Dancing Monkeys: Automatically Generate step files for DDR

Austy · Basic Member Joined: 17 Jul 2005

Very nice program, Karl.

And thanks, nicgravel, for the batch file. It's very useful.

I've only had one problem so far. I just tried to generate some steps with 2 different songs and it doesn't generate for the right difficulty. I put 6 8 and 9 for the difficulties and it gave me 5 7 7 and the 2nd time it gave 3 5 6. I don't know what's wrong.
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PedanticOmbudsman · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 4:55 pm Post subject:

Depending on the song, it might not be able to figure out how to fit in enough steps to get the difficulty you want. And I don't think it can do 9's or 10's at all.

If you want to make the generated steps harder, just do a little clean-up work in edit mode. Throw in some sixteenth steps at appropriate places (I think Dancing Monkeys uses only quarters and eights, so on slow songs it can't get enough note density to make a hard stepfile), turn some steps into jumps, extend some steps into freezes (at places where the other foot could handle the rest of the steps during that period, but with some added difficulty). If you like them, add in some "hands" & mines. Then try it, see what it feels like, & assign it a new difficulty rating.

Though it's somewhat limited, I'm impressed that a functional program like this has even been written. Now that we know that something like this can be created, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw similar programs in the future that'll probably work a bit better and hopefully be compatible with more songs. But I wouldn't expect miracles until we get artificial intelligence software that can actually understand music like we do... or until we start dissecting the brains of simfile authors, recreating their minds in digital form, and putting them up for download on Sourceforge.
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sequencial · Trick Member Joined: 03 Jul 2005 Location: Detroit, MI

great program! first time it didnt work because i mistyped the output. its a lot easier if you dont give it an output. it actually generated a pretty hard 9 footer with steps that seemed to be well thought out. great work!
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formerly midjetville

shieldwolf · Trick Member Joined: 01 Nov 2003

Hey Iâm still having some problems

The stepmonkey folder and contents are on my C: drive

My Cantina.mp3 is on my desktop

And my owner name is Shieldwolf

I type this in at the run command what am I doing wrong.

C:\Dancing Monkeys 1.01\Dancing Monkeys\bin\win32/DancingMonkeys.exe" "C:\Documents and Settings\Shieldwolf\Desktop\Cantina.Mp3" 1 3 7

icywindow · Basic Member Joined: 29 May 2004

I shall repeat this again.

If you can't use dos (like it seems 75% of the DDR Freak Community can't) use my frontend. Here's a link to the page that has it and the patched exe:

http://www.freewebs.com/icywindow/dmfe.htm

Good luck for all.

The freezes were supposed to be a feature of the program, but no one seems to like them anyways. Mostly, the program exists to give you a bpm and gap (within 30 ms) for your song so you can make your stepfile with one less hurdle.[/url]

squeakypants · Trick Member Joined: 31 Jul 2005

i've tried like 5 songs and they all give "cannot confidently find bpm" error. is there any way to correct this?

PedanticOmbudsman · Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 7:42 pm Post subject:

Well, not really. A few things might help if you know how to use a sound editor. You might have better luck if you cut out the song introduction, since the beat often doesn't become clear right at the start of the song. Try removing all but part of the song -- pick a section of acceptable length with a good steady consistent beat. Make sure that there are no tempo changes anywhere in your song file. If the song changes tempo in the middle, it won't work. So do some editing.
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Okiyama · Trick Member Joined: 06 Aug 2005

Okiyama · Trick Member Joined: 06 Aug 2005

ddrfanman32 · Basic Member Joined: 01 Aug 2005

i took several hours getting everything right (start=noob, now=alot better)
i now can process mp3's
but i no longer download music, and won't get an encoder (ma' dad won't let me) but have Winamp, which will convert cda's to wav's.
i thought i was saved because DM will not do the mp3 to wav convertion but still process the song
but i get an error i could reall use some help on

Jedo · Trick Member Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Location: NYC

Is there any way to make this work for a Mac?
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At midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew, go to round up everyone who knows more than they do

Okiyama · Trick Member Joined: 06 Aug 2005

Hey i got a good mp3 and i geberated steps but where do i find the steps and how do i put it into stepmania? please help!

sequencial · Trick Member Joined: 03 Jul 2005 Location: Detroit, MI

the stepfile will be in the dancing monkey output folder.

put the song and the stepfiles in its own folder under "songs" in the stepmania folder. if you didnt understand that, try using google first.

