One of the essential ingredients in a dance game is the music. There’s more to it than just music, though: each of the featured songs needs “step” files which describe the dance steps for the song at particular levels of difficulty. Most songs will also include background and “banner” images, and can potentially include video footage for the background.

There are a number of sites offering song packs of dubious legitimacy with regards to copyright, and I don’t intend to be one of them. This will severely limit what I can offer here, but at least that which is here is all free and kosher. If anyone has additional songs or song packs licensed under sufficiently permissive terms and would like me to distribute/mirror them here, please contact me with the details.

StepMix1. The folks at StepMania had a competition (entries closed in January 2006) called “StepMix” in which contestants were invited to submit songs. The entry requirements stipulated that the songs must be made available under certain licenses which allow redistribution (whether for profit or not), so I can make the pack available here. The quality is mixed: most of the entries are good, some are excellent, and some are not at all to my tastes. There are 98 songs in the pack, so there’s still plenty of good stuff if you delete the ones you don’t like.

The pack is available at the StepMania website, but only as a torrent (or as a CD you can order). If you prefer to download it with HTTP, I’m providing it here.

Download StepMania_all_StepMix1_entries.smzip [256MB]

If you are using StepMania, the downloaded file can be placed “as is” in a directory called “Packages” (in the same directory as your “Songs” directory), or you can extract it (it’s a .zip file, really) and install the songs in the “Songs” directory. This latter option gives you the ability to delete any songs you really hate, and it’s also necessary for programs other than StepMania which don’t support “.smzip” files directly (like PyDance).