Frequently Asked Questions

Help yourself! This FAQ is for open music games in general. It might not address all of the games or opinions. Please visit the websites of the games.

🟩 For Players

🎮 Games

Which game should I choose for playing? There are so many projects!

Every game can be big fun. But to be honest every game has big flaws in different ways from user perspective or developer perspective.

For a deeper understanding check "Overview Karaoke Games" and "Recommended Games" in overview section. It tells you "whys" and "flaws".

To make it short:

If you like singstar or let's sing, we recommend Melody Mania for best overall user experience at the moment, followed by Vocaluxe.
If you like games like guitar hero, rockband or dance dance revolution: Performous is way to go. And there is also YARG.

What's the difference between UltraStar Deluxe, UltraStar Play and Melody Mania?

To keep it simple: Ultrastar Play and Melody Mania are forks of UltraStar Deluxe, written in unity game engine.

They try to bring UltraStar Deluxe to modern technology standards. Cause UltraStar Deluxe uses old PASCAL Coding that no developer what to use anymore.

Ultrastar Play is the free version from the same Developer. But currently it is not further maintained.

Melody Mania is a commercial version on Steam to compensate the spend developement effort. It will have some exclusive features like online multiplayer. But the developer plans to give back some general improvements, bug fixes and so on from Melody Mania to UltraStar Play after a while.

What is Vocaluxe?

Vocaluxe is the original successor to UltraStar Deluxe started in May 2011. The developers wanted to bring open source singing games on a sustainable technology (like UltraStar Play now) and make a game that is more than just a singstar clone. The game turned out to be a rewrite from scratch, written in C# with MS Visual Studio. Unity engine weren’t suited for small games that time.

Today Vocaluxe is 50% complete and has a fully defined roadmap looking for developers that can handle a custom game engine or re-build Vocaluxe in Godot Engine. It is the minimalistic designed brother project of UltraStar Play/Melody Mania with different gameplay elements and a part of open music games portfolio.

Do the games update automatically?

Most of the games have to be updated manually. But this feature is planned for future. Melody Mania already updates automatically. It uses Steam. For the other games we recommend right now to check for updates at least half a year. It's happening a lot.

Do the games include songs?

The games are by default distributed without any audio/video/lyrics content. The game developer develop the software, not the content.

Third parties can create and distribute content. For example, third parties may sell song packages for their region according to license requirements.

For development and testing, the game developers use either self-made content or Creative Commons licensed content. This is what you typically see in published screenshots of the games.

Do all the games use UltraStar Song txt-files? Can I switch between them?

Yes, all the games claim to use UltraStar Song Format. And they support it often good enough. It's such an popular easy to read format.

Yet every game and third-party tool handles txt files different in many ways and that's often causing confusion.

We're working on a standardized format definition right now to solve all this problems.

Why should I play open music games?

Commercial games shut down if there's not enough revenue. Or just new consoles coming out. You loose all the songs you bought when changing the device. With open music games you can keep your collection over time because they can evolve with the future as long as it has a contributing community behind it.

Cause open source software is free it can also powering other new projects. For instance: If you support performous maybe a dj-music game can evolve in future based on performous code.

How does the future of the games look like? Are there new features & next steps?

Look into "Meet The Teams". You will find roadmaps or milestones for every team/projects there and get an insight in what is planned.

What happens to UltraStar Deluxe?

UltraStar Deluxe will be maintained but not really developed anymore due to it's old technology PASCAL that no developers wanna use nowadays.

But of course there are successor projects like UltraStar Play, Melody Mania, or Vocaluxe that are based on modern technology. Here are the new active developers.

The technical advantage can make the new games evolve and grow faster compared to UltraStar Deluxe and its forks.

👥 Community

Where can I get help for technical Issues? Who is gonna help?

Got problems with mics? Or songs? If you don't find the answer here or in known issues try out our Help Desk channel on our Discord. Players help players there. Many of them are so experienced that you wouldn't need direct help from a coder.

If you don't find help there you can try the special development Discord Server for Performous or Melody Mania. Here you can go to channels like "issues" or "user support". There is also a gitter chat for UltraStar Deluxe.

