Feedback v1.1

[locastan]

Hey Raven,
very strong start! I like where this is going. The Rapunzel Duet text conversion worked flawlessly, although the video did get stuck after about 45 seconds in for some reason I have to check upon. SCv3 had no problem converting it before.

Things currently missing from the SCv3 "features" that are not already shown on your TODO list:

• Ability to save and load your songlist so you don't have to add them all again when you redid maybe one song of 60. ;)
• Ability to manually change/update input files after the song is listed in the tool.
• Keeping the end results of successful conversions (video&audio) in the source folder of the song, defaulting to it or ask wheter to use them if they exist to speed up disc creation. (like sca/scv files)

QoL improvements:
Currently the toolkit relies on the tags of the Ultrasong.txt files having correct values for video, cover art and audio files. I'd suggest to fall back into a user browse prompt instead of an error message, so the user can provide the files if they are not found. (This is very probably already planned, but I'm mentioning this just to be on the safe side.)

Suggestion for a future feature:
If the video tag of the txt files contains a youtube link (either a full link, or something like "a=51Ez6ZVz68c" or "v=51Ez6ZVz68c") you could ask if the audio and video should be downloaded and converted from youtube. (Look at how UltraSinger (https://github.com/rakuri255/UltraSinger) handles this.) Cover art could be the video thumbnail too.

How is multilanguage support going to be? Is it just a tag set in some xml when building the iso, or do you need different localized versions of Singstar to repack into? (If you need help tanslating your tools UI texts to native german, I can help, btw.)

[locastan]

Oh also just found a small bug. Removing the very last song in the list so it ends up empty causes an index out of range error, but the tool does not crash hard.

[RavenDS]

Hey thanks for reporting !

Ability to save and load your songlist so you don't have to add them all again when you redid maybe one song of 60. ;)

Not sure what you mean by this? You can already load a folder with multiple songs, everytime you select a new folder on the right side on the tool, the list gets updated with all songs currently in that folder. Arrange this folder as wanted before selecting it, and you can add single songs later with the "+" button

Ability to manually change/update input files after the song is listed in the tool.

This is already possible, hit the "edit" button, it will open the txt in notepad.exe. Make your edits, save the txt then "Refresh Song list" from either the Edit or Tools tab

Keeping the end results of successful conversions (video&audio) in the source folder of the song, defaulting to it or ask wheter to use them if they exist to speed up disc creation. (like sca/scv files)

Yes, I thought of that and i'll include another checkbox that allows copying these files. Keep in my mind that all your converted data is stored in /tools/Disc during conversion, before it is paked as PAK files, then rebuilt as an ISO. So you can also navigate there after conversion (hence the "DISC folder will be deleted after you click OK" MsgBox) and backup pretty much everything you want.

But let's say you're making a 60 songs disc that will weight 6 GB. You will actually need 18 GB of free space at some point for the conversion. (6GB for converting the music & video files and placing them in /tools/Disc/IOP and IOP1 + 6GB For the PAK + 6GB For the the final iso). Duplicating them again will mean adding another 6GB on your hard drive.

Currently the toolkit relies on the tags of the Ultrasong.txt files having correct values for video, cover art and audio files. I'd suggest to fall back into a user browse prompt instead of an error message, so the user can provide the files if they are not found. (This is very probably already planned, but I'm mentioning this just to be on the safe side.)

I don't think this would be a QoL improvement and would actually rather degrade the QoL, right now all you have to do is edit the concerned txt and add it again using the "+" button (or even quicker, reload your songs folder as a whole after you edited all the txts!). Opening a browser window everytime an error is found would be a nightmare! Also that would probably lead some users to break the list most of the time, because they could navigate to files that are not located in the same folder as the txt. It just seems more logical to me to edit a single line of a TXT here but perhaps there's another side of this i'm not seeing ?

If the video tag of the txt files contains a youtube link (either a full link, or something like "a=51Ez6ZVz68c" or "v=51Ez6ZVz68c") you could ask if the audio and video should be downloaded and converted from youtube. (Look at how UltraSinger (https://github.com/rakuri255/UltraSinger) handles this.) Cover art could be the video thumbnail too.

While this is a very good idea, it's not gonna happen unfortunately, at least not in the way that you'd expect. It would require me to clutter this simple tool with a sh*tload of frameworks just to grab youtube videos, and it wouldn't even work most of the time (see this very common issue that requires manual inputs from the user). The software you linked also suffers from this issue (see here) and therefore it cannot work as standalone, it needs yt-dlp to circumvent it.
What can be done, is to convert these videos using external yt-dlp if it is installed and correctly setup by the user. But then again it would require a lot of error handling for something that would probably fail 50% of the time.
I'd suggest getting songs from https://ultrastar-es.org/ instead since they have everything (video & music) bundled.

