Yass Reloaded 2025.2

Features

Syllable-Dictionary

• If Ultrastar Creator is installed, Yass Reloaded will already try to find its syllable dictionary ("English.txt", "German.txt", etc). This is useful, when splitting words into syllables.
  Now it is also possible to edit these dictionaries, by selecting "Extras" → "Syllable Dictionary"
• When editing a song, you can now select words and select "Lyrics" → "Add to Syllable Dictionary" (or CTRL-SHIFT-H) to add the selected words with their syllables to the dictionary. If the words already exist, then the syllables will be updated if they have changed.
• Check out the wiki page for reference

Autocorrect

• New Option: Page breaks that preceed the end tag are now detected as "Uncommon page break" and can be auto corrected

Bugfixes

• #22 .yass folder is now created if it doesn't exist on startup
• #23 Pasting Notes now also works after the last note
• #24 When doubling the BPM, the setting "Separate connected notes" is also considered. When the original BPM is lower than 100, connected notes are not separated at all
• #25 Fixed behaviour when "Correct all early/late pagebreaks" would stop after correcting the first occurence.

Yass Reloaded 2024.11

Features

New Editor Keyboard Shortcuts

• CTRLALTSPACE Adds a space at the end of the current syllable (if there is none yet)
• CTRLALTBACKSPACE Removes the space at the end of the current syllable (if there is one)
• CTRLSHIFTU Toggles the case of the selected syllables: lowercase → Titlecase → UPPERCASE

Rework of "Create new Song" and "Tap Recording"

• When creating new songs, the lyrics are now hyphenated
• When recording taps (CTRLR) the first two rows of the keyboard can be used like a piano-keyboard
  
• When activating the instrument with CTRLB (or the keyboard icon next to the save icon), the keymapping may shift, as Yass Reloaded will determine the lowest used note of the current selection. The lowest "white" note will then be placed on the Q key. In the example below, this is the note "B". Since the next half-step up is the note "C" and thus also a "white" note, the key 2 will note be used. Instead pressing W will tap the note "C". The next half-step up is a "C#", which is a "black" note, and thus pressing the key 3 will tap a "C#", and so on.
  Example:

• Since the first and second keyboard rows have less keys than a piano, you can additionally press Shift in combination with one of the other keys to tap an octave higher. Ctrl in combination with one of the other keys will produce a note which is an octave lower
• Pressing F while tapping will create a Rap-Note
• Pressing Shift>F while tapping will create a Freestyle-Note

Limitations

• Only 3 1/2 octaves can be tapped in at a time. However, this should be sufficient for the vast majority of the songs
• When the instrument is activated (the keyboard will be shown on the left hand side of the screen), Yass Reloaded will playback the piano sound. However due to processing time, there will be a slight delay which may distract you from tapping in time
• Yass Reloaded will try to determine your keyboard layout. Thus far, QWERTY, QWERTY and AZERTY are supported. Please let me know, if the detection does not work for you.

Sampled Piano

• When "Sample clicks" are enabled (Preferences → Editor → Design → Feedback → Sample clicks), a sampled piano will be used instead of the MIDI sequencer. This solves an issue with the MIDI sequencer playing back notes with a slight delay
• Since these are sampled sounds, please be aware, that this also has limitations: For each note, there are only two samples with either short (1 second) or long (20 seconds) lengths. This basically means:
  • Notes may sound a bit choppy.
  • Yass Reloaded now requires now double the disk space (but I figured, it's still less than 100 MB, and disk space isn't a huge issue nowadays)
  • I was considering sampling another set of medium length notes, but this will also result in a bigger jar-file.

Improvements

Playback Speeds

With the change of audio libraries from JavaZoom (which unfortunately is not maintained anymore and has very limited audio format support) to JavaFX with 2024.2, changing the playback speed had the drawback, that the pitch was changed (1, 2 or 3 octaves lower, depending on the speed change). If you are using Yass Reloaded with FFmpeg, this has now been restored to the original behaviour.
Since I actually found slowing down the audio by 50% was already too slow, instead of 50%, 33% and 25%, the new slow-down steps are now 75%, 50% and 25%. If you are not using FFmpeg, using the 75% step is advised against, as the pitch will not be an octave lower, and thus the pitch may be misleading.

Navigation Behaviour

When using Up to navigate to the first page, Yass will no longer navigate "before" the first page but instead stop at the first page.

Help

The help files (F1) have been updated to reflect recent changes.

