Our story
From a research project to AI beatmap generators for two osu! modes, in four months. Every song deserves a beatmap.
The problem
You find a song you love, look for a beatmap of it, and the one you want isn't there. Nobody mapped the song — or it exists only in another mode, another key count, or at a difficulty far from yours. Mapping by hand takes hours for every difficulty, and no community can map every song for every player.
The vision: every song deserves a beatmap
DanceGAI exists so that the beatmap you want can exist, even when nobody has made it: any song, turned into a playable osu! beatmap in the mode and difficulties you choose.
Why AI
A model that has learned from thousands of human mappers can make that first playable map in seconds. It doesn't replace mappers — a skilled mapper still makes a better map, and if a great one exists, play that. AI is for the songs and difficulties that would otherwise have no map at all.
How we build it
- Playable, not just plausible. Correct timing, sensible patterns, and a star rating measured with osu!'s own algorithm.
- Honest about AI. Every map is labelled as AI-assisted, and we publish how the system works and where it falls short.
- The player decides. The mode, key count, difficulties and style are yours to choose.
- Fast enough to play with. A full mapset in seconds, so trying another difficulty or style is easy.
Read our mission for the principles in full.
Milestones
The moments that shaped DanceGAI. Every individual change is in the changelog.
Research begins
DanceGAI started as a research project, Project Rhythm: can a model learn to map osu! mania the way people do — not by transcribing audio, but by deciding what a chart should feel like? The first weeks went into the foundations: how to describe a chart's patterns, how to represent it so a model can learn from it, and what data to learn from.
dancegai.com launches
The first generation pipeline was frozen and, the same day, dancegai.com went live with the core loop: upload a song, generate on a cloud GPU, download a playable .osz. Rough, but real — anyone could turn a song into a chart.
One song, a whole mapset
Instead of one chart at a time, a single generation began producing a full spread of difficulties, each named by its measured star rating — and the full generator opened to visitors who weren't signed in.
ManiaGAI v2
Version 2 replaced the whole pipeline in production on October 1. Timing is right on 97.1% of the songs in our benchmark (up from 90.7%), and a full mapset now takes about 20 seconds of GPU time — typically 13–25 seconds, depending on the song and the difficulties requested — instead of a minute or more. Your audio is prepared in your browser while you choose settings, GPU workers start from a snapshot in about a second, and the generator opened up: 4K to 9K, any choice of star ratings, and style controls. The technology page explains how it all works.
DanceGAI in 15 languages
On October 3 the whole site — the generator, the guides and every page — became available in 15 languages. Each language has its own address, such as dancegai.com/ja, and the language menu at the top of every page switches between them, keeping you on the same page.
Sharing and a public Gallery
Players can now decide who sees each mapset: private, unlisted or public. Public maps gather in the Gallery, playable as silent previews so the song itself is never shared, and their charts are kept permanently. The same day, repeat generations started faster, and the note model moved to its newest version.
ManiaGAI v2.1
A week after version 2, ManiaGAI v2.1 went live — a major quality upgrade, with both models substantially improved. Every chart is now stamped with the version that made it, and the Gallery shows it. Two days earlier, Gallery maps became playable with their song and downloadable for a week after they were generated.
OsuGAI v1 Beta — osu! standard
DanceGAI became a multi-mode platform. OsuGAI, the osu! standard generator, opened as a beta with its own page, its own style controls and background images, and the homepage now introduces both modes with the same Flower Dance mapped by each. It is honest about being a beta: maps often come out harder than the target, and some slider shapes are rough.
The long-term vision
Every song deserves a beatmap — in every osu! mode. ManiaGAI v2 is the foundation and OsuGAI v1 is our first step beyond osu! mania; the next stages are a better OsuGAI (truer difficulty, cleaner sliders, learning from human play), more editing control, and the two remaining modes: TaikoGAI for osu! taiko and CatchGAI for osu! catch. The first piece of editing control is in internal testing now: a map editor where you select the part of a chart you don't like and regenerate only that section with AI — or edit the notes yourself and test-play the result.
Read our mission for where we're going and why.