Hi!!

Since 2 months now, I've been working on a project I, as many other users wanted to see on my empeg: A lyrics viewer.


I posted a small video of my lyrics viewer in action. You can download it on the yahoo empeg group in the files section. I didn't know if riocar.org was a suitable place for a large "temporary" (1mb) file. If so, I can post it there too. (yahoo is such a crap, but bandwidth is free! ;-)

After a lot of programming (the program isn't that big nor good, but I'm such a newbie in C ;-), this what I finally got today... I'm planning to release a very first version of the program soon (in a week or two), after I make a little clean-up in the code.

The program uses the "official" lyrics tags of id3v2. I used a winamp 2 plug-in, Lyrics 1.22, to write my lyrics directly in the mp3. If you want to start writing lyrics in your mp3, if you do it with this tool, it will certainly work. Support for other lyrics editor will come later...

Work still to be done:

- Detect Pause, FF and REW
- Shutdown cleanly ;-)

The rest is working quite well ;-)


Enjoy!!

Patrick!

I posted a small video of my lyrics viewer in action.

A long time ago, I said that seeing the empeg doing this would make my head explode. I'm now wiping my brains off of my monitor.

Very cool. Can you turn it on and off (I might not want to see lyrics all the time)? It looks like it is using the synchronized lyrics tag (and actually using the synchronization). Can you confirm that?

Can you turn it on and off

Yes, it will be possible. This is the way it works: When you want to see lyrics for a song, you just enter the Hijack menu and select "Lyrics Viewer". A press on the knob when it's working will make it go away...



It looks like it is using the synchronized lyrics tag

Yes, it uses synchronized lyrics:

Lyrics are typed like that in the mp3:

[00:00]I drank sixteen doubles for the price of one
[00:05]Trying to find the courage to talk to one
[00:08]I asked her for a dance
[00:10]Not a second glance
[00:12]My night had just begun
[00:14]

I use the current line time and the next line time to calculate speed at which the lyric should scroll. Some tweaking is still necessary but in general, it works quite well... Some difficulty though when lyrics should be scrolled of 1 pixel in a shorter delay than 20 msec...



Patrick

Wow. I started a similar project a long time ago, but grad school got in the way. I'm glad someone else decided to do it, and from the looks of it, you've done a great job. Kudos.

Now I won't have as much trouble deciding which of my other programs to work on when I get back to empeg hacking.

That is so cool. Now all I need is a couple of thousand monkeys to re-tag all my mp3s.

this looks amazing, i cant wait for it to be posted so i can put it on my empeg.

for those of you who do not want to go thru the trouble of signing up for the yahoo groups, i have posted the video on my server.

http://12.210.200.43/test/lyrics_viewer.mpeg

Very Nice!, i also can't wait to get a copy of this.
Here is another link to the movie, incase 20k isn't good enough for you

This looks pretty cool.. but alas, none of my mp3's are tagged for lyrics.. *sigh* Guess I have an excuse now..

Is there any sort of centralized database of lyrics with times? I'd be willing to cut&paste, but I know I won't have the patientice to figure out the timing. That being said, great work, I can't want to play with it.

Matthew

No one centralized database, but there's a Winamp3 plugin that searches multiple databases for lyrics... Unfortunately, none of them have times in them. Adding times would be kinda simple, you'd just need a program which takes the regular lyrics and shows them in a window, and plays the MP3 back for you. Then as each line of the lyrics comes up, you could just click, and it could tag that line with the current time in the song. We could use the Tag Tool from Kuo's Lyrics Displayer as a starting point.

There used to a bunch of little sites with tagged lyrics, but it seems they're all on Geocities and Tripod, and are woefully out of date and don't have any files on them anymore.

I am amazed. If I show this to friends, I will get one of three reactions:

a) "That is the most amazing thing I've ever seen"
or
b) "I wish my car stereo could do that!"
or
c) "You are such a geek"

Oh well, C is the going trend anyway

*picking jaw up off the floor*

I think there's actually a similar xmms plugin. I guess I should go look.

