This specification contains a set of rules and requirements that dictate what an UltraStar textfile is and how each item should be interpreted.
The idea for this specification came up within the UltraStar* Creators Community Discord as we've been roaming free following some guidelines posted at many places on the internet for over a decade. Many programs (creator software, website hosts and karaoke software) try their best effort to support the respective tags and NoteTypes to support all the features we want. But it's been long enough and we need to standardize things to sustain the future of our precious format.
Currently there are thousands of textfiles laying around unversioned and some with problematic tags which are hard to comprehend or built support for. There are several communities out there who do not talk to eachother so it's hard to come up with a definitive system. Let's bond together and see if we can make the best out of this format we all love.
The endgoal for this project would be to:
- Bring the different communities on par with eachother to increase the quality of the produced textfiles
- Versionise the format so we can improve and add features to it
- Give each Tag or NoteType a definition and how it should be working
Since the text format was introduced a little bit more than a decade ago alot of projects got to know and support it. We'd like to give these projects a little bit of appreciation by linking to their respective GitHub page or website.