The Rapunzel Duet text conversion worked flawlessly, although the video did get stuck after about 45 seconds in for some reason I have to check upon. SCv3 had no problem converting it before.

Yes, I also encountered this type of behaviour and that is actually quite puzzling. It cannot be because of the conversion itself, because regarding video conversion, the tool does the exact same thing as SCv3 (that is, calling external tools in a specific order with specific arguments). Try unchecking "Set .mp4 for all", and re-edit your txt and video filename to the original extension/filetype, if you remember. I might set this checkbox as disabled by default if that turns out to be the cause, but i honestly doubt it. IMO it has to do with movie.idx generation that can differ most of the time, this is not under my control and there are no tools or frameworks that allow for Singstar IPU/IDX encoding/decoding, unfortunately.

Last resort, it could be tied to the fact that we're using a more recent version of FFmpeg, that might encode in a way that some of the other converters don't expect. If that's the case I would rather prioritize stability over compatibility (since audio & lyrics playback is not affected), video conversion failing is pretty much what plagued the old SCv3. But i'll keep investigating to bring compatibility to the maximum!

Once again, thanks a lot for helping me and taking the time to test the tool! You'll also be credited in the next versions, in the "About" tab :)

[locastan]

(First off, this is complaining on a high level. The tool is working very well as is already.)

I understand it is possible by editing the txt file to swap out audio, cover, video files used by the tool itself. This is however not really user friendly if you do not know how the Ultrastar.txt format works and what the tags should be named. I have several txts that do not even have a cover art tag and I had to check up what I need to add to simply make the tool accept an image file that is right there in the same folder. A right-click context menu that allows to browse for a file on a song in the list like in SCv3 would help there.
This is also what would make a save/load list menu item necessary as we would be moving away from the data that is purely set up in the txt.

External vs internal organization is something we seem to disagree on. To me it feels counterintuitive to set up all the external folder structures and filenames up so the tool can read them automatically. If for example I have songs split up into different folders or drives and want to make a "best of" compilation the tool should allow me to do so without shuffling existing files around. Save/Load List would also make editing of past compilations and editions easier, as you don't have to keep dedicated folders with songs for each one.

About keeping converted files: I am not talking about keeping the completed compiled IMU/IDX files that contain all songs of the disc, but only the final ffmpeg converted video (pass3 M2V) and the converted audio of each song, so you can skip these workflow steps entirely after first build. Useful for fast rebuilding the iso later on because you made timing/pitch changes to fix the txt files. This gets more important for bigger ISOs, as it means the difference between waiting for half an hour or 1 minute instead to finish the build.

I noticed the nice touch of letting us inspect the Disc content after building until you hit OK. Is there a way to make after build edits to the Disc and then rebuild it again with changes made?

I understand the issues with yt download. It will probably more trouble than it's worth, however I can say that I never had the yt-cookie setup problem on my hands using UltraSinger to create files for new songs.

The FFmpeg.exe version problem could be an issue. I never had trouble with the old ffmpeg.exe that came with SCv3, but remember I had an error on passes when I used the new one. It doesn't recognize the -intra command (whatever that is used for) issued by SCv3. I noticed just testing now omitting the intra, that your tool generates about a 20MB (75 vs 56MB) bigger m2v than the ones I get when I encode with the SCv3 ffmpeg command line parameters for the 2 passes. Did you change anything there? Hmm...probably bitrate...I ran on -b 2000k.

BMP encoding for cover art is a bit lossy atm, as you already said in your TODOs. Did you find out what SCv3 uses to convert jpg to bmp?

[locastan]

Looking into the -intra command it seems to be deprecated and related to GOP settings. For newer FFmpeg.exe the -intra command can be subtituted with "-g 1" for intra only GOP. Maybe worth a try.

[RavenDS]

(First off, this is complaining on a high level. The tool is working very well as is already.)

No worries! I really do appreciate these kind of conversations as they help me brainstorm on several topics, and help me make choices for the tool :)

I understand it is possible by editing the txt file to swap out audio, cover, video files used by the tool itself. This is however not really user friendly if you do not know how the Ultrastar.txt format works and what the tags should be named.

