consists of several files with audio & txt being the most important ones,

• tag in Ultrastar context means some kind of song metadata (e.g. artist, title),

• songs can have multiple vocal tracks,

• track's notes are organized into lines,

• beat is the smallest unit of time, its duration depends on the song's tempo (BPM).

Equipped with this basic knowledge, we can continue to the next article to actually start working on the song.

For the curious

Full explanation of the TXT file format, possible tags and their meaning can be found in the advanced section:

🗒️TXT file format

This is just for your curiosity at this point. You do NOT have to understand everything to be able to start.