Keep in mind: if you do self-service then the developers got more time and energy to improve the games.

How can I get to know other players?

We provide event channels for different countries. You can invite players to your next offline singing party or be invited. Or just chit-chat in general various channel.

Is there an international online community? Which platform?

You are right here. Join our Discord community Server. Our main language is english yet we provide multi-language support for help desk and event channel.

Can I wish for a song txt file?

There are no song creators that do wishes in this community. But you can talk about good songs of course while chit-chating.

We have a curated song backlog to memorize most favorite songs that are liked by many. Yet it's not to be understood as wishlist.

The best way to get your favorite songs (that maybe special interest) is creating songs by yourself. It's easier than ever. Start with Karedi, YASS reloaded or UltraStar Creator now! In future there will be even AI features for more convenience with UltraSinger Project.

To help yourself: concentrate on songs that have an offical music video. cause all these games are designed for video backgrounds while singing in the end.

🎵 Songs

Where can I find more songs?

There are several third party websites that offer UltraStar song downloads. However, usually some effort is required to get these working.

Please bear in mind that any song, video, lyrics, music score, etc. may be copyright protected in your country.

If you download txt files (aka timecode files) please buy the equivalent music/music video files accordingly in trusted stores. Or vice versa, download only txt files for music that you already legally own.

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The most active sites are:

USDB.animux (only txt files, works best with USDB SYNCER)
UltraStar-es (not legally proper! we do not recommend because of illegal torrents!!)

Use these websites at your own discretion.

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Open Music game stands firmly against all forms of piracy. We neither support nor endorse piracy, as it is a violation of copyright law with serious legal consequences.

The best way to get songs (that maybe special interest) is creating songs by yourself. Check out our song editor section.

How to add songs?

An UltraStar song consists of at least

and audio file
a txt file (plain text file) with information about the song (audio file, artist, title, lyrics, notes, etc.)
other files are optional (cover image, background video, etc.)

If you have all files of an UltraStar song

you you can add a new song folder in the settings that points to your UltraStar song
or add your UltraStar song to an existing song folder

You can create the txt file for a new song using one of the song editors.

How can I organize my song collection easily?

You can use UltraStar Manager or YASS reloaded. These are free and libre management tools which simplifies handling of big song collections. For instance they allow semiautomatic fixes of typical issues in UltraStar txt files. Go to "Tools" section.

Is there a database or store to download new songs with videos?

There is no official song service/store yet for UltraStar songs where you can buy complete songs with audio and video files. This is due to copyright issues.

If you download txt files from third-party websites please buy the equivalent music/music video files accordingly in trusted stores.

Besides from a central store, third parties can create and distribute content. For example, third parties may sell song packages for their region according to license requirements.

Can I use songs from YouTube?

No, not directly. YouTube does not allow to use their content this way. And the current technologys or mechanics of the listed games do not support streaming from YouTube directly.

Where can I buy music videos legally?

You can buy music videos legally for instance in iTunes Store (m4v-files) or other video plattforms - only for your personal use. However it may be illegal if you put them online.

⁉️ Issues

Why does my lyrics look strange? I only see ????

The game you're using can't handle or guessing automatically the encoding of the txt-file.

Make sure to convert the text file properly to UTF-8 encoding with "saving as".
Make sure that your song editor or tool is configured to save files with UTF-8.
Only download and upload txt files with UTF-8 encoding

⚠️ Watch out: if you go on third party pages it may occour that the txt file are saved as CP-1252/ANSI and only looks like UTF-8. Its just saved but not proper converted. That's a fault of the third-party.

Don't worry all games and third party will do UTF-8 in future - everyone agreed to that.

ℹ️ UTF-8 encoding is the future. It is a great encoding that can represent a vast number of symbols from all kinds of languages. Other encodings, like Windows code pages, are far more limited and are only suitable for a small family of languages.

My duets do not work? Why?

While up- or downloading txt-files in third-party applications it can be that information about duet is cut off from the txt-file. Right now as a workaround you have to manually add Duet information in txt file if this happens. Watch this problem and it's solution in known issues section.

