Starbound Composer Program Lets You Make Music to Play In-Game

Following my party around as a trusty (but useless) bard is one of my favorite Starbound activities, right behind gutting villages and mindlessly digging down to planet cores.

Starbound players are lucky enough to be a part of a growing and active community. The game’s ease of modability and general customization let you make the experience all your own, including adding your own songs to your instruments’ repertoire via ABC files.

Finding ABC files to play using in-game instruments is easy, but not all of the songs you may want to play in-game have already been converted — this is where a program like Starbound Composer comes in handy.

Starbound Composer allows you to convert MIDI files into ABC files, test them out using the game’s instruments without having to launch Starbound itself, and allows you the ability to edit your ABC files to your tastes. How cool is that!

You can grab this nifty free utility on StarBards.net, but keep in mind you must convert music you want to use into MIDI format before you can convert to ABC, unless it is already in MIDI format.

If you happen to be simply looking for new community-made music without the minor hassle in using Starbound Composer, the StarBards community also has a wealth of gaming-related tracks and other types of music available for browsing.

Note: There is currently no direct download option on the songs found in the StarBards Music Hall.

To make use of the ABC information provided in each listing, copy all of the text found in the ABC script field and paste it in a blank text document. Save as .abc and place in Steam/steamapps/common/Starbound/assets/songs wherever that may be in your operating system.

If this sounds like too much effort for some novelty tunes, popular sources like abc Notation and StarboundABC have direct downloads to ABC files. But where’s the fun in that?