A! A! choice A! choice A!

That is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. If only it did not require so much manual labor...

For the wanna-be (and perhaps real) lawyers out there, would it be possible to maintain a database of these lyrics in a standard format (or somehow start submitting them to freedb) so that each song would only have to be done correctly once?

John

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeet! That is really too cool. Now who wants to type in lyrics for my 5000 or so mp3s :-)

-Mike

Awesome!

I have about 75% of my collection tagged with (non-synchronized) lyrics. From your video, it looks like the manual effort invloved in adding time codes might be well worth it.

If svferris is listening, does musicmatch have plans of adding an interface to add synchronized lyrics any time in the near future ? -:)

~Yogi

I'll second that. This will definitely cause "option A" outbursts from passengers. Only problem is I will have to learn the lyrics to some of my favourite songs now!

Pretty cool! I'm sitting here now singing alone with Old Black Rum on my player, and your vid clip on the notebook pc.

Cheers

Some difficulty though when lyrics should be scrolled of 1 pixel in a shorter delay than 20 msec...

Well, you're using a pretty big font, if you use a smaller font (like the 5-pixel high font the player uses), you'll squeeze more letters onto the display, although obviously it will be smaller, and maybe harder to read. Then you *could* skip 2 or even 3 pixels per screen update, but I doubt it would look very pretty. 1 pixel every 20 ms means that a given word is going to only be on the screen for about 2.5 seconds... Might be kinda hard to read if things are flying by faster than that.

Also, are you switching the scheduling policy to SCHED_RR when you start the application? If you're not, this would make things run a little smoother.

One thing you might think about for future development is a full-screen mode which would scroll the lyrics vertically. That way you'd have the ability to have 4 or 5 lines on the screen at once, for songs with a lot of really fast lyrics.

The other thing is, pretty soon after I started my lyrics scroller, I realized that Hijack's menu binding system was getting in the way a little bit. The user app becomes the "foreground" application, and the player is kind of in the background. IR presses can go through to the player, but in order to return control to the player, you have to call the WAITMENU ioctl, which makes your program stop. To get the most out of a lyrics scroller, I think Hijack needs some mechanism for user apps to run in the background and update the screen after returning control to the player. Not sure if that's in the cards, though.

Great stuff -- can't wait to see it in action on my player.

Okay, I was bored at work today so I decided to hunt for tagged lyrics on the net. I did find one site which still seemed to have files available, though the most recent ones might be from 1999 or 2000 at the latest. The selection isn't amazing (800 or so songs) but it's a start, for those who don't want to deal with downloading untimed lyrics and adding times...

Anyway, I sucked down all the ZIP files, unzipped them, and uploaded the files to my site. Here's the URL.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/a/m/amc156/lyrics/

Note that I'm still FTPing some files over so if you don't see songs at the end of the alphabet, they're coming. The filenames and such are really raw, and I haven't checked the files in any way. I just wanted them to be available on a non-Geocities non-Tripod page, and in raw (not ZIP) form.

Once I get my hands on this lyrics viewer, I'll probably be tagging some of my own collection and adding them to my site. I'm still curious to see how the mechanics of adding these tags to the MP3's works.

cool looks good, im sure once it get released im going to start doing the same, we should build a website so people can add there lyrics to the site as well and build a collection. anyone good with php and mysql?

Someone should definitely start a database of lyrics.

If that program is as sleak as it looks, I'd at least contribute a few albums if not simply for the wow factor.

How cool.

while messing around with the lyrics in winamp2, i noticed something that might come into play with the lyrics reader since it scrolls with the song. I will use Green Day - Time of your life, as an example. Here is a line from the lrc file.

[00:37]but in the end it's right.
[00:39]I hope you had the time of your life.

