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It's still early, but it's time! ABC Song Notations

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by Darkevony, Dec 7, 2013.

  1. Darkevony

    Darkevony Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    It's still very early into the beta but I'd like to discuss with all the dedicated fans about the .abc notations for songs you can play on your in-game instruments!

    The default song that comes with the game is Canon in D. How we go about creating .abc notations and such are left to the people who actually do know how to make them and to already made .abc files for songs scattered around the internet in the small quantities, but even then, Starbound seems to work much differently in terms of what it can do with those files as opposed to some .abc file readers and media players. I've been able to convert only a few songs (three in fact) into .abc notation files and got them to work smoothly by placing them in the Starbound>asset>song, folder, and I'll discuss more of this below

    I'm new and still very much learning at all there is to .abc notations and midis and all that jazz, so what I did was get myself acquainted (to the basics) of what .abc notations could be made from or into. I found out that there are a few midi to abc converters made for a Lord of the Rings game (which I'm clueless about) and that I tried several ways to get that to work but none were successful.

    One program I tried from midi to abc did create an abc file and it did work on Starbound with the instruments, but the music from the original midi was distorted and sounded nothing like the songs. At first I thought this was because of the multiple lines in the midi used to create the abc notation file, but when I tried one that was only one line, that too turned out wrong. Another one, again for LoTR, created abc notations, but all spaced out, which made a really long list of notes. This one, in turned, crashed my game every time I tried to play the song.

    So I was left with having to go scout the internet for abc songs that were already made.

    One website brought me to a list of things, and with only one song in mind, I was disappointed not to see it in the list. I tried several songs on that site, like the Coldplay - Clocks song that was several leagues of length in the abc notation on the notepad and I also thought it would crash like the spaced out one that LoTR program made, but it worked! It worked smoothly. I tried another one relevant to the song I wanted and found it worked too. That song was the Ducktales main theme.

    The song I wanted was Ducktales, The Moon Theme. That's the song that made me learn a lot of the basics. I tried converting many midi files and musicxml files and several others but to no avail. So here I am, at the mercy of you all, hoping that someone answers the call of this post and finds me a working Ducktales Moon Theme in abc notations for the Starbound instruments.

    (I will update the post if you guys want me to show you the basics on how to take already made .abc notation songs and place them in Starbound.)
     
  2. FreezeYouAway

    FreezeYouAway Tentacle Wrangler

    I tried this out, and I got one song to play, but when I tried to get another to play it crashed. Now whenever I open the song ingame it crashes. Also gibbe the link to this clocks abc notation that works! I'd love to follow my friend around with my Ocarina and be his BGM player C:
     
  3. Darkevony

    Darkevony Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    http://reissendewoelfe.de/abc/ <-- That's the website I got most of the ones working from. The song itself is Coldplay - Clocks. Sounds like you already know how to make the abc notations from existing songs, so I'll hold off from tutorializing. Give a shout if you don't.
     
  4. Jawa108

    Jawa108 Yeah, You!

    Helllo there,
    This'll mark my first official post on these forums, though I have been a lurker around these parts lately.
    I spent about an hour and a half tonight working on a Final Fantasy Victory theme, and it turned out swimmingly.
    If anyone needs any help on how ABC works, or has any questions, feel free to ask. ;)

    ((Edit: It's possible that I could make you a Moon theme, but it'd take me a while just because I'm a perfectionist.))
     
  5. Darkevony

    Darkevony Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    A perfectionist is what I wanted! Take all the time you need and message me when you have it ready if you do decide to make it. It's my favorite piece of any music ever, and it would fit so well with exploring the moons on some planets. Thanks again Jawa, in advance or even just for offering, I'm a little busy and artistically uncoordinated to actually create the music myself, so the help is much appreciated.
     
  6. Jawa108

    Jawa108 Yeah, You!

    Yeah, I've always loved that track, and I can only imagine how well it'd fit into this game.
    I'll get to work on it first thing tomorrow, but for now...
    Sleep.
    I've spent the last two nights up until 2:30 AM playing this game, haha.
     
  7. Darkevony

    Darkevony Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Know the feel! I've spent several hours not playing it because I've been looking for the score. Spent several sleepless nights before that with the game itself. Hehe.
    My outburst of dedication to find the song came from finding a lead guitar in my game. Thanks very much again!
     