I understand your point of view, the thing is if i make a Form dedicated to song details, in the end it would require even more button clicks and fiddling than opening the txt directly in notepad and changing a line. Making a context menu is not that hard but it would require overriding the DataGridView control almost entirely, something that i'm not really prepared to do atm. I understand that it's not user-friendly for ppl who don't know what they're doing, but imho it's pretty easy to understand the # tags in an Ultrastar file. Reading and understanding a txt file isn't that hard haha, especially when it has been codified for 10+ years. But i do agree that we should have both options, like "Edit .txt" and "Edit Song Details" as a separate form. I'll think about this when i'll make the Medley manager form :)

External vs internal organization is something we seem to disagree on. To me it feels counterintuitive to set up all the external folder structures and filenames up so the tool can read them automatically. If for example I have songs split up into different folders or drives and want to make a "best of" compilation the tool should allow me to do so without shuffling existing files around.

Duplicating & moving folders around in the Windows Explorer seems like a better option than having to tediously click several buttons in a tool for the same result. We don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Just make a new folder with all songs you want in that Best-Of. Each song should be a folder containing the txt, music, video and artwork (that's the UltraStar-Es structure and it should be the norm if you ask me), or you could put everything in the root "Best-Of" folder, but that would be messy. I know that some websites only provide the .txt with external references, and I don't support that for several reasons (but that's another topic hahah)

About keeping converted files: I am not talking about keeping the completed compiled IMU/IDX files that contain all songs of the disc, but only the final ffmpeg converted video (pass3 M2V) and the converted audio of each song, so you can skip these workflow steps entirely after first build.

I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but Singstar doesn't store all songs and videos in a single IPU/IDX. Each song has a separate IPU, MIB and IDX. So it would be useless to keep the M2V, because conversion would still need to be applied to go from M2V to IPU, not really a time gain. As you may have noticed, FFmpeg is not the part that takes the most time. The longest processing time is due to SDK2SS which processes m2V into IPU. So if we want to duplicate the processed files in order to save time when using the same songs on other discs, it will have to be in IPU, MIB and IDX format, this is what SCA and SCV store in SCv3. As for converting audio, it takes literally 4 seconds to go from a MP3 to an MIB, so it wouldn't make sense to clutter the hard drive with these converted MIB. Some ppl have notebooks with like 128gb SSDs hahaha, every Mb counts!

Is there a way to make after build edits to the Disc and then rebuild it again with changes made?

Absolutely! the "Tools" tab has a "Repack PAK file" button where you can just navigate to the Disc folder and Repack everything. PAKs will output in a folder called "PAKed" at the root of the app .exe, and the folder opens automatically after repacking. To repack the ISO manually, copy the PAK files to the @pop folder inside of the "Builder" folder and run PS2 ISO Rebuilder as you would normally, type "r" for rebuilding and "POP".

I understand the issues with yt download. It will probably more trouble than it's worth, however I can say that I never had the yt-cookie setup problem on my hands using UltraSinger to create files for new songs.

I will look into implementing something like that in the final version, after i finish reverse-engineering the R&B edition. I'm not saying it won't happen at all, but just not natively as part of the tool. It will indeed require yt-dl to be installed and setup correctly!

Looking into the -intra command it seems to be deprecated and related to GOP settings. For newer FFmpeg.exe the -intra command can be subtituted with "-g 1" for intra only GOP. Maybe worth a try.

Thanks, no worries, all deprecated commands have been replaced, otherwise it just wouldn't work. I triple checked with the FFmpeg documentation, ChatGPT and Claude to make sure i was correctly translating the deprecated command to the newer version. I don't have it on hand right now but it's litterally the same arguments, just updated. So i'm not really sure what could be causing the issues with videos, it could be from the video containers themselves. In every occurrence of this bug, re-downloading or re-encoding the video with a different codec fixed the issue for me. Perhaps it is caused by some updates to encoding/demuxing libraries in FFmpeg over time.

BMP encoding for cover art is a bit lossy atm, as you already said in your TODOs. Did you find out what SCv3 uses to convert jpg to bmp?

I use the exact same thing, BMP2TX2. It's just that SCv3 used yet an external .exe to convert JPG to BMP before going to TX2, and I thought that was super lame, so i wrote my own algorithm which is not very efficient regarding bit-depth. BMP2TX2 can only process 256 colors (8-bit depth) BMPs so that's why the artworks look degraded, i have to reduce the bit depth first. My goal is to get rid of BMP2TX2 entirely, as it turns out it might be possible to embed files with a higher bit depth. But yeah that's like last priority right now, and I thought the degraded images gave kind of an early-2000s look to it, so i didn't really bother haha

How is multilanguage support going to be?