[00:52]So take the photographs

that gap between :39 and :52 there is a solo with no voavls just music. I know i should add a blank line to repersent this. I assume that the program is going to scroll the words over that long amount of time and thus not going in sync with that line. Is this going to be a problem?

I will make a webste design and the layoiut if soemone can write a simple php script that connects to a database to help drive it.

I would guess that you'd put in a time code where the vocal silence starts with no text associated with it.

Oh no in car karoke the world has ended

pretty cool though

Ummmmm. I don't mean to be a naysayer, but the program you linked to, Lyrics 1.22, doesn't look like it uses the official lyrics tags, as you claim, but the crufty Lyrics3 spec. Can you either tell me I'm right or wrong or post a small mp3 that works with your program somewhere for us to examine?

I'll tell you one thing, if it's lyrics3, those files aren't coming anywhere near my empeg. "Crufty" is a perfect word for that spec (I guess that's how you got to be the grammar nazi.)

I had some draft code which was using the ID3v2 SYLT frame, which is where synced lyrics are supposed to live. I'll see if I can't dig that up, if it turns out this program isn't using the right tag.

I think that has to be the coolest thing I've seen in a very long time.

I'm currently in the process of recoding all of my CD's in OGG and MP3 format, so I think I'll start adding synced lyrics fo them.

I could easily pop up a simple PHP and MySQL system for lyrics storage and retrieval. I have my own servers to get everything up...

And hell, if it was good enough maybe we could get Drakino to put in on Riocar

If that program is as sleak as it looks, I'd at least contribute a few albums if not simply for the wow factor.

/me considers the possibility of transcribing the entire Rush catalog...

And hell, if it was good enough maybe we could get Drakino to put in on Riocar

Well.. This might be something we might want to keep on the down low... Once a lyrics archive gets to a certain size, it's going to start attracting C&D (ceast and desist) letters. Even small to medium-sized lyrics sites occasionally get hit with them. If we do set something up, I think we should be careful about how much we publicize it.

Having said that... Tom, if you're listening, would you be willing to host it on the riocar.org server?

what we should do, is if tom is willing to do it, setup a secure members only database that only forum members can login to. Now that would be T&A

-oliver

Humm, I didn't know that sites got slammed with Cease and Desist letters for lyrics sites. I guess that would be somewhat obvious if you don't have permission from the owner of the copyright.

Kinda sad really.

He has a point about RIAA people getting on our case for posting lyrics. Last thing we want is "that" kind of attention.

And having to be a board-member to get to the site will NOT stop RIAA people from logging in, it just adds an extra step. And also doesn't protect the site owner from prosecution when they do get in.

And having to be a board-member to get to the site will NOT stop RIAA people from logging in, it just adds an extra step. And also doesn't protect the site owner from prosecution when they do get in.

Well really they don't waste the lawyer fees unless you refuse to "cease and desist." The negative attention isn't really going to kill the community, it'd just force us to take down the site. Really, if it was restricted to members, I'd be comfortable with it. Even if it was my ass on the line. Seriously, they just don't go after you as long as you do their bidding once they find it.

I think if it was restricted to members, they would have a tough time finding it.

Hi!!

Finally came from work.. No internet connection at work ;-( so bad... Good to see all your replies!!

OK, here are a few answers to your questions:

Well, you're using a pretty big font

Yes, Medium font of vfdlib. I tried small, but characters are kind of malformed, so harder to read. There's a gain of speed, but it's negligeable....(text is more longer (time) on the display, but it's harder to read) The skip-2,3 or 4 pixels is currently in use and helps keep the lyrics in sync...



are you switching the scheduling policy to SCHED_RR

Sorry, don't know what it does.. could you explain what and how ;-)



full-screen mode which would scroll the lyrics vertically

Yep, that would be cool too, but "phrases" of majority of my already tagged songs are too wide to be displayed completly on the display. Thats mainly why I choosed horizontal scrooling.


...I realized that Hijack's menu binding system was getting in the way a little bit.

