Preparing other files

In this lesson you will learn

how to prepare the cover file,
how to prepare the background file,
how to handle the lack of video file.

Before you start

This lesson requires the songfiles that we have finished in the last lesson of this tutorial. If you don't have them, you can download all the necessary files here:

3MB

David Amber - Second Time Around [other_files].zip

Preparing other files

In the last lesson we have finished work on the txt files. However, as you probably remember from song format section, there are also other files that together create an Ultrastar song.

All of these files need to be in the same directory as TXT files

Preparing cover file

Cover file is the picture that will be displayed in the game when you go through your song's catalog:

Obtain some image

The image used is usually simply the cover of the album. If the song was not released as a part of any album, you can use some picture of the artist instead. If the song was an opening theme for some show and you are mapping this version of the song, you can use some image representing the show etc.

You should make sure that:

the image has decent quality,
there is some clear connection between the song and the cover image.

In case of our tutorial song, simply download the file from here (it should have 2500 x 2500 px resolution after download):

Copy the image to the song directory

Unzip the image and put it in the same directory as our TXT files are:

Rename the file

As you may remember, unless you specified othewise the cover file name is supposed to be Artist - Title [CO].jpg.

In our case it would mean David Amber - Second Time Around [CO].jpg

You can always double-check it in the txt file by looking at the #COVER tag:

Rename the file accordingly:

Adjust the image

The image you chose should already have decent quality, but on the other hand there is no need to use a full hd picture for a cover. It will be only displayed as a small picture after all.

Currently the image has 2500 x 2500 px. Let's use some image editor to downsize it to e.g. 700 x 700 px.

If your cover is not a square, this is a good moment to try to cut it into a square.

Check the result in Ultrastar

Load the song in Ultrastar and make sure that the result looks as expected:

Preparing background file

There is no video for this song so we will add a background file. Usually you will use some picture that is related to the song or artist.

The steps are almost the same as with cover picture. You just have to make sure to choose a high resolution picture this time as it will be displayed on the whole screen.

For this song, let's use one of the pictures on the artist website that has good quality e.g. this one:

Similarly to before:

Let's copy the file to the song folder
Rename it to David Amber - Second Time Around [BG].jpg (check #BACKGROUND tag in txt file in case of doubts about the filename)
Alter the image if necessary - crop some parts/resize the image so that is has some commonly used ratio e.g. 1920 x 1080 px meaning 16:9 ratio.
Check the result in Ultrastar

Double-check the file's extension. Filename must be exactly the same as defined in #BACKGROUND tag, "jpg" is not the same as "jpeg".

The result in Ultrastar should look similar to this:

If your song has no background image, remove the #BACKGROUND tag

Some Ultrastar distributions may log errors if the file specified by the tag does not exist. If your song has no background, removing its tag from the txt file is considered a good practice.

Preparing video file

This song has no video available so we will just remove the #VIDEO tag from both txt files:

You may of course use Karedi's tag editor to remove this tags

It's just simpler to do it manually in txt file since we are working on the files in the song directory directly now.

However if you plan to do any manual changes to the tags, either have Karedi closed or reload the song immediately (F5) after saving the txt file. Otherwise Karedi will overwrite your changes on next save.