Over the Frail Dream

A guide to acquiring BMS independently

NOTICE: This page is a constant work in progress. There is still likely much I don't know, and much that I do know but don't realize would be very helpful for others to know. If there is a facet of this not covered that you would like to see covered, just contact me; an email address is provided at the top bar.

Preface

If you ask around in western BMS communities on how to get BMS, the most common response is going to be to download some huge table pack compiled by someone else (Or maybe one of the starter packages, if you're new and not fully committed).

However, this is not the only way to do things. You can simply accumulate your own BMS collection. This has some upsides over the table pack approach, particularly:

There are also downsides that explain why most people do not do this (Besides lack of awareness):

This page hopes to help alleviate the second bullet point.

BMS Acquisition

If you know the song and not where to find it, the most reliable way is usually to go on the Stellaverse IR or LR2IR Archive and search the song name. The top result for the song will probably have the URL listed for the source.

The link might be dead, especially if it is an old song. The best approach here is to use the Wayback Machine to get an archived version, and download from there. I recommend having the Wayback Machine extension for your browser to speed up the process of going to the archived page, as the Wayback Machine's site interface is a bit sluggish. You can download the Firefox version here.

There is a good chance the download link is not a direct link but rather a link to the page of the song in whatever event it was released in. You can usually find the download link somewhere in the box containing the song information.

Most BMS songs are released as part of events. While most BMS events (unfortunately) do not provide packages for easy installation of the whole event, some do. This can greatly speed up the process of acquiring songs if you want to amass a large collection. Some people also provide unofficial packages. I personally would not trust these, unless you trust the creator; even on reputed sources such as this page I've found that the unofficial packages often have data corruption issues, along with more nitpicky issues like strange folder organization. If you have a source you trust however, or don't mind auditing the packages yourself, it can be a great help in building up a collection faster.

Sabun Acquisition

As with above, a link to the sabun will usually be in the chart information on Stellaverse IR/LR2IR Archive. This link may also be dead.

However, sabuns are fortunately much more well archived than BMS for the most part. This is because sabun releases are very centralized compared to BMS; with historically only a handful of sabun uploader sites being used. While all of them are now dead except for the Stella uploader, the contents of all of them are archived. You can find archives for most of the sabun uploaders on DARKSABUN, though you may notice that the gnqg-upload folder is lacking. This is because the majority of it was already archived separately on Hex's archive of the gnqg uploader.

You can either just install sabuns by dragging them into the original song's folder, or by using a utility such as BeMusicSeeker to automate the process.

BMS Organization

This is very subjective, but here's a quick explanation of how I do it. I have one big BMS folder which I import into clients and tools, and in that folder I sort songs by what event they were released in. If they were not released in an event, I have an "Outside events" folder which is sorted by artist.

This organization is pretty intuitive, and it meshes well with the concept of events and event packages that most BMS distribution is based around.

Advanced methods

If a song has no information on the IRs or BMS Search, try searching the artist instead, and then looking at other songs the creator has published. This is how I found あやめ's Incarnation of devil; it had no information on the IRs, but I instead looked at a much more popular copy BMS they made, DQIII Battle, and found their homepage from there, which also had Incarnation of devil.

If all else fails, consider checking the Tzamen collection, listed below in the resources section.

Miscellaneous Resources

Websites

Unofficial event package collections

As mentioned above, use at your own discretion. I personally do not use any of these; the ones listed here are simply ones that I have heard of with at least a decent reputation.