In fact, multilanguage support is already sorted out, all it takes is to edit a .lua script in the Disc/EE/scripts/ folder with the approriate language, and remove that language from a list in the same file! In the meantime, you could replace the "english" text files in Disc/EE/strings/ by whichever language that you want

Removing the very last song in the list so it ends up empty causes an index out of range error, but the tool does not crash hard.

Whoops! forgot to remove that MsgBox, will do in next version :)

[locastan]

Gotcha! Yeah whatever is in the sca and scv files to speed up rebuilding is what I meant.

Fair points on the rest. It works, just means to setup everything right before using the tool. An example of a correctly setup minimal header for an Ultrasong.txt file might be good in the readme as heads up for users.

re-encoding the video with a different codec fixed the issue

Maybe we can find a commonly working codec the input video should have. Would you share what you find working most of the time?

Another small bug: When you steal away focus on the ISO Repacker cmd window because you are multitasking before the tool can enter "POP" you end up stuck. :D

[RavenDS]

Hey, i'm back with some updates :)

I succesfully booted an R&B disc yesterday, with one custom song. I think the R&B version checks for the DUMMY file on disc, which PS2 ISO Rebuilder usually removes for a small storage gain. Currently the only way i can boot the game, is by remaking the entire ISO using PS2 SDK tools. Obviously i can't automate that or distribute the SDK, so i'll have to find another way to make it work.

An example of a correctly setup minimal header for an Ultrasong.txt file might be good in the readme as heads up for users.

I will definitely automate the process of making valid headers when using the in-app editor, however i realized that not all .txt files are created equal in that matter. Some of them lack some tags and therefore might require user input. But i'll figure it out a way to ease out the process.

Maybe we can find a commonly working codec the input video should have. Would you share what you find working most of the time?

At the moment, encoding with X-Vid seems to work ok, but that doesn't make a lot of sense since some files where already encoded with this codec. I think it is linked to the number of "frames" and other data stored in songlist.xml, Singstar Creator used to copy the same information for EACH song so i replicated this behavior, but it's obvious this causes issues. However, i did find some source code to convert IPUs to M2Vs, written by the same person who made "SDK2SS" (Holger Kuhn). I will try to reverse this code so it can convert M2Vs to IPUs, but it's gonna be a tedious task as M2Vs are often encoded in different ways, and currently SDK2SS only supports .IDX files encoded with the official PS2 SDK. This is yet another format i have to explore. On a side-note, we might be able to downsize the IPUs to allow for smaller ISO sizes (see IPU Resampler), but i haven't tested that yet.

Another small bug: When you steal away focus on the ISO Repacker cmd window because you are multitasking before the tool can enter "POP" you end up stuck. :D

Yeah, that's the downside of using an external tool that does not accept arguments. One way to fix that would be to display a MsgBox when the usual video/audio conversion has finished, to let the user know that an ISO is gonna be built. However that would prevent the tool from automatically making an ISO when you're doing something else while it's converting, and I don't want to switch to another tool since PS2 ISO Rebuilder allows to rebuild from "empty disc" data, so kind of a dilemma here :D

I will keep on improving the tool in the following weeks, but i might not be available for a while, as i have lots of real-life work to do haha

Last point, some songs (2 out of 120 during testing) litterally crash the game entirely. I double checked the lyrics XMLs and songlist XMLs, and everything is supposedly right. This i cannot understand. The songs were "Bella" by "Maitre Gims" and "Jeune Demoiselle" by "Diam's", both taken from ultrastar-es.

[locastan]

Great news! Did you glean any info how rap is encoded in R&B xml?

Maybe you can get in touch with whoever made the ISO rebuilder. Maybe they are open to help with some custom coding or supply of source code.

Crashing the game on startup loading screen or just when you try to sing the particular song? It is possible trying a different bitrate for ffmpeg passes could help. Are the video files of those songs maybe bigger than the others?

[locastan]

Sidenot: On error messages, it would be great to either include the song name or list index the problem occured. Just got an error on a note overlap but I don't really know which song in my big folder caused it. :D

Edit: I might have missed it highlighting songs as it processes. Not sure if the highlight went away with the error message appearing or if I didn't notice. Will keep an eye on it.

[RavenDS]

Hey, so i've got good news, and bad news :/

The good news is, i found how to fully repack R&B ISOs and I already wrote code to support the R&B edition!

However it must be noted that this edition requires at least 7 songs (unsure if it's actually a song count or size requirement for IOP0.PAK, but 7 songs is the threshold) or else the game won't boot

Did you glean any info how rap is encoded in R&B xml?