Bugfixes

• Removed option to configure a mic, which never worked and causes the playback to stop working (does not work in the original Yass either)
• When "leading spaces" and "Capitalization of each row" are configured, each syllable was marked as "incorrect capitalization"
• "Create new song"-Wizard - When selecting a MP3 audio file, the "Next"-Button did not get enabled
• Issue 18 - Paste Notes adds linebreak at end of paste, highlights all notes afterward
  • A page break is now only added, if the last copied note is followed by a page break
  • If more than one note is selected, the copied notes will only be pasted over those selected notes. If only one note is selected, the note will be considered as the starting point of the pasting process
  • The selected notes prior to pasting will remain highlighted after pasting

Yass Reloaded 2024.10

Features

New Editor Keyboard Shortcuts

GAP and BPM

Previously only in spinners, but now via shortcuts:

• Change Gap
  • 9 - Reduces Gap by 10. If the Gap is not divisble by 10, the Gap will be rounded down. e. g. 2233 becomes 2230. 2230 becomes 2220
  • 0 - Increases Gap by 10. If the Gap is not divisble by 10, the Gap will be rounded up. e. g. 2233 becomes 2240. 2240 becomes 2250
  • Shift9 - Reduces Gap by 1000. This operation will not apply any rounding. e. g. 2233 becomes 1233
  • Shift9 - Increases Gap by 1000. This operation will not apply any roundings. e. g. 2233 becomes 3233
• Change BPM
  • CTRL– Reduces BPM by 0.1. BPMs to the second decimal point will be rounded down. e. g. 123.45 becomes 123.4. 123.4 becomes 123.3
  • CTRL+ Increases BPM by 0.1. BPMs to the second decimal point will be rounded up. e. g. 123.45 becomes 123.5. 123.5 becomes 123.6
  • CTRLSHIFT– Reduces BPM by 1. BPMs to the first decimal point will be rounded down. e. g. 123.45 becomes 123. 123 becomes 124
  • CTRLSHIFT+ Increases BPM by 1. BPMs to the first decimal point will be rounded up. e. g. 123.45 becomes 124. 124 becomes 125

Please note, that the shortcuts that used to work in Yass Along (G and all variations with CTRL, SHIFT and ALT have been removed in favour of the same keyboard shortcuts as the Ultrastar Deluxe Editor.
To change the BPM, the keyboard shortcuts differ from the USDX editor to the extend, that you have to use it with CTRL as – and + are already used to split or join syllables.

Fix 'Normal Note' and 'Play Next' ambiguity

When editing songs and you just edited the lyrics, typing N would fire an event to change the current note to normal. Otherwise, it would play the audio right after the note. While the latter is a custom key binding (through settings), it is the default behaviour until you change it, which means, that most people will leave it. To avoid this ambiguity, this is the default behaviour now:

N Plays the audio from right after the current note until the next note. This is very useful to determine note lengths
ShiftN Changes any selected note to "normal". Any Golden-, Freestyle- or Rap-Note will become regular notes again.

Autosave functionality

• Yass Reloaed Issue #11 - When editing songs, any changes will be automatically saved after 300 seconds to a backup file. If the user accidentally exits the editor without saving their work, or the program crashes unexpectedly, when opening the editor for that song again, the last autosave will be compared with the actual txt and can be used to restore it to the last version.
• The autosave interval can be configured in the Extras → Preferences → Editor → Control (0 seconds to disable autosave, or up to 600 seconds)

Better handling of file deletion

• Yass Issue #147 Deletes files straight away, and can't recover them - If the OS supports it, deleted songs will now be moved to the Recycle Bin rather than being deleted immediately. If you delete, rename or move a file or folder manually and then try to edit it in Yass Reloaded, the library will be refreshed.

Logging

• Previously, it was only possible to see the console output, when Yass Reloaded was started via the command prompt in a console window. Now, theses messages will be logged in a log.txt file, saved in the .yass user directory

Bugfixes

• Yass Issue #144 Find and replace uses previous song lyric - This bug also affected Yass Reloaded.
• Yass Reloaded Issue #17 Can't Paste Note Heights over multiple lines - When selecting multiple notes across multiple pages, note heights can now be pasted onto other notes.

Yass Reloaded 2024.9

Features

FFmpeg support

Yass Reloaded now supports and even recommends FFmpeg.
This means that when editing Ultrastar songs, the audio file is converted to a temporary file (in PCM WAV) format (in a separate folder, so don't worry. None of your existing audio files are tampered with). This brings the advantage, that all audio formats that FFmpeg supports can now be used. This extends the audio format support e. g. by OGG and OPUS. Another advantage is, that this also overcomes some sync issues that JavaFX had during playback especially within the first second.

