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Creating Custom Music for your Board

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nikkiwritescode edited this page Jan 29, 2024 · 22 revisions

Table of Contents

Prerequisites

This guide uses Audacity, which can be downloaded for all platforms at https://www.audacityteam.org/download However, we split by Operating System at the .brstm level. This is because Windows users can use a nice GUI method, whereas Mac and Linux users have to get their hands dirty with the command-line. This guide covers both scenarios, so grab whichever file is relevant to your setup.

Note

The OpenRevolution team has stated that they plan to one day have a GUI frontend, so this guide may eventually be able to be re-written to use it on all platforms.

Getting Started

Custom music is an important aspect in making new boards and backgrounds feel new. In the original game, arcade, auction, stockbroker, and venture card music tracks were global, but CSMM has now enabled these (and many other) music tracks to be set on a per-board or per-background basis. CSMM also now allows a single board to use multiple varying tracks for different switch states! Therefore, you can now set many tracks for a single board if you want to. Though this guide focuses largely on the creation of a single track, we list the various different tracks that are possible to set in your board's descriptor file in the Descriptor Music Key Reference section below.

Warning

Please be mindful of music copyright when creating music for your board. Distributing licensed music is a no-no, so please refrain from doing so. Irrespective of legality, people who want to stream to platforms like Twitch will not appreciate having sections of their VODs muted because you used a copyrighted song. So please keep this in mind when configuring music for your board.

Importing a Track to Audacity

Let's finally get to creating a track! For this guide, I'll use a personal favorite of mine. If you want to follow this guide in a 1:1 fashion, grab Rigil Kent System from the Star Cruiser for Sharp X68000 soundtrack over at KHInsider. Otherwise, you are welcome to use whatever music you would like, being sure to follow this guide only generally as specifics pertaining to the song will not apply to you.

Normalizing volume levels

Save the above file somewhere (.flac and .mp3 files both work), then open it in Audacity. Press Ctrl + A to select the entirety of the waveform, then go to Effect > Normalize and set Normalize peak amplitude to 0.0 dB, then click OK. Screenshot of the Normalize panel

Removing the silence at the start of the file

This track, like most, has a negligible silence to start it, which will result in a gap if we try to use the beginning of the track as a loop point. This step will not apply when the loop start is further along in the song, after some intro or something. But in this case, we want to remove this gap. To do so, move and zoom as necessary to the very beginning of the track, and select the bit before the waveform begins. Press DELETE on your keyboard to remove it. The following image shows what this looks like when it's selected.

Tip

Keyboard and mouse users can zoom by holding Ctrl and using the scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

Mac OS trackpad users can use gestures in Audacity, and pinch-and-zoom will zoom in and out. Two finger swiping can navigate the track by time, but be sure the mouse is hovered over the track and not one of the toolbars, otherwise your gestures may apply to it instead.

image

Finding the loop points

Note

Windows users have the luxury of using BrawlCrate for this, which makes life a little easier in a number of ways. If you are a Windows user and wish to use BrawlCrate for this part, you should skip to the Exporting to .wav format section of this guide. For everyone else, read on.

Now that the track is imported, we're ready to start searching for the loop. Select All with Ctrl + A, and click play. Listen to the first two minutes of the track and think about how this would sound looped. For a small challenge, see if you can pinpoint the approximate loop point of this track before reading to the next section! You probably can. I give you the answer in just a second, but being able to do this is the first step.

The loop point is right around 1:49. But, in order to make our music loop nicely, we need to be a little more specific with that. Zoom back out, and click a second or two after 1:49, then press Shift + J to select the area from the start of the track to your cursor. Now, press the following shortcuts in order:

  • Ctrl + X (Cut)
  • Ctrl + A (Select All)
  • Ctrl + V (Paste)

This should more-or-less crop the song to the relevant portion so we can get more specific with our loop.

image

Zoom in toward the end of the song, and try to find the exact sample where the song loops. This song makes it pretty obvious, but if you need the answer, it you can see around where it is in the following screenshot:

image

Once you are satisfied that you've found it, press Shift + K to select the region between your cursor and the end of the track, and press DELETE on your keyboard to get rid of it.

