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1.  Music standards

1.1  Trimming

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.

1.2  Completeness

The pack should contain all "music", not sound effects. A track might be considered a sound effect if:

• it's under 2 seconds long
• it only uses one tone channel
• it does not end the currently playing track when heard in-game

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.

2.  VGM file standards

2.1  Tagging

The tags should be as complete as possible. Where appropriate, they should be consistent between tracks.

Track

Title

The track title. You might find this from:

• an "OST" album track listing
• the game credits (eg. Wonder Boy III)
• the sound test (eg. Out Run 3D)
• the manual
• different versions of the same game on other systems
• the internet (try looking for different versions of the same game again)

If there is no official track title, try naming after:

• the level name (check the manual - some games, eg. Psycho Fox, have stuff named in the manual but not in-game.)
• the game character to which it refers (check the manual again)
• the event which prompts it (eg. "Game Over")

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.

Author

The names of the person of people who created the music, or who are at least credited with "sound". Check:

• the game credits (eg. Sonic the Hedgehog)
• the manual (eg. Cosmic Spacehead)
• other people's brains (eg. ask some people who might know)
• the original version of the game (if it's a port and the music is the same)
• any OST albums
• the original composers if it is an arranged version, e.g. of a film soundtrack
• the internet

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.

Game

Name

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.

System

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.

• Sega SG-1000
• Sega SC-3000
• Sega Master System
• Sega Game Gear
• Sega Mega Drive
• Sega 32X
• Sega System 16
• Capcom Play System 1
• Colecovision
• BBC Micro

You can choose these from the dropdown list; if possible, the Japanese equivalent will also be filled in.

Release date

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.

Japanese

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.

VGM file

Creator

Put the names of everyone involved in making the VGM file. If there's more than one, separate them with a semicolon and space ("; ").

Notes

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.

2.2  Filename

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

• The title should be in Title Case, not lower case or UPPER CASE.
• The game name may be shortened from that shown in the tags if you consider it appropriate
• Unusable characters should be handled sensibly, for example remove accents and convert punctuation (e.g. "Name: Subtitle" becomes "Name - Subtitle")
• "##" means the track number. (See below for how to choose the order). It should be 2 digits, starting with 01.
• The extension should be ".vgm" (even though the file should be compressed)

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.

3.  Pack Contents

3.1  Files

You should include all of the VGM files. I guess you knew that.

3.2  Playlist

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.

• That order ought to be the order they generally appear in the game.
• This is preferred over having a "miscellaneous tracks" group left over at the end

If you make the playlist using a music player, please edit it in a text editor to remove any lines starting with the character '#'.

3.3  Description file

This should be a file named "Game Name.txt", based on this template:

Attach:description.txt

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.

3.4  Image file

This should be a file named "Game Name.png" which contains a representative image for the game. In general this should be:

• Based on the game's title screen
• Pixel-sharp, i.e. not filtered/resized/resampled
• Edited to remove unwanted text (such as "Press Start" and copyright details)
• Altered so the aspect ratio is 1.0 (i.e. the image is square), to be more like LP and CD covers
• Run through a PNG optimiser. PNGOUT is recommended.

4.  Packing

Files should be packed in two formats:

4.1  Zip

This should be 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.

4.2  VGM7z

This is a 7-zip file, renamed to have the "vgm7z" extension instead of "7z". VGM files should be uncompressed (yes, uncompressed). The 7z archive should use maximal ("Ultra") compression.

4.3  Packing helper

Here's a batch file that does a lot of the work for you. It assumes that there's only one M3U file in the directory, with the right name; only one PNG file, which might have the wrong name; that you have 7-zip, kzip, gzip and PNGOUT available; and that the directory name is the base for the packed files' names.

Attach:vgmify.zip