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formerly midjetville

MagicianType0 · Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:17 pm Post subject:

This is getting quite annoying. I've come up with this error time and time again:

C:\Program Files\StepMania CVS\Stepfile Generator\Dancing Monkeys\bin\win32\DancingMonkeys.exe "C:\Program Files\StepMania CVS\Songs\Other\Like The Angel\LikeTheAngel.mp3" 3 5 9 "C:\Program Files\StepMania CVS\Other\"

Microsoft Windows 2000 [Version 5.00.2195]
Initialised.
input: C:\Program Files\StepMania CVS\Songs\Other\Like The Angel\LikeTheAngel.mp3
(44.1 kHz, 2 channels, MPEG-1 Layer III)
output: ..\..\Temp Music\Temp Song.wav (16 bit, Microsoft WAVE)
skipping initial 1105 music samples (encoder+decoder delay)
Frame# 6393/6550 128 kbs MS
Decoded Mp3 / Copied Wav
Loaded song.
Normalised song.
WARNING: Unable to Output truncated version of song. Please copy original to output directory.
Outputted truncated normalised song.
Monoed song.
Smoothed song.
Normalised mono and smoothed data.
Thresholded data
Found peaks and troughs.
Found beat positions.
Calculated peak to beat offset.
Brute forced the interval tests.
Calculated Gap and BPM.
Calculated Energy.
Computed Self Similarity.
Calculated Bar Similarity.
Divided song into groups.
Found pauses.
Found freeze arrow positions.
Foot Rating: 3
Foot Rating: 5
Foot Rating: 9
Created arrow patterns for each difficulty level.
ERROR: Invalid fid.

Now, what is going on? I saw the text on a fid error on the Dancing Monkeys download page, but I made sure to include the trailing slash on the output. So, what do I do to solve this problem?

The N · Basic Member Joined: 07 Feb 2005

Okay, so this took between 3 and 4 hours to do, after the first 3 hours, I stopped checking, came back an hour later and it was finally done... When I play the song, it plays almost backwards, and skips like mad.. I'll email a zip file to anyone that asks. Note that I have gotten several files that work pretty darn good, just reporting this oddity

gasm · Trick Member Joined: 27 Apr 2005 Location: Montreal

This program is good but bad. Its great when it works but when you wait for 10 minutes(for me) to see "memory allocation request failed" it makes me sooo mad. I tried it so many times and it worked 5 times (in a row) for me and now it wont at all. My current chances are 1/6, so it takes about an hour for me to get 1 song. I could just make my own steps that dont have 10 second stops during lyrics

. I did get one really great step file though, after I added 1/16ths it is great.
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PedanticOmbudsman · Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2005 8:27 pm Post subject:

If you get memory allocation errors, increase the size of your swapfile to at least 1GB. In order for the program to never crash from lack of memory, you have to have like 1GB+ of total memory, phsyical & virtual. So pump up your swapfile HUGE in order to make this memory-hog of a program happy.
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Hands R' Us · Trick Member Joined: 15 Aug 2005 Location: Mars

Hmmm...interesting. I never really had a chance to check into it. I still prefer to create my own steps, though. But this concept would certainly save time in creating steps.
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ITG home version expert difficulty progress report: All songs beaten except Pandemonium

gasm · Trick Member Joined: 27 Apr 2005 Location: Montreal

PedanticOmbudsman · Posted: Mon Sep 05, 2005 10:41 am Post subject:

Changing Virtual Memory size in Windows XP:

1. Right click on the "My Computer" icon on the desktop and click "Properties", or enter the Control Panel and go to System.

2. In the System properties window that opens, Click on the Advanced tab.

3. Click on the Settings button next to Performance.

4. In the new window that opens, click on the Advanced tab.

5. Next to Virtual Memory, click the Change button.

6. In the Virtual Memory window, click Custom Size, and set both numbers to 1024MB, then click Set.

7. Click Okay on all the windows you opened, and reboot the computer if prompted.

You'll now have 1GB of virtual memory, which should be more than enough to make Dancing Monkeys happy. Half a gigabyte would probably be enough, but if you want to guarantee that the program won't crash from lack of memory, 1GB will definitely do it. It seems to use vastly different amounts of memory based on what song you give it, so there's really no way to predict how much it will need.
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