I face this problem too. I will allow left and right buttons, but all other will quit. I think it's the best I can do with my knowledge right now.



[00:37]but in the end it's right.
[00:39]I hope you had the time of your life.

[00:52]So take the photographs

that gap between :39 and :52 there is a solo (...) Is this going to be a problem?

No...
When I tag my lyrics, I set the time of the "empty" line to the beginning of the solo. The viewer, when it reads lyrics, fills that line with a number of spaces proportionnal to the lenght of the "solo". That is working pretty well.



I don't mean to be a naysayer, but the program you linked to, Lyrics 1.22, doesn't look like it uses the official lyrics tags, as you claim, but the crufty Lyrics3 spec.


Here comes the worst part....(maybe not)

OK, My program uses ONE of the MANY ways of adding synched text to a mp3 From what I know now, I guess it's called id3v2 lyrics3 v2.0. The main reason I choosed this standard is the ease of use of the winamp plugin used to sync the lyrics (just click when it is sang), and the ability to find documentation and it looked like official. But the more I dug into it, the more I saw there was no clear standard.

From what I can understand of id3v2 SYTL (Synched Lyrics or Text... is that right??) they are directly kind of "between" audio frames? Am I right? Is there any easy way to find which frame the player is? The way I sync with the player now is to watch the /proc/empeg_notify (By the way, could somebody confirm that this file is in the RAM of the player, and not anywhere on a HDD???). The viewer would have to include some sort of mp3 decoding library, which my current knowledge of C prevent using... Way too much complicated. And if the lyrics are "interlaced" in the frames, one would have ot read through the entire mp3 to find all the lyrics.

The way lyrics3 work is by placing creating news tags with "undefined" lenght just before id3 tags at the end of the mp3. Lyrics there are a lot easier to retreive.

The good (or maybe less bad) point now: The hardest part of the program is actually to display them. The "retreive" part of the code is actually quite small. There could be addition to the viewer to detect other types of synched lyrics if it doesn't find the first type. As long as the lyrics are passed in a " [00:01] Hello!! " format to the scroller part, everybody could be happy.


if it's lyrics3, those files aren't coming anywhere near my empeg

Is there any reason I should know not using this format (destroys mp3 by corrupting...) I've used them since 2 years know and had no problems...




Concerning lyrics database:

Just an idea: if website hosting isn't a good idea, maybe kazaalite or any file sharing could be used to shared lrc files. (which are by the way, the same format that is used by lyrics viewer, but simply saved into a separate file instead of in the mp3 itself). Using a special filename (beggining always with LFEGWLV (Lyrics For Empeg Guys With Lyrics Viewer, then with artist - title........ something like that...) it could be easier to search, and less complicated to maintain...

just my 2 cents on that...



So, back to coding..... I just learned today I would work Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, Tues, Fri, Sat, Sun, 12 hours each day, so 0.1 release date could be a little later than first expected... Will keep you informed


Thanks for all good comments... I knew such a news would create reaction ;-)

Patrick

Ok, we could have a opt-in for only board members. And have the signup page pretty hidden so its very hard to find. I think that should by us a good year plus! It would also be a good idea to completely delete this thread in the bbs, so google doesn't pick up on it.

Lyrics3 is about as advanced a specification as ID3v1 was. It's a horrible kludge, and it's about the worst possible way to do it. (Okay, it's a little better than ID3v1 was. At least it didn't utilize fixed-length fields.)

The reason we don't like them is because they technically corrupt the mp3 files. As far as a decoder is concerned, it's trash at the end of the file, just like an ID3v1 tag is. While ID3v1 tags became a de facto standard and decoders learned to ignore them, Lyrics3 did not, and decoders did not learn to ignore them. If you're lucky, the decoder will throw it away as trash. If not, you might have the pleasure of squeaks and squawks. If you're terribly unlucky, you might end up blowing your speakers due to those squeaks.

