Project Heartbeat is a game all about community support. The game provides regular players with an editor where anyone can create a chart and upload them to the Steam Workshop. Unfortunately, there are many things that can go wrong. Some people might be making a chart for the first time, so they might not know some basic principles for chart syncing. Or more likely, the game makes a mistake when you download the song from the workshop and messes up the sync.

This tutorial will show you how to enhance your experience using the built-in editor to properly identify the offset of a chart.

One easy way to identify desyncs is by looking at the bar at the bottom of the screen. If a chart is too early, you'll tend to have more white lines on the right of that middle line. If the notes are too late, they'll be on the left side. You'll also be getting a lot more Fine judgments than you would like.


You can also add the Autoplay modifier to a song and listen carefully.

In my case, the song MochiMochi feels too heavy (notes come in too early). I checked with the original creator of the chart, and they actually synced the song perfectly. For some reason, when the game downloaded it, it became desynced.
The Dev of the game told me that updates made to the Youtube downloader can cause this. Unfortunately, that is beyond his control because it isn't his program.

In the Main Menu, navigate to Tools > Song Editor. This tool allows us to open the data for a chart and move things around. Usually, you would use it when creating your own charts and upload them to the Workshop. However, there is a hidden feature that lets us open the data of charts from either the Workshop or from imported Megamix+ songs (such as the base songs or any mods you installed for it). We can use this to our advantage to fix the sync of a song.



To access this feature, simply press F6. You will then see a bunch of songs with "Workshop" or "Megamix+" at the end. Simply type in the name of the one you want to fix and select the difficulty.


Upon opening it, the editor will display waveform of the song along with all of the notes:




In my experience, you will immediately be able to see if the notes are not properly placed over the waveform.
What we want to do is get the notes on the obvious peaks that you can see on my screenshot (at the red line). This is what people usually chart to. Before you continue, click on the very first note and on the right side of the screen, the Inspector tab will fill with some values. Take note of the "Time" value. In my case, the value is 2708ms. We will need this later.
Then on the top right, select the Sync tab, and locate the "offset timing points by..." section:



Change this value to 1 (if they come too early like mine) or -1 (if they come too late). You can use any value, but you have more control if you use 1/-1 instead of bigger increments.
Then just spam that "Apply" button until they line up!

When you finally line them up, look for the "Time" value under inspector for the same note as before. For me, the first note is now at 2743ms. Simply subtract the first value from the second:
2743-2708=35

Alternatively, if my notes came too late, it would give us a negative number:
2708-2743= -35

Now, simply go to the song select, select your song, and under Song Settings > Latency Compensation, enter this value. That's it! Now the chart is properly synced and you can climb the leaderboards!

The editor has a Test Play feature built in. On the top right there's a controller icon. It is always recommended that you play test from here. Leaving the editor for any reason will reset any changes you made, because you cannot save edits made to Workshop songs (that would be an easy way to cheat).
When you click the Test Play button, there will also be an "autoplay" box. These are useful tools when messing with offsets. If it still feels off, you can make any changes immediately.

I should also note that sometimes, the waveform will be very noisy at the beginning, and it can be hard to find where the note is supposed to be:



If this happens, do not give up! You can use that bar with all of the colored dots to scroll through the song and look for other spots you can use to sync. In my example, the next good spot was in 20-40 second range where you can see those obvious peaks again. So just use one of these notes for the process described before:

As I mentioned before, this guide also works for Megamix+ songs. In mods like Eden Project, I have found that quite a few songs are off sync (Strato Stella is ~127ms off!). A lot of songs in the base game are also off sync by more than a few milliseconds. Normally, accessing the chart files for that game is tedious. You have to unpack the mod, find the file and do other stuff that I never bothered with. Project Heartbeat does all of that for you and loads them flawlessly. This means that if you are having issues with modded charts like I have, you can just use this game's editor to find the offset and use those values over there.

There is a small difference however. In Heartbeat, if notes come too early, you use positive values to push the notes forward (or negative numbers to push the notes backwards). Megamix+ is the opposite: positive values push the notes back and vice versa. So just be mindful of that.