Is there any way for me to download just the osu mania variant of a beat map? I'm trying to use malody but it won't detect regular beatmaps that have mania as an option
I think they are either talking about downloading only the mania difficulties from sets that have both mania and another mode, or somehow downloading only the converted mania version of a map. Most likely the latter.
In both cases, no, it is not possible to download only the mania map directly from the website. The best you can do is download maps that only have mania difficulties and nothing else.