USDB Syncer Meta-Tag file

If songs are downloaded from https://usdb.animux.de using the USDB Syncer, the meta-file will now be parsed, when pre-fills the USDB Syncer Meta-Tag Creation Tool.
You can also add this entry in your user.xml
<entry key="usdbsyncer-always-pin">true</entry>
This will "pin" the song once you make changes in Yass Reloaded yourself and write-protect it from any change when you open the USDB syncer. Please note, that if you activate this, you will not retrieve any updated songs! If you are making changes that are improvements to a song, please always consider updating it directly in USDB, so that everybody can benefit from it!

Toggle apostrophe ending

Sometimes, gerunds (e. g. going, talking, singing) in lyrics are omitting the ending 'g', but have not been mapped as such, or the other way around. If you select words ending with "ing", you can now simply type in an apostrophe, and the editor will toggle between a "g" and an apostrophe (e. g. making a "singing" to a "singin'"

Bugfixes

• Fixed incorrect saving of START and END tag
• USDB Syncer Meta-Tag generator added medley=0-0 tag, even though no medley information was given

Yass Reloaded 2024.6

Features

• Pasting lyrics over existing syllables: If you have copied lyrics as plain text, it is now possible to paste them onto selected syllables. e. g. you have two notes "Hi" and "there!". If you copy the word "Hello" from a plain text source (e. g. Notepad, or a website with lyrics), then select the two notes in the Yass Editor, and then press CTRL-V, Yass will split "Hello" into two syllables and paste "Hel" and "lo" over the selected notes.
• Adjust line endings: Let's say you have a syllable stretched across several notes, e. g. "torn~~" and you want the notes to be "torn" instead to reflect the fact, that the "n" is actually sung last. You can now select "torn" and the following tildes, and press Shift-E (for "ending"), and Yass will move the n to the end of the last selected tilde ("torn"). If you press Shift-E again, Yass would move the "r" to the end ("to~~rn")

Other Changes

• Issue 13 Adjusted installer to install into "Yass Reloaded" instead of "Yass Along", to avoid program conflicts with the original Yass
• Issue 14 Point to Azul download page instead of java.com

Bugfixes

• USDB Syncer Meta-Tag Editor: Medleys were not added to tags when the starting beat was zero
• Inserting lyrics: The first note was sometimes removed when the lyrics to be inserted did not intersect with existing lines
• File ends now with "E" end tag, and not a new line
• When using "Set Start", the value was set as milliseconds, but should have been seconds
• Surpressing CTRL-O in Editor as this would change the orientation of the lyrics and would effectively mess up the program instance

Yass Reloaded 2024.2

What's New?

New Java Version Requirement

Yass Reloaded now requires Java 21 + JavaFX

USDB Syncer Meta-Tag Generator

This feature is for those who use usdb.animux.de as source for Ultrastar txt-files and the USDB Syncer to gather the necessary media files to create a playable Ultrastar song. To map video/audio/cover files to a txt, the necessary information is put into a set of tags which are stored as #VIDEO tag within USDB.
Yass Reloaded's USDB Syncer Meta-Tag Generator has basically the same functionality as the one from the "USDB Syncer", but takes the duet, preview and medley information from a selected song and prefills them in the generator. This is useful for those who create new songs and find it tiresome to copy-and-paste these values back and forth.

Bugfixes

Several minor bugfixes are included within this release:

• When switching between AUDIO/INSTRUMENTAL/VOCALS, the mp3 is reloaded so that the correct file is played
• Fixed incorrect duration for the #END spinner
• Fixed Duet Icon getting lost in the songlist once a duet was selected

Yass Reloaded 2024.1

New Features

Supports Ultrastar-Format Version 1.1.0

To activate the new format, go to "Extras" -> "Preferences" -> "Error Checking" -> "Tags" -> "Compatiblity" -> Select "SHINY (1.1.0)"

#TAGS

• Tags are now supported in the Song-List view. Either from the context-menu (right-click) or from the file-menu ("Edit" -> "Set Masterdata" -> "Set Tags")

#AUDIO / #INSTRUMENTAL / #VOCALS

• Various audio-tags are now supported
• When editing a song, new fields are now available in the top-right corner.
• A combobox lets you switch between "AUDIO", "INSTRUMENTAL" and "VOCALS". The selected value of this combobox determines, which file is saved under the legacy #MP3 tag

#PROVIDEDBY

• Currently, this does nothing. You cannot add or edit it from Yass, but it won't mess with it either, if you have manually edited the txt-file

UI-Improvements

To accomodate the new audio tags in the song editor, the pop-up dialogs for #GAP, #BPM, #START, #END have also moved into the top-right corner

Copy-Pasting

The copy-pasting functionality has undergone another refactoring and should now produce less unpredictable outcomes.