ID3v2 avoids these problems by making itself look like an mp3 frame (or making sure it doesn't look like an mp3 frame -- I forget). Anyway, while the specification states that ID3v2 tags can appear anywhere in an mp3 file, in practice, they only ever appear at the beginning of the file, possibly following a VBR header.

However, if you want to implement the ID3v2 SYLT spec instead of (or in addition to) Lyrics3 (which, BTW, is not an ID3 spec), there exists a library you can use (id3lib), so you won't have to worry about all of that stuff.

Oh, and the Linux kernel dynamically generates all the stuff in /proc. It's not on the hard drive anywhere. Some of it can actually be written to in order to tweak parameters.

Sorry, don't know what it does.. could you explain what and how ;-)

On Linux (and most other UNIXes), processes have a scheduling policy and a scheduling priority. The policy determines what algorithm is used for choosing which processes to cycle between, and the priority determines within those policies, which ones are more important.

On the empeg, the player is generally (by default) the only process that runs using what's called realtime scheduling (SCHED_RR is one of the two available realtime scheduling policies.) This means that, for all intents and purposes, user apps get a tiny share of CPU, and they get it whenever the player or other apps which are using realtime scheduling feel like giving it up. (Sorta, it's a little more complicated than that on the micro level.)

So by default, programs use SCHED_OTHER, which is the non-realtime scheduler. To change the scheduling policy to realtime, you do the following in your program. The following is lifted directly from my emptriv source, so it might not look exactly like yours. You might not be forking off a new process to start off with, for instance, if you're not, take the if fork()... stuff out. Also, checkRC is just a macro which checks the return value of these calls (>0 is error.) Substitute in your own error checking.

// include section

#include <sched.h>



// define the process priority

#define PRIORITY 30



// variable declarations

struct sched_param  sched_param;

int old_policy;

int iPid;



// early on in your int main(), do the following:

  if ( fork( ) != 0 ) // Fork off the process, if parent, return

    return 0;

  else

  {

    iPid = getpid();



    old_policy = sched_getscheduler( iPid );

    rc  = sched_getparam(iPid, &sched_param);

    checkRC("sched_getparam()\n", rc);

    sched_param.sched_priority = PRIORITY;



    rc = sched_setscheduler(iPid, SCHED_RR, &sched_param);

    checkRC("sched_setscheduler()\n", rc);

    rc = sched_setparam(iPid, &sched_param);

    checkRC("sched_setparam()\n", rc);

   }

// continue on with your program

.

Basically what the above does is set the priority and scheduling policy of your process. I think if you add this code to your program, you'll definitely notice it's more responsive. You should be able to scroll a little faster, and get a slice of CPU more than every 20 ms. Give it a shot, or give me your source code so I can do it.

Oh, of course, the big problem with SYLT is that, AFAIK, there are no editors for it, so we'd have to write one ourselves. But it shouldn't be too hard to do. We could also write a translator for existing Lyrics3 tags.

From what I can understand of id3v2 SYTL (Synched Lyrics or Text... is that right??) they are directly kind of "between" audio frames? Am I right? Is there any easy way to find which frame the player is? The way I sync with the player now is to watch the /proc/empeg_notify (By the way, could somebody confirm that this file is in the RAM of the player, and not anywhere on a HDD???). The viewer would have to include some sort of mp3 decoding library, which my current knowledge of C prevent using... Way too much complicated. And if the lyrics are "interlaced" in the frames, one would have ot read through the entire mp3 to find all the lyrics.

As Bitt says above, we don't care where the SYLT frames are, they can appear anywhere. id3lib handles most of the mechanics of reading/writing ID3 frames, including the SYLT frame (though you need to format the timestamps and lines of text in a pretty strict way.)

Once you release your program with source, I'll be happy to give ID3v2 SYLT a shot. I made a bit of progress several months ago. Thing is, we need to do both reading and writing, because I've never found a tagger that's implementing SYLT frame writing, except in raw form, where you need to encode the timestamps and headers yourself anyway.

