[SM5] Seeking advice for giving offsets to songs

So, yeah. I have been having difficulties syncing my songs to my steps, especially when it comes to offsetting.
Do you have any advice to come up with a "near-to-perfect" syncing of the songs and steps, especially when giving offsets to songs?
For those step artists, how do you give a perfect offset to a certain song so that it would perfectly sync to your steps?

I would appreciate pieces of advices from y'all.

1.open the options menu in editing mode.
2.find 'rate'
3.set it to '0.2x',then the song will be played amazingly slow.
4.let's let the first line sync with the first beat.
5.save the offset.and turn the 'rate' back to '1x'.

You can also use F11/F12 to change offset when you are previewing steps(ctrl+p).

http://r21freak.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=12750

syncing by ear is vastly inferior to syncing by a waveform (note if you don't have to use -0.012 as a GO; something like 0.000 is fine if you aren't gonna play these on r21 machines or whatever).

http://r21freak.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=12750

syncing by ear is vastly inferior to syncing by a waveform (note if you don't have to use -0.012 as a GO; something like 0.000 is fine if you aren't gonna play these on r21 machines or whatever).
Other than the fact that if you sync by ear with a high speed and focused like an eagle on the target arrows standing at the distance away from the monitor then you can get a really precise OFFSET with practice of course. Waveform doesn't compensate for many things that affect the timing once it leaves the speaker such as distance away from the TV, potential audio lag, potential input lag, different versions of StepMania seem to affect the offset, different PC specs... All of that goes away if you sync the offset by ear well at least sync the global offset by ear.

Thanks to your advice. I am planning to follow the tutorial from the link Maxx gave, but now I want to ask this.
Where do I find the Stepmania.ini in SM5 so I can edit my Global Offset?

Other than the fact that if you sync by ear with a high speed and focused like an eagle on the target arrows standing at the distance away from the monitor then you can get a really precise OFFSET with practice of course.

if something is even 10 ms offsync it's gonna be very noticeable while playing. I would be damn surprised if anyone had ears that accurate enough to get within that window that consistently.

Waveform doesn't compensate for many things that affect the timing once it leaves the speaker such as distance away from the TV, potential audio lag, potential input lag/

all of which is covered by the global offset. There's plenty of packs synced to the same GO (like mute's) that you can use as a reference for your own songs once you sync that pack to a good GO for your setup.

different versions of StepMania seem to affect the offset

I don't see why that would matter much (it's never affecting mine at least)

different PC specs...

which AFAIK would only take a change on the order of nanoseconds and completely negligible for milliseconds.

if you wanna sync by ear, I can't stop you, but I'd rather trust hard numbers the waveform spits out than what a human ear "thinks" is the correct offset.

And my question was left unanswered.

And my question was left unanswered.

Assuming windows: %APPDATA%/Stepmania 5/Save I think (it's actually in preferences.ini for sm5 iirc)

That or you can just hit f6 twice during a song and play until it feels on for you (preferably on a synced pack).