Rhythm games are fun, steno is fun. Put them together and you get double the fun. The idea is to transcribe your favorite songs with steno. If you've ever heard of Steno Hero from Steno Arcade, you will sort of get the concept. Read until the end to try out StenoJam for yourself.
Steno Hero is a great concept, except it's not playable on my device, an M1 Macbook Air. Also, downloading Steam is a hassle for those who aren't already gamers. I'd much rather practice typing in the browser, which everyone already has.
Also, Steno Hero’s songs were too fast. Even the easiest song was too fast for me. There is also no easy way to customize the songs you want to steno to which makes sense because of copyright issues.
I tried transcribing some songs like Disney’s “Let it Go” and some other songs, which I found manageable. I did this by playing the YouTube video in the background and typing in Google Docs. Okay, this was fun but I didn't know the accuracy, and there was no way to tell if I'm typing the lyrics right on the beat. Also, there was no fancy user interface.
One problem with transcribing Disney songs, or any other song for that matter, is copyright. This is why games like Beat Saber only have a handful of songs and don't let users make their own custom maps out of the box.
However, I think I found a loophole to this problem. Looking at YouTube’s terms of service, YouTube videos that leave the embedding option on for their videos necessarily consent to other websites embedding their videos. Here is the link to YouTube’s terms of service: Terms
I don't know about syncing the music to the beat and making sure the player strokes to the beat, but just embedding the video is okay. The only caveat being you have to use a video where the embedding option is enabled. It's just something interesting that I stumbled across and what encouraged me to continue building the web app.
If anything, StenoJam is just another practice website with a bit of a twist. You can pretty much replicate the whole experience with just a text box and some music, but maybe StenoJam will inspire someone to make something even better; add rhythm to the game.
In fact, that was one of my reasons for making this. I know I don't have the ability to make the perfect steno rhythm game. I just need to make something good enough to be an inspiration.
Here is the link to try it out: https://stenojam.web.app/
To play, you get a YouTube link of the music video, and paste it into the “change song” pop up box. You can also copy paste the lyrics of the song as well if you want to know your accuracy. Now all you have to do is play the video and start jamming, or transcribing.
Maybe this'll be the start of something.
