All tracks should be accurately trimmed, with looping if appropriate. The loop point should be inspected for any errors such as extra or missing notes/noise.
The pack should contain all "music", not sound effects. A track might be considered a sound effect if:
Try looking at the Sorted list of memory trigger hacks for music forum thread to help get all the tracks, or to find how to search for a new hack.
The tags should be as complete as possible. Where appropriate, they should be consistent between tracks.
The track title. You might find this from:
If there is no official track title, try naming after:
Only use one title - if you feel it needs clarification, add it in the Comments field. Avoid verbose titles if they are not needed, and consider whether OST titles include explanatory comments (e.g. in the form "Title (Level Name)") which are not truly part of the title.
The names of the person of people who created the music, or who are at least credited with "sound". Check:
This should include composers, arrangers and music engine writers. If there is more than one name, separate them with a semicolon and a space "; ".
If you can, try to find "real names" instead of any nicknames used in credits.
Try to use what is written on the box (see http://www.smspower.org/scans/), or what Meka calls it. If the game has a sub-title, consider whether it is necessary or not, eg. "Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse" is a bit too much but "Ys: The Vanished Omens" is good.
These are the recommended system names. Please copy and paste to be sure you get them right. Note that some of these systems don't have emulators which produce VGMs yet, or VGM players supporting their chips.
You can choose these from the dropdown list; if possible, the Japanese equivalent will also be filled in.
Put this as accurately as you can... the format is yyyy/mm/dd, or just yyyy/mm or yyyy if month and day is not known. If you don't even know the year, look at the game's title screen.
A good resource for release dates is Sega's "segahard" listings.
Don't put ANYTHING in the Japanese tags unless you are writing in Japanese characters, or you can prove that what you're writing in Roman characters is how that item was known in Japan.
You can look in the scans section to find some Japanese game titles.
Put the names of everyone involved in making the VGM file. If there's more than one, separate them with a semicolon and space ("; ").
Put anything you like here. However, don't put anything unnecessary, like your website, favourite colour, or whatever. Only put what's really relevant - e.g. what parts of the game the music corresponds to, if it is not obvious from the title.
The filename should contain only upper and lower case Roman characters (with no accents), numbers and punctuation that is generally safe across operating systems (so no \ / : * ? " etc). Avoid "~" when "-" will do (this applies to tags too). The filename should be in the form
Game Name - ## - Track Title.vgm
In the past, "vgz" was used to signify compressed files. However, this is no longer recommended. Some tools (VGMTool) may change the file extension, so be sure to change it back.
You should include all of the VGM files. I guess you knew that.
This should be a file named "Game Name.m3u" (to match the VGM filenames' prefix). It should be in ASCII format (since all the filenames are in that subset), listing all of the VGM files in the pack in the order they ought to play.
If you make the playlist using a music player, please edit it in a text editor to remove any lines starting with the character '#'.
This should be a file named "Game Name.txt", based on this template:
Do NOT use tabs. Make sure that the file has CRLF line endings. If you edit it in Notepad and avoid pressing the Tab kety, it will be fine.
Fields in the description file should be a superset of what is used in the game's (English) tags. "Package created by" means a superset of the "Creator" tags. If you are just packaging it, or making a minor correction/addition to the tags, you should not put your name there.
This should be a file named "Game Name.png" which contains a representative image for the game. In general this should be:
Files should be packed in a zip file that contains all of the files mentioned above. There should be no embedded folder names or extra files. VGM files should be compressed. The Zip archive should use maximal compression.