Creating songfile

How to create a valid TXT file with necessary metadata?

In this article you will learn how to create an empty song for Ultrastar in Karedi editor. Make sure to download the latest version of the application from here.

We will be working on a creative commons licenced song called Second Time Around by David Amber. Please download the following audio file:

In this tutorial we will just quickly go through all of the steps of the new song wizard. If you want to learn about everything in detail visit page dedicated to new song wizard.

Step 1: Open new song wizard

Open Karedi application and go to File -> New... in the menu.

Step 2 - Specify the artist and the title

In the popup that appears, you should specify the artist and the title of the song. In this case it is:

Artist: David Amber

Title: Second Time Around

Underneath you can see auto-generated filenames for all of the files that will be associated with our song. Let's stick to the defaults.

Step 3 - Choose the audio file

After clicking "OK" button, you will move to the next step - choosing the audio file on which we will be working. Choose the file downloaded from the link at the beginning of this section and click OK.

Step 3 - Choose output directory

Choose the directory in which your song will be saved and confirm with OK button.

Step 4 - Set BPM value

In the next step you have to specify the tempo of the song with BPM (beats per minute) value. You can use MixMeister BPM Analyzer to automatically find it out for you. Just open the application and drag & drop the mp3 file of our song to see the BPM:

Paste the value in the Karedi popup. You will see a warning. If you hover your mouse over it, you will see the following message:

The BPM of the song is too low for comfortable work in the editor so let's double it until it falls in the right range by pressing the button with ">>" symbol:

If you want to learn all about BPM go to this page.

Step 5 - Add additional information

In the last popup you can set any additional information for the song. For now let's just set the GAP value. GAP is the approximate time (in milliseconds) in which the singer starts to actually sing the song in the mp3 file. You can learn the value by listening to the song in any player that you have installed on your computer. For this song let's use the value of 5220.

Let's skip filling the rest of the tags for now. Just click ok after setting the gap.

Final result

When you confirm the last step your new song should be now loaded into Karedi:

When you go to the directory you chose in step 3, you should see a new sub-directory for your song with 2 files inside - the mp3 file & the txt file:

Karedi automatically copied the audio to the final directory.

Inside the TXT file you can see all of the metadata that you supplied so far:

#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
: 0 3 0 ~
E

Let's go to the next lesson to start learning how to actually map the vocal track.

Video

For the curious

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