Pros and Cons

There are a few benefits to storing your profile on your USB Flash Drive rather than having on created on your local arcade cabinet. For instance, with a USB Profile you're able to view your stats, scores, and other profile information without needing access to the machine. This is especially useful in the case of public cabinets such as Penn State's "Cabby" where you are unable to access the machine without permission from a club officer and/or some sort of administrator. Having a USB Profile also means that you are able to setup Groovestats on your own, edit your display name at will, view and download your screenshots, and play custom songs off of your USB Drive on your profile.

There are however, a few downsides to USB Profiles

• Physical, if your USB Drive is lost or damaged you will lose your profile forever.
• Backups should be taken to ensure that losses are minimal
• Risk of erasing profile data if used improperly on the cabinet
• You no longer have the luxury of scrolling in the Select Profile screen (This may be seen as an upside)

How to automatically create a USB Profile

Step 1) Insert a flash drive into cabby before going past the Select Profile screen*

It is imperative that step is done before going past the Select Profile screen; otherwise, you run the risk of erasing any profile information already present on the drive.

Step 2) Play a set (1 credit) and save your scores under your name. Once you've reached the Game Over screen you can remove your flash drive.

If you look inside of it, you'll see that it's created a StepMania 5 or StepMania 5.1 folder which contains all the info for your new profile.

USB Custom Songs

If you did not create a USB Profile complete the following step first otherwise skip to step 2

Step 1) You can create a StepMania 5 or StepMania 5.1 folder on your flash drive depending on your version of stepmania.

Step 2) Create a Songs folder inside of the StepMania folder on your flash drive.

Step 3) Inside your new Songs folder place the folders containing your songs. Do not place whole packs in the Songs folder. StepMania will basically treat everything in your Songs folder as its own pack named [Your Profile Display Name Here]

Let's take a look at an example of the proper File Hierarchy in your USB showing Custom Songs