Why are notes and text out of sync with music?

There can be many reasons for this.

Maybe your audio and txt file were made for different versions of the song. For instance album vs. video vs radio version. Try to find the fitting audio file with the right version.
The BPM and GAP in the txt file are simply just wrong. Try to correct them with an song editor.

How can I use Cyrillic lyrics? I only see ????

Try downloading your TXT file with UTF8 encoding. The often used CP1251 encoding can’t display cyrillic.

If you use Vocaluxe, try UTF8-BOM or add #ENCODING:UTF8 (or else Vocaluxe will guess it is CP1251 encoding).

🎤🎸 Setup / Hardware

Can I play with guitars from Guitar Hero or Rockband?

In Performous any connected Guitar Hero and Rock Band instruments are detected automatically. All instruments that are suitable for XBOX360 or PS3 and Wii work great with Performous. But they came with USB dongles for those systems originally so you need them.

Instruments from PS4 / XBOX One that uses Bluethooth may need some mapping. Generally if something is supported by SDL2 then it will work.

By default the keyboard can also be used to control every instrument type (guitar/drums/dance pad), but this can be disabled in the config menu.

Can I use USB Singstar Microphones for the games?

For technical reason you can't use them for UltraStar Play at the moment. But you can use them for UltraStar Deluxe, Melody Mania, Vocaluxe and Performous.

🤝 Contribution

Is there a way to support the projects with a donation?

Yes many of the driving forces enabled donation apps. Check out our "Become A Sponsor" page. This really helps them and give them a feeling of appreciation. It's so important in open source scene to value everybodys work.

Coders often got good regular jobs but designers, testers and pr experts always need compensation and our community need some money to finance our tools.

Why donate?

Developers have different kind of costs to bear. It's not only their time they're investing. It's also:

hosting costs for websites
or license costs for tools.

With money you make sure that the projects are maintained. It shows that you care. You even make it possible that poor players can play a quality game even when they normally couldn't afford it.

Why is there such chaos in the open music game scene?

There are many reasons for this.

One reason could be that there was no shared organization and community for years. Many coders were just doing their thing and don't having the energy about thinking all games, tools, txt-file-hostings and teams together. There's a lack of holistic view.

Another problem is that there weren't any project leads that make decisions actively - only maintainers keeping rough basics alive. It's still quite uncommon to have project managers in open source games. But this is essential when a community can't agree on features or new coders have to be found.

As a consequence without a motivated lead building a team there are no proper development teams with clear roles.

Finally, most of the projects use or used custom game engines. But nearly all modern game devs expect to have standard engines like unity, godot or unreal. They don't want to or simply can't build everything from scratch, especially unpaid or without any personal social benefits. This is why there is hardly progress for years.

What has to be done to bring the scene as a whole forward?

There are 4 ways on a strategic level to make things better generally:

1) Built a shared organization and harmonized standards, co-working between different teams, talking with each other and finding synergies - across all games.
2) Every game or tool project gets an experienced or highly motivated "Owner" a leading figure that makes decisions and search actively for coders.
3) The community and owners build proper teams with clear roles to reduce individual workload: UI Designer, Sound designer, Programmer, Projectlead etc.
4) The games are migrated to standard game engines.

What can I do to help the scene?

As a player or song creator you can stick to our open music games plattform and spread the word. Just be kind to project leads or developers and say thanks. Tell this your coder or designer friends and look out for open source enthusiasts.

As a developer: Stick to our open music games organization on GitHub. Join our general team. Talk with other teams across.

🟣 For Song Creators

Are there any tools for me to make songs by myself?

Yes, there are good Song Editors for free working on Windows, Linux and Mac. Go to our "Song Editors"-Section to get an overview.

Some are included in games and some are stand alone. Karedi has the easiest installation. So may try to start with this one.

Whats the best song tutorial? There are many!

Most of the tutorials you find may be outdated. For the best start we recommend the beginners tutorial from Karedi Song Editor Developer Nianna.

It's the most updated modern and complete tutorial, that is in sync with our common song standards of open music games. Even experienced creators find advanced guides in that tutorial.

