Greetings everyone.

"Practice makes perfect".

I could not agree more.

Skill, on most arcade-rhythmic games, comes almost solely with practice, perseverance, determination and self-control.
osu! - and osu!mania specifically, in this case - is not an exception.
Improving at this type of games has been controversial, quite much so. I believe, anyhow, that there might be a quicker, cheesier way to improve and achieve better results.

All beatmaps rely on patterns: gallops, swings, stepjumps, pentuplets, [...].
These are, however, likely scattered around the beatmap, and not easily accessible to practice directly; wasteful, as per the purpose of training as efficiently as possible. Also, osu! has potentially an infinite amount of ever-evolving patterns, that cannot be entirely categorised and documented.

For this very reason, I wonder: is it possible to extract specific sections of a beatmap, to practice it specifically at different playback speeds?
I thought about cutting the MP3 track and copy the section of interest to create a new beatmap, benefiting from half and double speed mods.

It requires, however, a lot of time, and I have never edited a beatmap before.
What do you think could be the best approach?

If you go into the edit section of a beatmap, you can go to the part you want to practice and test play from there by clicking F5. After you do that, restarting will put you back at that point. The only problem is that you cannot use mods while doing this.

In the future, this sounds more like a feature request and therefore should be placed in the appropriate forum

You can select a part of the map.
On the top you will see circles in a straight line, select one and scroll to until where you want, then hold shift and click on the second circle. This will select all the circles in between. Then delete them

I tried this before in a single difficulty and then just skipped the long break on the map (no need to cut mp3)

Thank you both.

@Kao, sounds great! Is it different for mania maps? I have already tried selecting the parts I do not want to play and removing them, but the map starts from the beginning nonetheless. Any clue what I am doing wrong here?

You can also just delete all but the section of a beatmap you want to practice and it will start from there (usually people save these as separate difficulties. This combined with mcosu's ability to select a playback rate (similar to stepmania) you can achieve what you seem to be looking for.

In general it's better not to practice specific patterns over and over again as the results are similar to training a machine learning algorithm on a data set with minimal entropy. You will overfit your playing abilities to those specific patterns and struggle with all the others.

It's better to train on a set of maps with a very high amount of pattern entropy (ie. nearly uniform distribution of many different patterns) so that your ability to hit patterns is based on your ability to hit the individual circles. Thus, you will be better able to hit patterns you haven't seen before or do not explicitly practice as all patterns in some sense can just be decomposed into series of individual jumps. It's important to note that the same applies to rhythmic patterns but you won't be able to get a training set with much entropy if you don't include a variety of technical maps.

This is why it's typically recommended to play a lot of different maps as opposed to obsessively retrying the same maps over and over again if you want to improve. This only works if the different maps you choose are actually quite different (not just the homogenous 2015-2016 ranked maps). The other recommendation people typically make is to play longer maps but that is more just to get used to nerves when holding large combos.

Edit: Another important thing to note is that mcosu does not submit scores to the official osu servers. If you choose to play with it you are basically playing offline.

ShinyPhoenix wrote:

Thank you both.

@Kao, sounds great! Is it different for mania maps? I have already tried selecting the parts I do not want to play and removing them, but the map starts from the beginning nonetheless. Any clue what I am doing wrong here?

Just press space to skip.
If there is a note in the beginning, then it won't work, as it won't skip to that part

Also, as said above, playing more and more of the same thing multiple times in a short time actually makes you play worse. Bad Muscle Memory is bad
My usual trick is to play 250+ times then I choke -> give up -> play another map -> go back and magically SS with ease