FAQ/About

Table of Contents:

What is VGVirtuoso?
What's up with the beta thing?
How do I access the songs on VGVirtuoso?
Can I submit arrangements to VGVirtuoso?
What sort of community is there to VGVirtuoso?
How do I access music?
If I arrange using Sibelius, can I still submit to VGVirtuoso?
What makes VGVirtuoso different than other video game sheet music sites?
How can I help VGVirtuoso?
How can I access the staff?
How did VGVirtuoso start?


What is VGVirtuoso?

VGVirtuoso is a database of user-submitted video game sheet music. Ever hear some great song from a video game you were just dying to play? Well, with VGVirtuoso, you can find just about any song from any video game, print out the sheets, and play it.

That’s the basic gist of our site, anyways. Users come and arrange their favorite songs. People come to the site looking for sheet music to play. Arrangers find others’ sheet music. People turn into arrangers. It’s all a big happy family here.

What's up with the beta thing?

Our site is currently in "beta mode"--hence, we have a lot more stuff we want to add to it, but we want to get something up and running for people to use. This is simply vgv 1.0 in our grand scheme. For more information, check out our projects page.

How do I access the songs on VGVirtuoso?

Very easily. First, you click on the sheet music tab in the navigation bar. Then, pick your favorite franchise.

From here, you click on the song name, and get linked to a profile of the song where you can rate the song, comment, find out information, and listen to it without downloading anything! And of course, you can still download the sheet music from here.

Let’s talk about mus, mid, and pdf. These are three types of files—three different ways you can download the song you’re looking for.

.mus is the file extension for files saved with Finale, which is what we use to make our beautiful sheet music. You need to have a Finale product to open these files. You need the most recent version of Finale to open files saved in the most recent version. You can download the latest version of Finale Reader for free by clicking here. However, any of the newest Finale products that actually write sheet music, not just listen to sheet music, cost money. Thankfully, you can use an older, free version of finale that writes music, Finale Notepad 2008. You can download that for free by clicking here.

.mid is a basic music file—you can just listen to the song, not get the sheet music. It’s not as high quality as an mp3, but it’s small and used for many different processes. It’s a .mid you hear when you go to the song profile page. Midi files can be played with all major music-playing programs, including Windows Media Player, iTunes, Winamp and more.

.pdf is a PDF file—used for Adobe Reader. Most computers have adobe reader installed, but if not, you can download it by clicking here. This is just the sheet music, you can’t listen to a .pdf as well. Since almost all computers have adobe reader, this is for people who don’t have Finale.

In summary, .mid gets you the song, .pdf gets you the sheet music, and .mus gets you both. Pick your favorite.

Can I submit arrangements to VGVirtuoso?

Yes! It is simple. First, we recommend you get an account on our forums. We have plenty of guides and helpful members there, both of which will explain the submission process in detail. Essentially though, you will go to our sheet music page, then select "Upload a song!" from the left sidebar. Here, you enter all of the information about the song, then upload the song file. Our moderators will review it ASAP, and then it'll either be accepted or denied!

But, if you're new, you shouldn't just jump headfirst into this system. You should get some feedback from members on the forums. So, once you have your awesome arrangement, you're just going to upload it to a hosting website (such as mediafire), then post a link to the location of the uploaded arrangements in a submission thread. Wait for people to give you feedback, fix what you need to fix, then go ahead and submit. Once you master the art of arranging, you can go straight to the user uploader, nice and quick.

If I arrange using Sibelius, can I still submit to VGVirtuoso?

Not really! Well... in a way. See, we here at VGV are idealists. We want all sheet music softwares to sing kumbaya in happiness. But, having multiple softwares would be kind of a pain! I mean, one sheet could be in finale, the next in Sibelius, and our poor users would have to download both. And people on the internet these days are stubborn. They only want to download one. If we had a .mus and a .sib for each song, that’d be fine, but that’s just way too much work.

I mean, most people here like using Finale. But, if a sudden wave of Sibelius lovers were to come to the site, maybe we’d allow Sibelius too. But, until that happens, here’s the plan:

So we’re really sorry that we can’t allow Sibelius too. I mean, we’d love to, but it just wouldn’t work out. It’s not you, it’s me. So, here’s our compromise. You can save your Sibelius arrangement as a nifty little musicXML file. Then, you submit your musicXML file. Then, we admins open the musicXML file in Finale, and everything transfers over. Quite useful, eh?

But, it’s not exactly clean—the transfer is similar to putting a midi into finale: there’s a lot of random stuff all over the place to clean up before it’s ready to be submitted. But! We’re the ones who made you use this crummy Finale in the first place. So you submit your musicXML file, and since we the moderators had to disservice you, we’ll clean it up for you. Pretty good deal, right?

Since we want songs on our site, we’re here to comply to what you want.

What makes VGVirtuoso different than other video game sheet music sites?

The most prominent difference is that in addition to piano sheets, we have multiple-instrument sheets and sheets for instruments other than piano. Many other sites have only piano sheets—we have that and more.

And we think we can give you unparalleled features to make your music experience even better. We have awesome features like rating songs, comments on songs, remixes of songs, and more! Some of this is still coming, but we promise it’ll be here soon.

What sort of community is there to VGVirtuoso?

You can access our community in two major ways: forum and chatroom. Our forum, the more docile of the pair, is a place for both work and play. Sure, you can submit your songs on there, but it also has games, random discussions, user creativity, and much more. So feel free to check that out.

And also the chat room. But that is a very strange place indeed. Experts only. You can access the chatroom the easy way—clicking on our handy little link in the navigation bar entitled “chat.” Or, if you’re IRC-savvy, our server name is link.nfnet.org, and our room name is #VGV. You can enter this onto mibbit, chatzilla (an add-on for firefox users), colloquy (a favorite for mac users), mIRC (A program you can download) or many more! If you have any questions about the chatroom, be sure to check out our guide to the chatroom.

How can I help VGVirtuoso?

Well, the best way is to join the forums, submit arrangements or just chat with our community. Every single member helps out site grow.

You can look in the bounty topic and see what the site needs.

If you want to affiliate your site with us, give us an affiliate image (88 x 31) and a brief description of your site.

And, you can show off your VGVirtuoso pride to other forums. Don’t spam the forums with advertisements, of course, but you can put one of our VGV user bars in your signature. Traditional grey, red, blue, or green. Or, make your own color!

How can I access the staff?

The easiest way is to pm us on the forums. We’re on there all the time, so we should respond quickly. Though, you might not have an account. Or, you just want to contact us a different way. Well, you can also join the chatroom, and ask us a question there. Usually at least one staff member will be on to answer your question. If it’s a private question, you can type “/query *staff member’s name here*” to open a private chat with them. Or, better yet, you can visit the contact page to get our e-mails.

How did VGVirtuoso start?

Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much...