Now, you can hear your loop by playing in Looping mode with Shift + Z. If you need to make changes, you can press Ctrl + Z to Undo.

Tip

Notice how the counters at the bottom of the last screenshot are in samples, while in previous screenshots it showed in minutes and seconds. The arrow to the right of these counters allow you to change how they display time. This means you can change them all to samples if you'd like to work natively in the unit of measurement that BrawlCrate and OpenRevolution do.

Tip

You can also work entirely non-destructively by simply noting the sample counts for Loop Begin and Loop End and passing those values along with your .wav file to one of those applications to let them handle looping.

If the loop works properly, then you're ready to export your file!

Exporting to .wav format

When you're ready, go to File > Export Audio. Make sure Format is set to WAV (Microsoft), and set Sample Rate to 32000kHz. If you are following this guide verbatim, save the file somewhere with the filename rigil_kent.wav. Otherwise, name the file however you please and click OK on the metadata screen -- metadata does not matter for our purposes.

Important

Please set your music to 32000kHz to help us keep download times short.

Now, move onto the next section.

Conversion to .brstm with BrawlCrate

Creating the .brstm file

Create a new .brstm file by going to File > New > BRSTM Audio Stream.

image

This option will open an Open File dialog. Find and open the .WAV file you just exported.

Setting the loop keyframes

On this screen, our objective will be to configure a seamless loop that will play forever without being obvious to the player that it is looping. This is simple enough: try to set the start and end keyframes to the same beat on either side. Once they are lined up well enough, the loop will be ready to save and load into Fortune Street. The below is an overview of the BrawlCrate music window:

image

For this song, the values of 0 for Start and 4771943 for End will provide the seamless loop that we are looking for. If you check the Loop box in the lower-left corner, then move the playback marker somewhere between the start and end values, you can test the loop for yourself. Click Okay when you are satisfied with the result.

Important

The screenshot above shows a frequency of 48000kHz, but please do not do this -- please set your music to 32000kHz to help us keep download times short.

Test your new file in the main window to see how you did.

Conversion to .brstm with OpenRevolution

Building OpenRevolution

This is honestly easier than it sounds, but you will need to get your hands dirty with the Terminal. To set up OpenRevolution:

  • Open the Terminal of your choice. On Mac, you can simply press Cmd + Space and type Terminal, then press enter.
  • Clone the OpenRevolution GitHub repository by pasting in git clone [email protected]:ic-scm/openrevolution.git and pressing enter.
  • Type cd openrevolution to enter the repository.
  • Type ./build.sh to build OpenRevolution.

From here you can use OpenRevolution commands in your Terminal.

Tip

You might want to move this folder somewhere you'll be able to keep track of it, then open a new Terminal in that location. This way, you won't have to reconfigure OpenRevolution when you want to make music in the future! It's out of scope for this guide, but if you add this directory to your system's PATH, you'll be able to call brstm_converter from anywhere, not just its directory.

Converting your music to .brstm

With your terminal in the same path as the previous step, perform the following steps:

  • Type ./brstm_converter followed by a space.
  • Drag the .wav file you exported into the Terminal
  • Type a space, followed by -o followed by another space.
  • Drag the exported .wav file into the Terminal again, but this time change the extension on it to .brstm.
  • Finally, type another space, followed by the looping flag -l, followed by one more space, then the number 0.

In all, your command should look something like this:

./brstm_converter /Users/username/Desktop/rigil_kent.wav -o /Users/username/Desktop/rigil_kent.brstm -l 0

This command will take your input .wav file and export it to a .brstm file next to where your .wav file is saved.

Note

The above command specifies the loop flag -l 0. If your music is a track that is not intended to loop (such as a Take-A-Break theme), be sure to omit this.

Tip

We specify the loop point as 0 because we've already clipped this file to its desired loop. If you did not do this, though, then this number should represent the sample on which you want to loop.