Yes, and that's the bad news :( Unfortunately, Rap notes require lots of informations that are not part of the Ultrastar format. While i can spoof some of them, other infos like "Glottal", "Fric" etc are just impossible to "invent" and would require user-input for each single note. I attached an example XML (in txt form) taken from the R&B edition so you can see the different types of points needed for a rap sequence. I couldn't think of any way to circumvent this, so i'm just giving up on that part at the moment. Building R&B edition is still cool because it has more features than the Pop version.
summertime-rap.txt

Maybe you can get in touch with whoever made the ISO rebuilder. Maybe they are open to help with some custom coding or supply of source code.

I'll try to, but in the meantime i'll just display a MsgBox when the video/audio conversion ends, before the ISO is built.

Crashing the game on startup loading screen or just when you try to sing the particular song? It is possible trying a different bitrate for ffmpeg passes could help. Are the video files of those songs maybe bigger than the others?

Crashing the game when selecting these songs, I haven't investigated on this topic yet but I do believe it could be the videos, cause audio playback in menu is fine. Another song from Mulan doesn't record microphone input, even though BPM is ok and there are no overlapping notes. Pretty puzzling as always!
Still experimenting with video conversion, the next update of the tool will have several advanced options and commands so we can try out different things and figure out what's happening.

it would be great to either include the song name or list index the problem occured.

I updated the code in that regard, thanks for reporting it :D

I'll try to release the update next week-end with a bunch of new features, including boot screen/splash screen customization and R&B

[locastan]

The way I see it, that is very, very good news.
Most Rap parts seem to be just marked as both freestyle and rap, so that would be the baseline implementation for R notes. Glottal and Fric annotations seem to be telling the engine to listen to how hard flavored the stop of the sounds should be. I don't think (hope) it is that important for scoring. The example has no golden notes, so IDK if there is a R&B equivalent to the G "golden rap notes" of the Ultrasong format.

For the Mulan Song: Was BPM fine originally or did you have to scale with Karedi? Maybe there were very short notes that got scaled below a length of 1 or something.

Is there a way to nicely edit the lua file in the EE folder to change language? I tried some decompilers but they all tripped on the luaP header format.

[RavenDS]

Hey again!

Most Rap parts seem to be just marked as both freestyle and rap, so that would be the baseline implementation for R notes. Glottal and Fric annotations seem to be telling the engine to listen to how hard flavored the stop of the sounds should be. I don't think (hope) it is that important for scoring.

I already tried editing most parts and replacing all with "Fric" or "Glottal" and several other stuff, and it just wouldn't work correctly, sometimes not even playing back audio. These parameters were all set up in the Singstar engine and unfortunately there's no way to generate them based on pure Ultrasing data. I'm unsure if it's worth our time, as the rap algorithm has always been criticized for not being accurate. The "freestyle" mode seem to fit well for this usage, even if it's not scoring. I'm all for compatibility and stuff but this just seems impossible to me atm. However feel free to try things on your own and report on what works and what doesn't, perhaps we can find some workarounds, even though it will never be 100% compatible. I just don't have enough free time to do that right now, sorry

For the Mulan Song: Was BPM fine originally or did you have to scale with Karedi? Maybe there were very short notes that got scaled below a length of 1 or something.

I did have to scale the BPM with Karedi, however I ended up making my own version of the song so I didn't focus on it too much. I'll take another look at it when I can

Is there a way to nicely edit the lua file in the EE folder to change language? I tried some decompilers but they all tripped on the luaP header format.

Yes indeed! You don't need decompilers, just hex-edit the file with HxD to replace "English" with whatever language you want, and then replace your language from the lang list with "English" (right below the set-up language, in the same file). If you're not comfortable with Hex editing you can have chatGPT or whichever AI replace this for you. I can upload some updated LUAs too if needed, just tell me which language you want (i'm guessing, german? :D)

I also reverse-engineered the TX2 format which actually takes TGAs, not BMP files. I will make it part of the next update.
Won't be able to release an update this week-end but be sure it will be done by the end of next week!

[locastan]

Yes, and that's the bad news :( Unfortunately, Rap notes require lots of informations that are not part of the Ultrastar format. While i can spoof some of them, other infos like "Glottal", "Fric" etc are just impossible to "invent" and would require user-input for each single note. I attached an example XML (in txt form) taken from the R&B edition so you can see the different types of points needed for a rap sequence. I couldn't think of any way to circumvent this, so i'm just giving up on that part at the moment. Building R&B edition is still cool because it has more features than the Pop version.

I'd try just plain purging all the Point elements from the notes and see how that goes, in case you haven't tried that yet.