[Guide] Hitsound/Keysound for newbie · forum (2024)

There are 2 types of audio source in Osu
1. Mp3
2. Hitsounds

Here is an example where both types of audio source are present.

The mp3 contains vocal, and the hitsound contains the instruments (piano, synth, music box)

Now, I will mute the instrument to listen only to mp3.

How to change volume

Sample = Hitsound, and Music = mp3

Example of mp3 solo

Example of Hitsound solo

Where are the sounds coming from?
Look into the song folder, you can see the following

TLDR: Just know that all sounds are coming either from mp3 or hitsound

There are 2 places where you can use hitsound
1. When used on a hit object, it is called hitsound, because you hit the note and it makes a sound. If you miss the note then you hear no sound.
You can click on the note to hear the hitsound attached to that note.
Notice that the filename of the hitsound attached to the selected note is on top right of the screen.
More details of hitsound in lesson 3.

Example of hitsound:

2. When used inside the Storyboard, it is called a sample.
As opposed to hitsound that is only played when you hit a note, the sample is always played from the storyboard.
To view the storyboard, press the TAB key in map editor.
You can not click on the note to hear the sound in Storyboard.
Storyboard has no limit on how many notes you can put at a time (aka chord size). The chord size is 3 in the image below but it could be more than 20 if needed.

In my map, I have put all the synthesizer sounds into Storyboard to complement the vocal from mp3 and put all the piano and music box sounds into hitsound for players to play.

Use case of Storyboard
1. Having too many notes as hitsound can be hard to play when you have multiple instruments. So putting some into the Storyboard can reduce difficulty.
For example, you have a map with drum and guitar hitsound, in Easy you only play drum , and put guitar hitsounds in Storyboard, in Hard you play both drum and guitar.
2. Vocal or some sound effects you don't want to play can also be put inside Storyboard.

How to import samples to Storyboard
1. You need to have the .wav files in your song folder
2. Press Ctrl + Shift + I or go to menu, Compose -> Sample Import

Select a file and set volume then click Sample

TLDR: Storyboard is used for sounds you don't want to play, Hitsound is for sounds you want to play

When working with hitsound, always show the hitsound names.

There is 2 ways you can create a hitsound, Default Hitsound and Custom Hitsound.
I will only cover Default Hitsound in lesson 3, Custom Hitsound will be in lesson 4.

Default Hitsound
Beatmap: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/430151

This is a note using Default Hitsound

You must name your hitsound file according to the naming convention (peppy made it).

Press F6 or go to menu, Timing -> Timing Setup to bring up the following window

The name of the Default Hitsound in the picture above is "soft-hitfinish.wav".
The "soft" part is called the Sample Set. There are only 3 types of Sample set
1. normal
2. soft
3. drum

Sound Test for the 3 different Sample Set

The "hitfinish" part because of the Finish Button on right side in picture above.
Sound Test for Normal, Whistle, Finish and Clap

You may use Whistle, Finish and Clap all together. If you do that, the note will be mapped to 3 hitsounds.
When you play that note, you are playing 3 wav files.
1. soft-hitwhistle.wav
2. soft-hitfinish.wav
3. soft-hitclap.wav

If you do not use any of Whistle, Finish or Clap, then your hitsound name will be "soft-hitnormal.wav"
Sound Test for using single sound and combined sound.
In the video, I first played note with only Whistle, then note with only Clap, and lastly note that has Whistle and Clap.

On right side of Sample Set, there is checkbox for Default, Custom 1 or 2+

Default means it is using hitsound file from your skin folder (...\Osu!\Skins\your skin name\), not the one inside your song folder (...\Osu!\Songs\your beatmap folder).
What this means is that if you have skin x, I have skin y. We both play the same map with this option set for hitsounds, you will hearing something different from what I am hearing.
It is often better to not use this option to make your map sounds consistent for everyone.

Custom 1 means you are using the hitsounds from your song folder. The "1" means its the first set of hitsounds. I refer to it as Set Index.
The hitsounds files for Set Index = 1 does not have "1" in the filename, only 2+ has it.

2+

Since you can only have 3 Sample Set (Normal, Soft, Drum) and 4 types of sound (Normal, Whistle, Finish, Clap) , it means you only have maximum of 12 hitsounds to use with Custom 1 option. Therefore this option allows you to have multiple set, when you set this to 2, you would be using hitsounds like

soft-hitnormal2.wav
normal-hitclap2.wav
drum-hitfinish2.wav
etc...

