Some notes on BMS charting from an Etterna background

I've been making some BMS charts recently. Coming from Etterna charting there's some interesting differences I wanted to briefly talk about.

I think the biggest workflow adjustment is that you cannot playback the song in the editor itself, you need to use an external player to preview the chart. This added friction makes the usual Etterna charting workflow of repeatedly playing back sections not as feasible. It also means that generally speaking you will have to keep how the song actually sounds in your memory more than usual.

Another big thing is that sometimes you will be limited by the fact that BMS is a keysounded game. There may be a really cool collection of sounds that you want to chart, but they might just be one keysound, so you're forced to represent it as only one note. Sometimes you can slice the keysound yourself into smaller keysounds, but often times it's impractical for various reasons, or you might not not feel like doing it. In these cases a workaround I've found is to repurpose other keysounds to capture these sounds.

A concrete example of this: in Incarnation of Devil -DEVIL7- there's a backing track that's all one keysound that I wanted to express. Since I couldnt express it explicitly, what I instead did was listen to the keysound, make a mental note of where each of the notes of the keysound landed in the song, and then rearranged other notes to create minijacks, so that the backing track is implicitly represented by said minijacks.

Lastly, something I take advantage of a lot in Etterna is copy and pasting patterns. This is a lot harder to do with BMS charts, at least in pBMSC. Since patterns are a collection of keysounds, if you want to copy and paste a pattern into a different section you need to select all of the same keysounds in the next section before pasting. Sometimes this is easy to do, but sometimes there can be sections that sound the same but actually have slight differences, and then its a real pain to find the slight difference in keysounds, and then adjust the initial selection to be compatible with the new section, and then you need to pray you did it right because if you didn't you need to start the whole process over again. Struggling with this process is why my chart for Cold Tribe isn't finished yet...

There's some positives about how BMS works though. Most obvious is that you don't need to deal with syncing. This significantly lowers the barrier of entry for making an acceptable chart compared to other rhythm games where you need to deal with sync yourself. Being able to listen to the individual sounds of the music also makes utilization of concepts like pitch relevance or column association much easier. Lastly, and probably my favorite conceptually, you can rearrange the song itself by shifting around, deleting, or adding keysounds, which opens up a lot of creativity.

Oh, and you don't need to worry about GFX or submitting charts to packs :-)

I'll add more to this writing if I have any other thoughts later.