Read about how to get started

Advanced Topics

Sideload Your Music
Moving & Sharing Levels
Level Creation Tips
Update Older Levels (if their start times are off)

Sideloading Your Music - aka using your own music

Sideloading Your Music - aka using your own music

You can “sideload” your own music and make your own levels.
Windows
Copy your audio files (mp3, wav, ogg) to the Groove Catcher/Music folder on your Desktop.
Then restart the game and your songs will show up in the Level Builder menu.
Quest
1) Download and install SideQuest. This is the easiest and most common way to load files onto your Quest. Follow the instructions on the SideQuest installation page to get thing set up and to connect your headset either using a cable or over wifi. Sometimes you have to restart your computer and/or you Quest to get the connection to work.
2) Once your Quest is successfully connected to SideQuest it will look like this

3) Then you can open the ‘Manage files’ view by clicking on the folder icon

4) Then click on the Android folder to open it

5) Then keep clicking on folders until you open up Android/data/com.vizmoo.groovecatchertx/files/Music and it looks like this (without the files that I already have shown here)

6) Drag and drop your audio files (mp3, m4a, wav, ogg) into the folder and they’ll get copied to your Quest. Or you can click the ‘+’ button in the lower-right of SideQuest. After you’re done, go back to the Quest and run Groove Catcher (or quit it and restart it if it’s already running).
Then you’ll see your songs in the Level Building menu.

Moving & Sharing Your User-Made Levels

NOTE - if you used sideloaded (i.e. your own) music to make a level

The person you give you levels to has to also have the same audio file set up for sideloading like described above.

Where are the level files?

Quest

Follow the instructions above under Sideloading Your Music to get connected using SideQuest.

Then the level files you make are in this folder:

Android/ data / com.vizmoo.groovecatchertx / files / User Levels

Be sure to copy both the matching sculps.sz file and the level.json files, as explained more below. If you get files from someone else, you can copy them to this folder.

Windows

When you make a User Level, aka a custom level or similar, it gets saved in this default location - be sure to replace <your username> with your, uh, Windows username!

C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\LocalLow\Vizmoo\Groove Catcher\UserLevels

You can also cut and paste this text into the Windows File Explorer address bar to get their quickly

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Vizmoo\Groove Catcher\UserLevels

You can make a shortcut to this folder (right-click it and choose Create shortcut), then move that shortcut to anywhere you like on your system so you can get to it easily.

The Level files themselves

For each level you want to move or copy, grab both the sculps.sz file and the level.json file.

The filenames are structured like this <Song name>.<Level name>.<unique id>.[sculps.sz or level.json]

Changing the level name - making a copy

If you edit a level in the game and change its name and save it, it will make a new level and sculps files with a new unique id, and the original/previous one will be left as-is in the folder. Changing a level’s name from the files themselves is more complicated, let me know if you want to know how.

Sharing your levels

For now copy the files like described above, and simply drop them in the same folder in another headset.

We’re working on a website to make it much easier for you to do this - stay tuned!

For now, you’ll need to just share the files on our Google Drive folder for level sharing. There’s instructions in there too. Since we give you edit permission, you’ll need to sign in with a google account, I believe.

Tips for Creating Levels

In-game instructions are shown in the little menu that opens up by your left side when you start editing a section.

‘Sculpting’ and Catching

You make a level by Sculpting it. This term comes from the origins of Groove Catcher, the Sculptor music sculpture tool, used to make the prototype visual music sculptures you can watch from the side menu.

Sections

You can make a level using one or more sections. Each section is simply what’s recorded between each time you hit start and stop. So you can work on a song one part of a time, which makes it MUCH easier to get things how you want them.

I make levels by working the song in short sections. The length of the section depends on how hard it is to get things the way I want them. I keep working on a section and deleting it until I’m happy, then move on to the next section. Scrubbing is your friend - see below.

Deleting the most recent section - your friend for making great levels!

You can delete the most recent section you made after you stop recording. Do this by clicking the ‘Delete Section N’ button in the menu (N is the most recent section number you made). Pay attention to what section number you’re deleting - you can see the section numbers that’s shown as a tooltip for each sculp and beat cube. Be careful - there is no undo button to get your section back! And you currently can delete only the most recent section (it’ll get better in the future, I promise!)

Scrubbing - ooooh, it’s sooo good

You can scrub (move quickly) through your level by holding the grip button and moving the thumbstick left/right (oculus / WMR / Index), or touching the touchpad left/right (Vive). This is VERY helpful. Watch your feet for the song time. When you stop recording, you’ll get brought back to the point in the song where you started recording - this makes it easy to check what you just did. You can scrub while stopped, sculpting or catching.

When we have time, we’ll make a little video tutorial.