Dead as Disco: How To Import Your Own Music and Actually Sync It Properly

Infinite Disco is the feature that could eat your whole weekend if you let it.

Dead as Disco puts you in the boots of Charlie Disco, a fallen legend clawing back the spotlight from your old bandmates in a beat-driven brawler where every punch, dodge, and takedown is locked to the music. The base soundtrack is already a solid mix of licensed tracks and an original OST, but the real draw is Infinite Disco mode, which throws open the doors and lets you pipe in whatever songs live on your hard drive. Drum and bass, classic disco, whatever embarrassing hyperpop phase you're still in secretly. The game does not care. It will let you throw hands to all of it. Getting that music to actually sync up, though, is a different story, and doing it half-baked will have the beats landing somewhere in the approximate vicinity of your attacks rather than on them. Here's how to do it properly.

How To Get Your Music Into the Game

Before anything else, you need MP3 files. Dead as Disco technically supports multiple audio formats, but MP3 and OPUS are your best bets for smaller file sizes and stable imports. If a file fails to import at all, the most likely culprit is a codec issue buried inside the file. The fix is straightforward: open it in Audacity, export it fresh, and try again. That export strips out the problematic codec and the game will take it cleanly.

For sourcing MP3s, anything you have purchased through iTunes works fine. If you want to pull from YouTube, a converter tool that accepts a pasted link and spits out an MP3 is your quickest option. One tip worth taking: use lyric videos as your source rather than official music videos. Music videos tend to have ambient noise, dialogue, and audio that is not the song itself baked in, which will muddy your import.

Once you have your file ready, boot up Dead as Disco and select Infinite Disco from the main menu, just below the Encore Bar option. From there, switch to the Free Play tab using RT on controller and look for the "Add My Music" button near the top of the screen. First time you hit it, a EULA pop-up will appear. Proceed through it, select your file, and after a short loading screen you will be sitting in front of the edit window. Hit Save here and your track is in the list. It is not synced yet, though. That is the next part.

Getting the BPM Right

The tempo setting is the most important part of this entire process. BPM controls how fast you and your enemies move and attack, so an inaccurate number means your hits are constantly landing off-beat. The game recommends keeping your tempo between 120 and 200 BPM for the best results.

There are a few reliable ways to find the correct BPM for a track.

Looking it up is the fastest option and works fine for most mainstream releases. Just Google the song name plus "BPM" and you will usually find a reliable answer in seconds.

If you want more accuracy, beatsperminuteonline.com lets you click along to the beat while the song plays and calculates it from your taps. It is the same underlying method as Dead as Disco's own Calibrate button, which I will get to in a moment.

For the most precise result, especially for tracks with unusual rhythms or slight BPM drift, ArrowVortex is the tool to reach for. It is a Windows app (also works on Linux via Wine) that analyzes your MP3 or WAV file automatically and hands you a decimal BPM value. That extra decimal point matters more than you would think when you are trying to keep beatlines lined up over a three-minute track.

Using the Advanced Editor to Nail the Sync

This is where most guides stop short, and where most custom tracks end up slightly off. Finding the right BPM number is step one. Making sure the offset is correct is what actually makes everything click.

Hover over your uploaded track in the song list and press E on keyboard or Start on controller to open the edit window. From there, go into the Advanced Editor.

In the Tempo field, input your BPM. Once you have done that, look at the waveform display. You will see pink beatlines overlaid on the audio waveform. Your goal is to line those pink beatlines up with the peaks in the waveform, which is where the actual beat hits in the song.

To move the beatlines, hold Left Shift and Middle Mouse Button together and drag. If your middle mouse button cannot be clicked, you can edit the offset value manually in the Offset field instead. Zoom in on the waveform for finer adjustments, the default zoom level does not give you enough precision to do this well.

Once you think you have it, hit the metronome button to hear it click over the track. If the metronome lands on the beat consistently, you are done. Hit Save and Exit, then Save on the edit screen to commit the changes.

One thing to watch for: if your beatlines are well-aligned at the start of the track but slowly drift as the song goes on, your BPM value is slightly off. Recheck it with a different method and adjust. Some songs also genuinely change tempo mid-track, which requires adding BPM sections.

Handling Songs That Change BPM

Some tracks, particularly older recordings or anything with a live feel, will have tempo shifts throughout. For those, you need to place multiple BPM markers at the correct timestamps rather than relying on a single global value.

Songsterr is a good resource for finding documented BPM changes in a song. Look for the note icon followed by a number, that is the BPM starting from that point in the track. You can mirror those timestamps and values directly in Dead as Disco's Advanced Editor.

To add a BPM section, press F in the editor. To reposition a section you have already placed, press Ctrl to toggle Section Edit mode, which disables playhead seeking but lets you drag your BPM markers into the correct position. Press Ctrl again to return to normal.

Trimming Tracks and Fixing Corrupt Imports

The Start and End Time fields let you trim the beginning or end of a track, useful for cutting a long intro, cleaning up playlist looping, or removing an outro that drags. You can type a value in seconds directly or drag the white boxes. Worth knowing: changing these values will automatically adjust your Beat Offset to compensate, so your sync will stay intact.

If a track ends up corrupted and refuses to clear from your song list through the in-game menu, you can delete it at the file level. Open your %localappdata% directory, find the Pagoda folder, and navigate to Saved/ImportedSongs. Every imported track lives there and you can delete any of them directly.

A Quick Recap Before You Waste an Hour Re-Syncing

Get a clean MP3 file. Use ArrowVortex if you want the most precise BPM, or beatsperminuteonline.com if you prefer tapping it out manually. Set your BPM in the Advanced Editor, align your pink beatlines to the waveform peaks, check with the metronome, save, and you are good. For tracks with tempo changes, grab the BPM map from Songsterr and drop in your section markers. It sounds like more work than it is, and once it clicks, fighting to a properly synced track you chose yourself hits completely differently.