Hello together!
First, excuse my bad English. It could be that some of my point's will be hard to understand.
Also it's my first time that i use this forum so i hope i can bring up good arguments and good points about this.

I had today a talk in #nominators about hitsounding in Mania.
A BN did check a Map which was really poorly hitsounded. It changed only the hitnormal which was also very inaudible plus some extra Piano Samples for certain part's in the music.

This brings up the Point that a lot of osu!mania Maps use very inaudible hitsounds. Most mappers often use exactly the same kind of sound as a hitsound for a note, which is already given by the song. This may result in the hitsound blending with the sound in the music.
The result is an inaudible or almost inaudible hitsound.

The Ranking Criteria says:

Ranking Criteria wrote:

1. Hitsounds from notes and sliders must be audible. These provide feedback for the player, and having them silent in a rhythm game doesn't make much sense. If you don't like the default sounds, then find replacements rather than silencing notes [...]. Lowering the volume of a few notes to provide a dampened effect is usually fine, but complete silence is always unacceptable. [...]

I did cut out the part's about slider, slider ticks etc because they doesn't count for osu!mania.


I'd like to discuss that point of the Ranking Criteria. From what I can see, many Mappers seem to not keep to that point because of the mentioned hitsound method, which makes most Maps technically unrankable.

Hitsounds should be somehow audible in the Beatmap. May it be by using a different kind of sound than the one which is to hear in the music or increasing the Volume of the Hitsounds. The player should get a positive feedback by pressing a note and for this we have hitsounds.
I also would like to clarify the difference between "Hitsounding" and "Keysounding".

For me it seems currently:

Hitsounding is using a different kind of sound as it is given in the music so that the player get a feedback for pressing the note.

Keysounding is using the same sound for hitsounding as it is given in the music.
It is also the adding of an missing sound from the music. A good example is here BMS. Most of the maps there contain "keysounding" which means every or at least almost every note has a different kind of sound which is missing in the music.
A good example of keysounded Beatmaps in osu!mania are: Yuuna Sasara feat. Tai no Kobone - Imperishable Night 2006 and Starry-'s Junk - Yellow Smile(bms edit). Imperishable Night is fully keysounded which means all hitsounds are additions to the Music while Starry-'s Beatmap has just a part in the Middle silenced and you play the Music with the keysounds (hitsounds).

My proposal would be:
An other suggestion would be:

I also would like to mention following:
Now using the argument "A lot of player doesn't play with hitsounds in mania anyway" is here not valid because there still player which play with hitsounds, including me, or play even better with hitsounds.


And now i would like to hear what you guys have to say to this.
It simply seems that many maps are just unrankable because of these blending hitsounds.

Hello, guys! I was one of the guys involved in the discussion, and even though I am not a mania BN/modder, I already had a similar problem in a mapset that got DQ'd for using the exact same sound as the one provided in the music, therefore players had no kind of feedback whatsoever. I would love to hear your opinions about this "problem" and how to fix or if it should be stayed like it's right now.

Thank you all so much for your participation!

I had a similar situation on my mapset, where I used the same hitsound of the drum in the music which wasn't even hearable.
As stated in the RC we're not supposed to hitsound each and every note on the map but they should be heard most of the time because they indeed change the map's perception.
The fact so many mania maps got through with such "errors" makes me wonder what went wrong in the ranking process. Keysounding is perfectly fine and the few examples I saw are awesome, but they are awesome because the music itself is the whole hitsounding and it's like really playing the song yourself.

In conclusion, the current RC is perfectly fine, since it states this concept more than once and those maps using almost unhearable hitnormals or really blending hitsounds in general aren't allowed. Someone can obviously argue how adding more notes at once in certain parts of the map creates a sort of hitsounding effect, but imo that's not enough to justify the almost complete absence of hitsounds on the map.

The basic problem in the end is: if I'm used to the feedback I receive from hitsounds I want them to be there and hear them, if I don't need them since I prefer the feedback of my keyboard then I just have to lower the volume of hitsounds or remove them totally.
Imo hitsounds must be there for the first ones all the time, since the second ones just have a convenient built-in tool to achieve what they want already.

