In Starbound, when you loot for chests and crates, you might find sometimes musical instruments. There's a big load of them in the game. If you try to equip one and left click, a menu will drop, showing the song to play. Once you choose one and clicked play, you can enjoy your character playing the selected song using the instrument... You can even play with other friends!

The game brings around 30 and more songs already, usually stuff from public domain. But you can actually add your own songs! This guide will tell you everything you need to know (or not) about how to play your own songs in Starbound!

(And by advance, sorry for my terrible english, it's not my main language)

Unlike what some people can think, Starbound doesn't use MIDI files. (.mid) The game uses another specific format, very close to MIDI: the ABC format (.abc)

This format has been created originally for the game "Lord Of The Rings Online". It's a simple text file with data that looks like this:

Note: The code here is the first lines of the file "12 days of Christmas.abc" available in Starbound.

It's not really readable by humans but there's softwares for making abc files. (plus, Starbound seems to use a slightly modified version of the abc system.) We'll see about that in another chapter.

You can note some readable stuff at the beginning.

• T: is the title of the song. (For some reason, it seems Starbound doesn't use that and rather use the file name instead.)
  
• Z: is a short description of the song.
  
• Q: is the tempo of the song.
  
• K: the key used by the song
  
• % Comment line

Note the % Original file line. It indicates that this song was converted from a midi file. This is the best and easiest way to make abc songs. We'll see more about that in another chapter.

You will need tools to make your life easier into song making. Actually you need:

• A MIDI sequencer (there's an online one here[onlinesequencer.net])
  
• Starbound Composer[starboundcomposer.com]

WARNING: You will also need to prepare Starbound Composer because the instrument preview doesn't work anymore with the 1.x versions of Starbound. Here's another guide that tells how to arrange this. This step is not necessary anymore with Starbound Composer version 0.8.7 or higher. Yay :D

If your song is something enough famous, there's likely a chance that there's a MIDI file of it. Use Google to find the MIDI files of the musics you want (pro tip: For the videogame songs, http://vgmusic.com is the best ressource ever) If you can't find it, create it yourself with the sequencer. I can't help here, find a tutorial about your sequencer to know how to do so.

Open Starbound Composer to display this window. You will only need the highlighted buttons:

• Red circle is for opening MIDI files.
  
• Yellow circle is for mixing tracks.
  
• Green circle is Play Pause and Stop buttons.
  
• Black circle is instrument choice.
  
• Blue circle is to apply the selected instrument into all the tracks.

Open your midi file and Starbound Composer should look like this:

MIDI format has multiple tracks for each instrument. But ABC format only has one. So we must arrange the song so the essential (melodies and bass) is on one track.

First, you can remove the percussions track. Then, click on play and check (using the speaker icon in the tracks to mute/unmute them) which tracks are good to keep and which are not. When you're decided, delete the tracks you don't want.

Once you have a satisfying result, select the tracks you want to keep by clicking the box at the left between the ↑ and ↓. Once they're selected, click the mixing tracks button (the yellow circle in the first pic). This will create a new track with all the tracks mixed together. This is what we need.

Click on the yellow icon on this new track. you will see a text file appear, like this:

We're almost there. now for the final touches.

• Change the line T: to put your title (Don't put any strange characters in there or Starbound will crash hard when you will play!!)
  
• Sometimes, the song can come lately after clicking play because of a silent moment. (some poorly designed MIDI files are like this) To remove this, remove the z# (in this sample, z3). at the beginning of the song code.
  
• Finally, save your abc file. (Don't put any strange characters in the file name or Starbound will crash hard when you will play!!)

The songs of Starbound are located by default at this place:
(replace "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\" by whatever you placed your steamapps files if it's not in program files)

Simply put the abc files in this location. Then, start the game and use your instrument to see your song in the list.

You probably noticed you can play songs with your friends. You can even go further by organizing a sort of orchestra for a song where each player plays a part of the song ! But, although it's possible, playing a song made for single players (like we did earlier) with multiple players might not render as smooth as you expected.

It's because you simply need a song for each track of your song. For example, for a song with originally 4 tracks in the midi file, you'll have to make 4 songs, one for each track. It's as simple as that.

Right. You have a bunch of .abc files and you want to share with them to your friends or even the world in an easy way. Here's how to.

Make a new folder. in it, put your abc files. rename all your abc files so it has 6 - at the beginning of the name. Example: ------Aqua - Barbie Girl.abc

Note that it is possible to make subfolders in your folder and put your abc files in them. It's useful if you make a huge pack and if you want to sort them by genre or stuff. So, the songs will appear like this in the list:
movies/stuff
movies/anotherstuff
tv/athirdstuff
whatever
and in this case, you need to put those ------ in front of the folders' names and NOT in front of the files. So it should appear like this in your file explorer:

Ok but why those ------ ?
This is very important! Because of Starbound's random stupidity in the code, the 6 first characters of the name of the song or the folder are truncated in the song list in game! So, to prevent this, we must put 6 random characters. (and ------ makes it easily readable for us) Why does it happen ? I don't know. I just hope this will be corrected some day... It only happens with songs submitted in the workshop, though.


So anyway, to resume it

• If you just want your songs to display simply like the ones given already, put them in the folder and add ------ at the beginning of their file name.
  
• You can optionally make categories for your songs, using subfolders. For the files in those subfolders, no ------ needed. But the subfolders' names will need them.
  
• Do NOT make an assets folder for your abc files! (or for any other kind of mod! I'm DEAD SERIOUS!)

Click on play and choose "Launch Mod Uploader" The following window will appear:

Note: "Name" is the name of the mod in the mods list in-game. "Title" is the name of the mod in the Steam workshop. In the usual cases, you'll probably put the same name for both. But don't put a too long name at least for "Name".)

Click on Select Mod directory and choose the folder you created for your mod. Then, fill the fields with the informations you want. Don't forget to put a pic and all.

Once you're done, click "Upload to Steam". This will create two additional files: "_metadata" and "_previewimage". Metadata contains the infos of the mod and its files, and previewimage is the preview pic (it means you can safely delete the pic you used for your submission now since it's saved as _previewimage.)

Now that it's uploaded, go to your workshop files to subscribe, make it public (or for friends only) and all. ^^

Oh, and if you had your abc files in your assets/user/songs too, don't forget to remove them or you'll have your songs twice!

It depends. The songs are streamed. So, potentially, someone who doesn't have your song in their mods can still hear it, but they still won't have it on their song list. If you want to make a music band and play multitrack songs with your friends, all of the song players will need the same song mod.

Your version of Starbound Composer is outdated. Use the version 0.8.7 or higher. You can find it on their official website.

In the folder assets\user\songs of your Starbound installation. In most of the cases, it's at the following:

It's because Starbound is stupid and automatically truncates the first 6 characters of a file/folder in the mod's root folder. To fix this, just add ------ in front of the files'/folders' name to avoid glitches (only in the root folder! no need to do this for the files in the subfolders!).

You probably made your abc file with something else than Starbound Composer (or you found an abc file meant for LOTR Online or anything. Use only Starbound Composer for your abc files. This is the best one guarantee for Starbound. :p