Paste Notes

Additionally to the existing feature to copy notes from anywhere in the song and pasting them somewhere else, it is now possible to copy lyrics from any text source (e. g. like "lyrics.com" or "songtexte.com"). Pasting them with CTRL-SHIFT-V will try to split the lyrics into syllables and paste them with the length of 1 spaced out with 1 beat gap in between them.

Yass Reloaded 2023.12

Release Notes

This release basically addresses #7

Versioning

This release introduces a compatibility setting (Extras > Preferences > Error Checking > Tags) where you can set the target Ultrastar Format version. By default this is set to "1.0.0"
If the default is selected, saving a file will result in:

• #RELATIVE tag being removed and the file is stored with absolute beats
• #AUTHOR tag is replaced with #CREATOR tag. If the latter already exist, the author will be appended to the creator
• #DUETSINGERP1 and #DUETSINGERP2 are replaced with #P1 and #P2
• #ALBUM, #ID, #RESOLUTION, #NOTESGAP, #ENCODING are removed

In any case, the #VERSION tag will now be added as well.

New Features

• #CALCMEDLEY is now supported. If this is set to on/off, #MEDLEYSTART- and ENDBEAT will be removed (and the other way around)
• When copying notes, you can now use "Paste Note Heights" to paste the copied note heights over other notes. The note lengths and lyrics of the notes that are pasted over will be retained. (Keyboard Shortcut CTRL-SHIFT-ALT-V)

Yass Reloaded 2023.11

Release Notes

I have been creating quite a couple of new songs, and tried to improve things, that were bothering me, whilst doing so.

Hyphenation

Obviously, this was already there, but the algorithm sometimes did not do a very good job in my opinion. For a lot of folks, the current workflow when creating new songs includes the Ultrastar Creator as a first step to tap in the lyrics and as a finishing step Yass, to finetune notes. If you are not already using Ultrastar Creator (in the latest version), I highly recommend downloading it. It includes dictionary files that help hyphenate words.
In the previous version, splitting a word (e. g. by hitting the "-" Minus key) that had multiple syllables would still result in a split where the whole word would be the first note, and a tilde the second. Now, the hyphenator will do it's best, to split the word in syllables, and put the first one in the first note, and the remaining syllables into the second note. Furthermore, if the word to split has multiple syllables, the length of the first note would be relative to the amount of syllables, e. g. if a word has three syllables and the note is 9 units long, then splitting the word would result in a 3 unit long note for the first syllable, and the remaining two were in a 6 unit long note. If you have defined in the settings, that notes should not be touching, then the first syllable would be 2 unites long, and the next note would start leaving a 1 unit long break.
Also, if you feel like the hyphenation did not meet your expectation, because the word was split lexixcally, rather than how it is sung (e. g. "hy-phen-ate" vs "hy-phe-nate"), you can hit "CTRL-H" to try to rehyphenate the word again

TL/DR

1. Install Ultrastar Creator for improved hyphenation (= splitting of words/notes into syllables)
2. Note-splitting tries to consider whole word length and sets the length of the split notes accordingly
3. New feature "Re-hyphenation": Mark the syllables to be rehyphenated and hit CTRL-H. Yass will toggle between "brea-king" and "break-ing". Also works on "breaking - ", which changes it to "brea - king" and then to "brea - king"

Recalculate BPM

Added the possibility to recalculate all notes based on a new BPM:

1. Open a song
2. Open "Lyrics Gap & Beats"
3. Enter a new BPM into the "Beats" field. Instead of hitting "ENTER", which will simply set a new BPM, click the "Recalculate BPM" icon (looks like a "Refresh" button with two circular arrows, and the start times of all existing notes will be recalculated based on the new BPM

Improved Copy-Pasting

This is still a bit wonky, but selecting and copying multiple notes and then pasting them over existing notes is easier now. Very useful, e. g. when you have finished the chorus of a song, then you can simply copy the chorus and paste it over the second chorus using CTRL-SHIFT-V

Installation

• Use the installer, if you are on Windows and haven't installed Yass yet
• If you have already installed Yass, you can simply replace the yass.exe file in your installation folder
• Use the JAR, if on Mac or Linux

Yass Reloaded 2023.8

• FIX: Fixed some incompatibilities during playback
• NEW: Auto-Correct option to capatalize each line
• NEW: Auto-Correct option to replace all sorts of apostrophes with typographic ones
• IMPROVED: Copy-Pasting notes and lyrics
• IMPROVED: CTRL-SHIFT-UP/DOWN now increases/decreases not by octave