Stepmania Online

Perhaps make a way to sort the downloads page by popularity, or something of the sort so that players with fewer packs can find the most popular ones easily?

Sorry, the downloads page is a bit raw at the moment. It's pretty much just being used for archival purposes, but things will be a lot more user friendly in the near future.

Until then though, you can check for useful links and a list of common keyboard packs I have seen on SMO. You can use the indeed pack search coupled with the list of packs to find potential songs, music artists, or step artists to download things that might be to your liking.

If you are looking for common pad packs, I would imagine anything with a DDR, ITG, or DWI label would be a safe bet to download.

Keep in mind that the more you have, the more you will be able to play with others. These packs were community projects from various places all over the world, and you will probably always encounter someone with something you don't if you only stick to "popular" packs. Popular is subjective based on play style and the community the people you see come from. "Popular" for me is based a bit on IcyWorld's original pack list, as well as anything known of by the community of Flash Flash Revolution, so you know. This should get you by if you are an alright keyboard player though.

Yeah, I personally can find all the packs I need, and I know what people have, but once in a while a newcomer will show up in one of my rooms, and just saying check the downloads section on stepmaniaonline.net used to be the easiest way to tell people which packs they should get. At the moment its a bit of a mess is all. Sending a link to people in the room just isn't easy, since you can't copy/paste them, or click on them.

Yeah I understand what you mean.

For the time being, just tell them to go to the pack list thread on the SMO forums for the common keyboard packs to download (since it has all the links they would need there at the moment). Hopefully with some stuff that is going on with Indeed we can make common pack downloading a LOT more simple and streamlined (since qqwerf over there has been doing an amazing job indexing the contents of almost every pack in existence). We are still in the upload EVERYTHING phase, but it won't be much longer before the project can move on to other details that need to be worked on.

I'll need to collect some data on what is really "popular" for pad, solo, etc so I might ask users about packs they play the most often soon. It won't be raw like this for much longer, I assure you.

Probably the best indication would be number of downloads, and an option to just sort by that descending.

Being able to view only keyboard, only pad, or only solo packs as well would be ideal, but I'm sure you already thought of that.

A lot more people should do angelo's pack archiver or w/e it is. That'll help a lot.

Can't do it if I can't find it. :p

the downloads page is a bit raw at the moment.