Manually creating beat maps for your favorite songs in Beat Saber (2018) requires a bit of know-how and time. If you’re looking for a quick and surprisingly effective solution to automatically creating beat maps for any song, look no further than the fan-built service called ‘Beat Sage’.
Beat Sage is an AI which creates custom beat maps with any song on YouTube, or any mp3 in your possession. Simply navigate to the Beat Sage website, plug in the song’s YouTube URL (or upload your own mp3), tick a few boxes for level difficulty, game modes, and song events, and you’ll have a brand new mess of levels for Beat Saber on SteamVR headsets and Oculus Quest. And it’s free.
Created by Beat Saber fans Chris Donahue and Abhay Agarwal, Beat Sage is said to use two neural networks to map an audio file into what the team calls “a plausible Beat Saber level.”
“These neural networks were trained on Beat Saber levels created by humans,” the team explains. “The first neural network listens to the audio and predicts at what points in time blocks should be placed. The second neural network looks at the predicted timings and maps each to a timestamp to a block type (e.g. red up, blue down, red up + blue down).”
Check out the promo below to see some of the results, timestamped showing Ariana Grande’s song ‘thank u, next’.
Installing the songs is fairly straightforward on PC, as it doesn’t require any modding. Find the ‘CustomLevels’ subfolder in your directory either via Steam or Oculus Home—depending on where you bought Beat Saber. Here’s the default locations.
- Steam VR: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Beat Saber\Beat Saber_Data\CustomLevels
- Oculus Home: C:\Program Files (x86)\Oculus Apps\Software\hyperbolic-magnetism-beat-saber\Beat Saber_Data\CustomLevels
From there you unzip the downloaded folder into CustomLevels and you’re off to the races.
Installing for Oculus Quest is a bit more involved, as it requires modding through the unofficial sideloading app SideQuest. Check out the full instructions on how to install the custom songs on Quest.
Beat Sage is free, however the team is taking donations through its Patreon, which they say will help keep the service free moving forward.