Feerum wrote:

Hitsounding is using a different kind of sound as it is given in the music so that the player get a feedback for pressing the note.

A Map should have at least an audible "hitnormal" hitsound so that the player can have a positive feedback by pressing the notes. Then the using of similar sounds for certain parts in the Beatmap like specific instruments is allowed.

A Map should have at least an audible "hitnormal" hitsound so that the player can have a positive feedback by pressing the notes. Then the using of similar sounds for certain parts in the Beatmap like specific instruments is allowed.

I think we should let this as a guideline insteal
because in my opinion, not many players play with hitsound turn on
however there are still many players play with hitsound turn on, example like me

but for hitsounding, insteal of hitnormal, i always turn down the volume of hitnormal to 10 ~ 20% so that i can express the volume of bass,snare,hihat,cymbal by sample hitsound more
more than that, using same hitsound that from the music itself is totally fine

here is an example: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/334363 https://osu.ppy.sh/s/446696

tl;dr: i think the current rule now is fine already, using soft-hitnormal.wav drum-hitnormal.wav normal-hitnormal.wav or whatever doesn't affect the map much and also gameplay
just for who want to focus on hitsound that help the beatmap more interesting and fun
which mean nobody care if you use soft-hitnormal.wav drum-hitnormal.wav normal-hitnormal.wav or not; they may igrone beatmap hitsound and use their hitsound from their skin or turn it off ; or for players want to enjoy gaming with hitnormal so they can play the beatmap with hitnormal default or hitnormal that given by the creator in the set; there is no strict for both

This doesn't only matter for mania, since there were discussions for standard too, like here
I'll post my opinion from the standpoint of a standard player/mapper/modder, which should still be relevant here, because hitsounds in both modes are generally meant to accomplish the same thing.

I don't see a problem with hitsounds that "blend too well with the music" (or might even be identical).
Gameplay wise, hitsounds are meant to provide timing feedback. If they match the song well/perfectly you might not get audible feedback for perfectly timed hits, but as soon as your timing starts drifting off, the hitsounds will do the same and let you recognize if you're hitting early/late.
As long as the actual hitsound audio is not muted (or extremely low volume compared to the song) I think it's fine.

But I can also see why some people might have problems with this. Combining such hitsounds with something else, like the default soft-hitnormal or using them only as additions so people still hear "their" hitnormals can be a fine compromise in many cases, but should not be enforced or anything as it can be really unfitting/limiting/...

formatting on mobile is hard

Ok, I apologize in advance if I say anything stupid or wrong here because this is my first time posting in this subforum (or any subforum that isn't the mapping or modding ones), but I'd like to give my thoughts/opinions on this since I'm getting more into hitsounding and keysounding.

I think the reason why a lot of Mania mappers use almost inaudible hitnormals is because of the sheer density of notes in Mania, compared to other gamemodes. It'd be kind of annoying to be playing a 1/4 jumpstream at say, 200bpm and hear a loud hitsound (like the default hitnormal) every time you hit a note, which is why a lot of people use the soft sampleset or turn the volume down to 30% or so. While I think having the volume too low is a bit of a problem for players like me who play with hitsounds (because some maps have amazing hitsounds and shouldn't be ignored), it shouldn't be loud enough to where you can hear it evenly with the music. I think it should more or less fall into the background, but still be loud enough to where you kind of just know it's there and drown it out automatically, so I agree with your proposal about the audible hitnormal.

As for the hitsounds that blend into the music, I agree with Lasse's reasoning above about how identical or near identical hitsounds will sound off if you're playing late or early, thus, giving the player feedback, and just blend into music when you're playing on time and well. I also think it's a pretty big part of Mania hitsounding because of how in this game mode, the notes are playing with the music rather than creating your own rhythm to go with it like in STD, CtB, or Taiko (correct me if I'm wrong, but I've got very little knowledge of the other game modes besides Mania), so it would make sense to have hitsounds that are close to the music to make the player feel like they're playing the song itself (kind of like with keysounding).

Tl;dr: Basically, what Lasse said above about almost identical hitsounds blending with the music and that loud hitnormals can quickly become annoying in dense parts of a map like a burst or a jumpstream.

With the change of how the Ranking Criteria Subforum works from now on, topics like these are obsolete.