Testing your .brstm file

So how do we test that this file sounds OK and is looping correctly on Mac and Linux? It turns out, there is a web-based .brstm player called Nikku that can help us with this.

Go to the Nikku .brstm player page (https://kenrick95.github.io/nikku/) and upload your new .brstm file. Does it work? Does it loop correctly?

Adding Music to your Descriptor File

Now that you have a .brstm music file, it's time to add it to your board's descriptor file. Thankfully, this is really easy! The file in the previous sections of the guide was intended to be a map theme, so the last thing we need to do before we can add it to our descriptor file is set its volume.

Setting the volume

While the .brstm format does support setting volume, CSMM actually takes this information from the .brstm filename. You may not know what volume your music should be set to at first and that's OK -- if this is the case, just use 80. Add the volume to your filename by renaming rigil_kent.brstm to rigil_kent.80.brstm.

Adding it to the descriptor

Take the above filename, minus the .brstm file extension and add it to your descriptor like so, adding the music and map keys if they are not already present:

music:
  map: rigil_kent.80

Important

Note that this entry does NOT include the .brstm file extension!

Separate themes for each switch state

If you want to set a different theme for each board state, you can do so using the .yaml array syntax:

music:
  map:
    - rigil_kent.80
    - some_other_song.75
    - ...etc

There are a plethora of different keys you can set music for, too. Please see the next section, Descriptor Music Key Reference, for more details.

Descriptor Music Key Reference

The keys you can specify in your descriptor file are as follows:

Key Type What is it?
download single or list The music archive download link(s).
map single or list The main board BGMs. If specified as a list, the themes will represent each switch state.
auction single Plays during Auctions.
badVentureCard single Plays when venture cards 13 and 103 are drawn.
bankruptcy single Plays when a player becomes bankrupt.
dartOfGold single Plays during Dart of Gold.
domination single Plays when a player purchases all shops in a district.
forcedBuyout single Plays when a player forcibly buys another player's shop. Also plays for venture cards 65, 79, 98.
guestAppear single Plays when a guest (Goodybag, Healslime, or Lakitu) arrives.
guestLeave single Plays when a guest (Goodybag, Healslime, or Lakitu) leaves.
memoryBlock single Plays during Memory Block.
promotionMario single Plays when a Mario-based character gets a promotion.
promotionDragonQuest single Plays when a Dragon Quest-based character gets a promotion.
promotionMii single Plays when a Mii-based character gets a promotion.
roundTheBlocks single Plays during Round the Blocks.
roundTheBlocks777 single Plays when a player wins at least one row of 777s in Round the Blocks.
roundTheBlocksWin single Plays when the player wins a non-jackpot prize in Round the Blocks.
slurpodromeRace single Plays during the Slurpodrome race.
slurpodromeSelect single Plays while players are able to select their Slimes in Slurpodrome.
slurpodromeStart single The starting fanfare of the race in Slurpodrome. Plays between Select and Race.
slurpodromeWin single Plays at the end of the Slurpodrome Race, regardless of who wins.
stock single The stockbroker theme. Plays on the Buy/Sell stock screen.
takeAbreak single The Take-A-Break theme. Plays when a player lands on a Take-A-Break square or pulls cards 9 or 34.
targetMet single Plays when a player has reached the Target Amount, but has not yet returned to the bank.
ventureCards single Plays while the Venture Card Selection screen is activated.
win single The game's ending fanfare. Plays both during the congratulations screen and the statistics screens that follow.

Keys marked as type single can only ever accept a single value, whereas keys that can also be a list can accept multiple values using the .yaml array syntax.

music:
  download: 
    - https://nikkums.io/cswt/BGM/WiiU.music.zip
    - https://drive.google.com/u/0/uc?id=1k1fRXR2gTyD35G93W3bANxKB4UTQv__6&export=download&confirm=1

Next Steps

If you need help with anything, feel free to reach out! The best place to reach out is on Discord: there are several active communities that can help with the various aspects of mod-making.

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