The maximum of the Set Index is 99, even if you type in 100, Osu will change it back to 99 when you edit the timing point.
This implies that you have maximum of 12 Hitsounds per Set x 99 Sets = 1188 hitsounds.

See Custom Hitsound to go beyond this limit.

If you delete the "soft-hitfinish.wav" from the song folder, it will just use the "soft-hitfinish.wav" from the skin folder

Sound testing with the different options

Notice how Default option is same sound as Custom 2 in the video above, the reason is because there is no soft-hitfinish2.wav in the song folder therefore it uses the soft-hitfinish.wav from your skin, which is same as picking Default option.

The volume of all notes using Default Hitsound (example: "soft-finish.wav") is controlled using timing points (F6)
Pro: you can easily change volume of many notes at once.
Con: You can't have multiple notes with different volume in the same chord.

When you create a note, by default its Sample Set is set to Auto, this means the Sample Set is defined in Timing Window (F6)

However, you may select a note and set Sample Set to something else. Doing this will only change the Sample Set for this note, if you change the timing point (F6) then you change the Sample Set for all notes that is part of that timing section.

Example of all 3 Sample Set in 1 chord (The note with Auto is using Soft from the timing point)

Example of Custom Hitsound

Freedom of file name
Unlike default hitsound, you are not restricted by naming convention for custom hitsound.
The name of the Custom Hitsound in picture above is "0_G#1_96.wav".
The 0 is ID for piano in midi instruments, G#1 is pitch, 96 is duration of the hitsound in tick (tick is a midi file time unit, somewhat similar to 1/4 beat).
You should still give a meaningful name to your hitsound so it is easier for your to map hitsound to notes. If you have pitch of the hitsound in the filename, it is easy for you to map by pitch, especially for someone who can't hear which note has higher pitch by ear like me.

When making a keysound map, you should really use Custom Hitsound rather than Default Hitsound, because you are working with lots of different instrument and pitch. Can you even imagine if you have to remember what each octave is mapped to which Set of Whistle Finish and Clap?

How to map a Custom Hitsound to a note
Make sure you put all hitsound file into your song folder, then open your map in edit mode.

Hold ALT and left click a note, or select a note then CTRL+SHIFT+I to bring up the Sample Import window.
Select a hitsound,set volume and click Apply.

1 Note to 1 Hitsound relationship
1 Note can only be mapped to 1 Custom Hitsound. You can consider this a drawback of custom hitsound.
If you have X sounds but you only want to play X - Y notes, you can throw Y hitsounds into the Storyboard.
I made a tool to easily throw notes into SB, check the hitsound tools section below for more details.

Individual Note Volume Control
The benefit of using Custom Hitsound is that say you are mapping guitar and drum in a chord.
If you want to have guitar sound louder than drum, you can just increase volume of the guitar note and lower volume of drum note.
This would have been impossible with default hitsound since all hitsounds in a chord have same volume controlled by the timing point (F6).

If you decide to use Default Hitsound and Custom Hitsound together. Custom Hitsound volume is independent from the timing point volume (F6).

TLDR: Use Custom Hitsound when you are working with lots of hitsound or multiple instruments

Beatmap : https://osu.ppy.sh/s/590799
In this practice beatmap, there is 2 Sample Sets, normal for drums and soft for hithat/cymbal.
Will add more complicated drum beats into this mapset later.

Try listen to it and replicate it, once you done that, try making up your own drum beats.
Even though I did not use all the hitsounds, you can have fun experimenting with them.

This website is a great resources to learn the existing drum beats:
http://www.onlinedrummer.com/category/drum-beats/

This youtube channel has lots of Drummania maps:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT2m6-B-Zd_S8WrdK5HuQMw

Here are the hitsound used in the maps above:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QrRoLkhigq2r3zdEA8dU7WU4iMdIsvli

How about we try making a simple keysound map of your favorite song now?

Now there is 2 ways of doing this, the manual way and the easy way.

Manually
Step 1. Find a music sheet of a song you like.
Step 2. Generate a hitsound for each unique note (unique pitch, unique duration, unique instrument) in the song or the chorus part or main melody.
Alternatively, you can also get hitsound from LordRaika's library.
Step 3. Create the beatmap for your song.
Step 4. Mapping each note to a Custom Hitsound.
Estimate duration for a 5min song = 40h if you generate hitsound yourself with midi program, 20h if you get hitsound from Raika's library.

Automap-chan
Step 1. Find a midi file for a song you like.
Step 2. Download Automap-chan(link in keysound tools section) and create map
Step 3. Fix the pattern.

Estimate duration for a 5min song (not black midi) = 10min (not including time you spend on fixing pattern)