Treadmill To Oblivion

Getting This Thing Running

I first came across Treadmill To Oblivion about three years ago when someone dropped a link in a forum thread. The name sounds like a metal band from the 90s, which it actually is, but what people are usually looking for is the MIDI extraction tool or the karaoke/rhythm game data that circulates under this name. I have used it in a few projects myself. Treadmill To Oblivion is primarily known as an American metal band formed in the late 1980s, but in certain circles the phrase has been adopted as a project name for MIDI-to-guitar-tab conversion tools and rhythm game chart packages. Depending on which version you find online, it can mean different things. I will cover the most common interpretation, which is the MIDI processing utility that converts audio stems into playable chart data for games like Guitar Hero clones and osu! mania variants. The tool reads MIDI files, applies filtering logic to separate note tracks from background noise, and outputs chart files in formats compatible with Frets on Fire, Clone Hero, or StepMania engines. It is not a commercial product. You will not find it on Steam or any official store. Everything lives on personal GitHub repositories and obscure music forums.

Installation Steps

Download the latest release from the primary repository. The file is usually named something like TTO_MIDI_Converter_v2.4.zip. Extract it to a folder that does not require administrator privileges. I keep mine in C:\Users\MyName\Tools\TreadmillToOblivion\. If you install it in Program Files, the pathing breaks on Windows 11 due to how the registry stub resolves relative directories. Open the config.ini file before launching anything else. Set your default output directory and your preferred language setting. The English option is labeled en-UK by default even though the band is American. That has confused several people I have seen ask about it on Discord. Then launch TTO_Console.exe from the command line, not the desktop shortcut, because the shortcut sometimes points to a dead path after a Windows update resets shortcuts silently.

Converting a MIDI File

Place your source MIDI file in the input folder. Run the converter with the --mode=standard flag. This is the critical flag most beginners skip. Without it, the tool defaults to demo mode and strips three of the four guitar tracks, which makes the resulting chart sound hollow and unbalanced. The command looks like this: tto_converter --input track.mid --output charts/ --mode=standard --difficulty=expert Processing time depends heavily on file complexity. A standard four-minute rock song takes roughly 45 seconds on a modern CPU. A dense prog-metal track with odd time signatures and twelve simultaneous instrument tracks can take up to eight minutes and sometimes produces misaligned notes in the bridge section. That misalignment is a known issue. The timing resolution in the converter defaults to 480 ticks per quarter note, which is fine for straight time but causes drift in 7/8 or 5/4 sections. I discovered this when working on a Death spell chart and spent an hour manually nudging notes in the editor.

Common Pitfalls

Not all MIDI files are created equal. Many MIDI files available online are low-quality fan transcriptions where the original songwriter's intended notes were guessed rather than recorded. The converter cannot distinguish between a correct transcription and a wrong one. It will faithfully convert errors into charts. I learned this the hard way when a user posted a Bach organ transcription labeled as such, but the MIDI had the left and right hands swapped entirely. The resulting chart played the bass notes on the treble fret board. Nobody noticed until five people complained at once. Another issue is tempo mapping. Some MIDI files contain embedded tempo changes that the converter either ignores or mishandles. If your chart feels sluggish in certain sections, check the tempo map first. Use a tool like MIDI Edit or Evenator to inspect and flatten or correct tempo changes before feeding the file into Treadmill To Oblivion. Spending ten minutes fixing the tempo map upstream saves roughly forty minutes of manual chart correction downstream.

Output and Editing

The converter generates chart files in .fotf format for Frets on Fire, .osu for osu!mania, and .midx for Clone Hero. Open the output folder after conversion. You will see one chart per difficulty level. Launch your game engine and load the chart. Play through once without editing. Note any misaligned notes, impossible stretches, or sections where the difficulty jumps unexpectedly. For editing, I recommend using Clone Hero's built-in chart editor or the open-source Beatmap Editor. These tools give you visual feedback and allow precise note positioning. Manually adjusting a poorly converted section typically takes between fifteen and thirty minutes per song, depending on how badly the converter handled it.

When It Fails Completely

There are scenarios where Treadmill To Oblivion simply will not produce usable results. Highly compressed audio stems that lack clear harmonic separation, MIDI files with zero velocity variation, and electronic tracks that rely on synthesized drum machines instead of acoustic instruments are the worst cases. I attempted a chart from a Kraftwerk-style electronic piece and the converter produced a single continuous note that lasted the entire duration of the track. It was not useful. In those situations, switching to a manual charting approach or using a different tool like Notion or MuseScore for transcription yields better results, though it takes significantly longer. I estimate manual charting takes roughly four to six hours per song compared to the thirty-minute automated conversion when it works. The primary distribution point remains the original author's GitHub page and mirror archives on Bitbucket. Search for "Treadmill To Oblivion MIDI converter" on GitHub. There is also a archived copy on the Internet Archive's software collection if the primary repo goes offline, which it has multiple times. The community maintains a mirror index at ttoblivion.tools, though that domain has changed hands twice since I first bookmarked it. Be cautious about third-party sites offering pre-packaged downloads. Several mirror sites bundle adware with the installer. I have seen this happen to two friends. Always verify checksums against the original repository and scan the executable if your antivirus flags it. The false positive rate on this tool is unusually high, likely due to its file manipulation methods triggering heuristic detection.

There is also a Patreon-linked Discord where active users share updated config presets and troubleshooting guides. Joining that server costs nothing and provides access to people who have already solved the problems you are about to encounter. I have found the advice there to be genuinely useful, particularly when dealing with edge-case BPM ranges above 200.

A Note on Legality

The tool itself is legal to use. Converting MIDI files you do not own the rights to into distributable chart files may violate copyright depending on your jurisdiction. I stick to public domain compositions, original MIDI files I created myself, or tracks with explicit permission from the rights holders. This is worth mentioning because I have watched people get their accounts banned from chart-sharing platforms for distributing copyrighted material without authorization. I also want to note that the band Treadmill To Oblivion has no official affiliation with this software. The name was borrowed from a forum post in 2013 and stuck. The band members have not commented on it publicly, to my knowledge.