  8. Sinaqui

    Sinaqui Title Not Found

    Here's a site with a collection of ABC files written for LOTRO
    This is a program that converts MIDI files to ABC files for use with LOTRO
    Experimenting with these might give you some insight on how it all works if you wished to build a program around converting MIDI to ABC for use with Starbound, possibly you could contact the program creator.
     
  9. Deshiva

    Deshiva Master Chief

  10. BitHorizon

    BitHorizon Ketchup Robot

    I have like 10 songs ready for playing in the game right now using a LOTRO converter on MIDIs and I haven't had any crashes.
     
  11. rexeven

    rexeven Void-Bound Voyager

    Does anybody know if you can have multiple parts for different instruments? If so, how do you sync them up?
     
  12. MisterMac

    MisterMac Space Hobo

    And on that note, do we know if we can condense multiple parts into the same file, using ABC's X header field? This feature was implemented into LOTRO, and made multi-part songs easier to organize. Considering that (I think) you need to be playing songs of the same title to properly sync in-game, and if this limitation remains, then this could be a critical feature for the music system.

    It would also make a lot of multi-part songs from LOTRO almost immediately transferable to Stabound. It's been a long time since I played LOTRO, but I still have a lot of good tunes from when I did.
     
  13. BigTheCat

    BigTheCat Space Spelunker

    I would love to know if you get your hands on Moon theme. I've been looking for it for the past few days aswell and had the same problems with the converted version not playing at the correct tempo

    Edit: Right, so I tried a different converter. I assumed everyone is using EasyABC. Well the Lotro community have had their way with this format for a while now so theres a lot of tools they've made. I found one that works perfect for Starbound. https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?121331-LotRO-MIDI-Player-and-MIDI-to-ABC-converter
    Thank you Digero! All you have to do is go to file and import midi, pick the midi. Then try your best to get transposed adjusted to where you have the least amount in "notes out of range". Disabling tracks helps with that also. Best part is you only need this one program now!
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2013
  14. Dodgerr

    Dodgerr Intergalactic Tourist

    I could definitely use a little help getting them to work. I don't really know anything about computers, and I can't really figure out what I'm supposed to do to download the files. From what I understand when you open the abc file on the websites, a bunch of text comes up, and that's about as far as I know haha. If you could tell me how I go about even making that text into an abc file that will play in game I'd appreciate it. Just need the basics of what to do. I'm using a Mac if that makes any difference.
     
  15. Darkevony

    Darkevony Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Copy and paste that text into a notepad document. Then, go to File tab and save as. In the bottom, change the option from Text document to all files. You'll name the file itself whatever you want it to be and at the end, you have to make put ( .abc) in the name, don't forget the dot between the name and abc. Save it and bam. Once that is done, you're free to place the newly created .abc notation inside Starbound's asset>songs folder. Starbound's folder is located inside of steam folder in Program Files (x86)>Steam>Steamapps>Common>Starbound>assets>Songs.

    That's the basics, hope you get it to work!
     
  16. Dodgerr

    Dodgerr Intergalactic Tourist

    Thanks, seems simple enough, the only problem is that I'm on a mac which doesn't have notepad. I tried doing it with TextEdit but there doesn't seem to be an option on there to change it to all files. Any idea what the problem is? Thanks for your help so far anyway though, appreciate it.
     
  17. Darkevony

    Darkevony Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Oh, hehe, sorry. I'm not well acquainted with mac at all. I can't help you there. Your best bet is googling a know-how on textedit file extension creation
     
  18. Malachar

    Malachar Void-Bound Voyager

    Ahh yes, the music. I've always loved being a bard in games, especially ones that actually let you play music. (LOTRO/Mabinogi)

    Shame it doesn't use the MML format mabi does, i'd have a huge library of songs hehe.

    I do recommend the LOTRO music site as many songs tend to work relatively well imported straight into starbound.
     
  19. Dodgerr

    Dodgerr Intergalactic Tourist

    I actually got it working using the EasyABC program. Thanks anyway for your help. :)
     
  20. Sinaqui

    Sinaqui Title Not Found

    I'm having some issues where Starbound seems to just stumble and fall over on some abc files, maybe too many notes too fast, or something?
     

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