For a quick video the best you can have right now is UltraStar Play song tutorial.

Is there an AI tool nowadays to make creating faster?

Try out UltraSinger Song Editor. It automatically detects notes, rhythms and even lyrics. Yet it has no graphical user interface.

It's in developement but promising. It improves workflow a lot. Though you always have to do corrections to get a good song in the end.

Please bear in mind not to use it on songs that are copyrighted in your country.

How much time does it take to create a song txt file?

Starting from scratch with just an audio file, it takes at least 2 hours for even experienced creators to make a quality song with all nice details.

If you're a beginner it propably is more than 4 hours to have your first proper song with golden notes and getting used to the tools. Once you're in the groove it's getting faster.

Good news: Setting rhythms can happen in minutes through tapping. And it's fun! Finetuning is the biggest thing.

Start with a song you know by heart.

🔷 For Developers

👥 Organization

How can I join a team and improve their project? As a designer or coder?

Here is a short guide: How To: Start as Developer in 5 Steps.

Introduce yourself via our GitHub introduction section or via E-Mail (join@open-music-games.org)

To get an idea what we're working on: look directly in github Issues of your favorite project. We got milestones and a task board.

If you have troubles with onboarding or questions about milestones and team building talk with Marwin on GitHub introduction area.

How do I know when the teams need help?

Check out our team page to see all teams that we know. It often speaks for itself. We keep it up to date regulary (at least once a month). Follow our official job board on GitHub as well.

The teams always need at least 2 Game Programmers, 2 Game Artists and 1 Game Designer. As well as at least 1 Translator and 2 Testers. The more the better.

As you can propably guess all projects need to build up proper teams. The most important thing is to ease the stressed coders. Often they do too much all by themselves and mixing up roles. Which leads to exhaustion and stagnacy.

To make it easier for everyone Open Music Games build up and maintains shared teams for all projects (Social Media / Community Management, Non-Profit Marketing, Translations, Quality Assurance/Testing, Legal etc.).

Are there roles in teams? Who is doing what?

The teams rely on following typical roles for game developement:

📊 Project manager: A project manager oversees all the developmental processes, defines the milestones and prioritize the tasks and features. He/she anticipates any potential problems or risks they may encounter. Plus they do onboarding/offboarding of team members.

💻 Game programmers: Game programming involves writing the code for the game, building the game engine, and producing playable versions for prototyping and eventual release.

📐 Game designer: Video game designers develop the rules of the gameplay. Designers determine the difficulty of gameplay, as well as the type of obstacles the player will encounter.

🎨🔊 Game artists: Animators, 3D artists, and FX artists are all responsible for developing the look and feel of the in-game assets. Sound designers and audio engineers create all the noises heard in-game, from the opening theme to the sound effects of the menu.

✅ Testers (QA): The quality assurance team tests a game over the course of its development. They report any bugs or crashes they experience.

🌍 Translators: Translators ensures that the game (incl. websites) is available and understood in many languages.

The roles has to be still implemented in GitHub pages and maybe in various related Discords.

How much do I have to commit at least to be a proper member?

We hope that you invest 8-16 hours per month. At least for 3 months. It's always possible to work more. You can always leave the teams (if your personal situation changes). Just tell us.

Are these games only made for PCs?

All open music games are intended to be on PC (Windows, Mac, Linux).

For different reasons it's not generally intended to bring them on consoles like Playstation, XBox or Nintendo Switch.

It maybe that some projects try to bring their game on Android and iOS (including a companion App) as well. But this is an exception. Performous and Vocaluxe can be controlled via smart phone but not with a particular app. They can be controlled via a webbrowser interface on your phone (no installation required).

🚀 Motivation

Are there credits in games? Will I be listed there?

Yes. All teams have or will implement a credits screen in game. You will be mentioned with name/username and your role for instance "game designer (2012-2016)".

So even if you're not an active team member anymore your effort will be clearly visible for every player.

What do I get from joining a team and working passionate for the projects?

Fun. Experience. Donations. Credits. Purpose.

All these projects are perfect if you...

