Stepmania Recolorizer Help

There are two main parts of this program: the drawing part and the coloring part.

Drawing Part

Start by choosing a .sm file (.sm.old is fine too). Open it in a text editor such as Notepad, and then paste the entire thing into the first textbox. Set the options if you want (they're described in more detail below), and then click the draw button to get a picture of the entire file. The picture shows what you'd see if you played the file on a Cmod, which means that a given time interval will always be converted into the same distance. Mines, holds, and rolls are supported, and files can have 4 or more columns. Negative BPMs won't crash the program, but they probably won't display properly either.

"Arrow spacing" is a number describing how far apart arrows are. It's equivalent to a Cmod of that amount. On a constant BPM song such as Disregard (BPM=300), setting the arrow spacing to that BPM will make 4th notes barely touch; setting it to twice that BPM will make 8th notes barely touch; and so on.

By default, this program will choose the first chart it finds in the file, and draw it. If you want the program to draw a specific chart, you can specify the difficulty and the game the chart is written for. It will then look for the first chart with those options. If no chart is found, no notes will be displayed.

Coloring Part

Once the file is drawn, click any note to change its color. A normal click will increment the beat type (4th to 8th to 12th and so on, wrapping around) and a ctrl+click will decrement it. To avoid the impossible situation of two differently colored notes at the same time, if one note is changed all the other notes in that chord will be changed as well.

There is also an option to change all notes of a certain type to another. This isn't good for small-scale changes, but it will save a lot of time on large-scale changes (such as making all 16th notes in a file green).

Finally, when you're done coloring the file, click the remake button, and a new SM file will be generated with this chart in it. The song name and artist, graphics, offsets, etc. will remain unchanged, but a new set of BPM changes will be created. The algorithm I use tends to generate a lot more BPM changes than in the original file, but this won't affect the color or timing of the notes.