... wanna built up your artist portfolio as graphic designer
... are a student in game academies and wanna learn things
... need some purpose as a good programmer with a regular job
... believe in open culture spirit
... meet new friends or like minded people

Why should I put energy in open music games as developer?

Commercial music games always implode because they are commercial and have high license costs. Open music games are a way out of that logic, they are non-commercial.

You indirectly help musicians that are not listed in charts and make them visible.

Cause open source software is free it can also powering other new projects. For instance: If you support performous maybe a dj-music game can evolve in future based on performous code.

📘 Legal / Copyright

Aren't these games illegal? Aren't there copyright issues?

The games have no copyright issues cause they don't include song packages.

Developers do the software not the content.
The games are developed with creative commons songs.
Third parties may sell song packages in future to players in their region according to license requirements.
Players can buy music and music videos in trusted online stores for their personal use.

All the ingame assets (graphics and sounds) can be used in open source contexts and beyond. The majority of the used content is based on free pixabay or pexels content license, or game artists released their work under creative commons license. All license details are documented in the projects.

Doesn't you get trouble with the big ones if the games going to be professional?

Open Music Games (OMGs) and commercial rhythm games are no enemies. They have totally different circumstances and adress different audiences:

OMGs are only for pc and not for consoles.
OMGs require way more effort from players to get going, especially buying and compiling the content on their own. Commercial ones are comfortable and include content already.
OMGs have unreliable player support. There is no money back guarantee cause they're non-commercial.
The scene around OMGs seems to do popular music but is way more build around specific tastes or special interest music. There is no explicit focus on the latest charts. Time Codes for hits are often made with a delay of two years.
OMGs may require additional pc hardware in contrast to commercial games. So they can even be more expensive than commercial games depending on custom setup of players.
OMGs are build to be customizable and extendable (for instance theming or having more than 4 Players).
OMGs will propably never have online modes, cause there is no server infrastructure.

In the end Open Music Games will always be a niche phenomenon, even if they're standards and teams are more professional. Commercial Games are always more comfortable and accommodating for quick and simple fun.

🟪 For Musicians

Why should I as licensor or musician support open music games?

1 With open music games there is another reason again for players to buy mp3-files and music videos files in online stores instead of only stream them via spotify or youtube. So there is potentially an additional gain for musicians and licensors.

2 Cause open music games are not bound to a specific set of popular chart songs they help muscians that are not listed in charts. It may help them to gain more money (through buys of files in common digital stores) and to get more attention in general.

Commercial rhythm games in contrast can only be successful if they use the most popular songs to get the biggest crowd (and revenue) as possible. They are by default not really interested in niche music or special interest, except if there is a hype.

3 Open music games are here to stay, maybe enabeling a continous small revenue for (mostly niche) musicians in general. The projects are non-commercial and don't wanna reach the biggest audience as possible. They are made by music lovers, investing their time just to get purpose. The players themself buy individually at their own discretion mini-licenses via music stores for their personal use. Like buying vinyl editions.

In contrast big commercial music games always implode as history shows, mostly supporting only the most well-known songs. Singstar, guitar hero, rockband or fuser vanished on the long run because of the incredible high license cost and the instable trends in games industry. The costs are so high for them because of the commercial circumstances and the intended high amout of audience.

Open music games are a way out of that cycle and are independend of common gaming consoles. However commercial games may have by far a better quality and comfort in many ways. The teams and player service in open music games can be unreliable and the players have to invest in additional pc hardware.

So open music games and commercial music games are no enemies. They have different target groups and totally different circumstances. Licensors and musicians can directly or indireclty profit from both of them.

Can I license my songs for all open music games?

Right now it’s not possible due to capacity and the games are still not complete. But there are plans in future to enable this. Maybe this will be possible in 2026.

How would be the conditions of licensing?

Licensing songs for open music games would mean that you allow open music games organization using notes and lyrics for free worldwide (represented in a special timecode karaoke file format) but players always need to buy music files / or music video files in trusted stores at their own. In a database website we would link directly to your store pages.

So basically we use the popularity of the games to promote your music and increasing your revenue without earning money by ourself. Plus we would never use your work to train AI.

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