I realize why you chose the tag format you did, and that format is perfectly fine for testing it out and getting it running. But there are a lot of audiophiles around here (obviously!) who aren't going to want gaps in between our songs (which these tags create.) I think ID3v2 SYLT frame support would give this already awesome program a much wider audience.

If you want to make your source available now, I have some free time in the next week or two before my classwork gets really heavy... Don't worry about it being ugly or half-working, you haven't seen ugly, unfinished code until you've seen my emptriv or empwake code. If your program is in any working condition, I think a few hackers around here would love the chance to contribute.

I don't think a lyrics viewer qualifies for real-time scheduling on the Empeg.

Remember, if EVERYTHING ends up in real-time classes, then there effectively will be no real-time scheduling, and the player will "skip" every now and then.

Cheers

I don't think a lyrics viewer qualifies for real-time scheduling on the Empeg.

Remember, if EVERYTHING ends up in real-time classes, then there effectively will be no real-time scheduling, and the player will "skip" every now and then.


Well, I haven't seen the update speed except in the blurry video above, but the player REALLY starves user apps on occasion. I've had Emptriv's priority bumped up pretty high and have never had skips. Something like this might not need a high priority, but if it's updating the screen in the ~20ms neighborhood, I thought it might benefit from realtime scheduling at a low priority.

But you're the expert. I'm just recanting my experiences with emptriv, which was using some much less efficient graphics routines.

Hi again!

A week ago, I though erasing completly the program because it was a mess. I kept coding on it last week and finally got it to work. Now you'll see why I tough about trashing it... Functionnaly, it's not so bad, but what a mess of C code.... I think there's a contest for the most obscure C program somewhere... I should provide my program as contestant ;-)

So here it is: Lyrics_ Viewer Pre-beta 0.1 ;-)

Just ftp somehwere on the HDD, chomd755 it, then include in config.ini and bingo...

To quit, please use Knob Press then press cancel to quit hijack menu..... don't go back to hijack menu (Knob Press Long) while you see lyrics viewer or you'll have to reboot

Don't FF or REW in a track... viewer will be all mixed up... If it does, simply skip track and come back to previous and it will do the trick



Coders: Be advised...Serial port was used for extensive debugging.... You can see the usleep() delays there : REAL is what the lyrics needed,
ADJ is the offset from real time
SLEEP is the real sleep time that was needed to keep up.. if it gets to 1, it means that lyrics can't keep up with the song...
MEASURED: is what a measered value of usec (with timers functions)
MOV is the numbers of pixels shifted each program scan... eventually gets higher if SLEEP is 1 for too long



Todo list:

- Real id3v2 SYLT support (BTW, I looked at id3lib doc.... whew too much for me ;-) and can I include C++ lib in a C prog?
- Not enough comments in the code (
- Handle buttons more gracefully
- Pause, FF and REW support...
- Improve Sleep coding (don't seems to catch up easily if lyrics get late for whatever reason)



You've been warned: Not for public use; just for your own drooling ;-)



Enjoy!!!!!!!! (as much as I did when it first scrolled!!!!)

Patrick

right on, im going to test it tonite, about the website i can also host it here at my house and password protect it. I already did the whole Wezzer - Pinkerton album with the lyrics if anyone is interested. If you want to do the php programming please contact me at justin@digxdesign.com so we can cordinate ideas about how we want it to work, and ill build up a flow diagram so we know we are on the same page.

The way I sync with the player now is to watch the /proc/empeg_notify (By the way, could somebody confirm that this file is in the RAM of the player, and not anywhere on a HDD???).

I'm no expert on empeg programming, but I think I understand vaguely how this works.

Normally, if you put [output] notify=1 into the config.ini file, the music player application will squirt FID data out on the serial port.

/proc/empeg_notify, if I understand it correctly, is a Hijack-only feature. Hijack intercepts the player's calls to the serial port and stores them in a memory buffer, then exposes this buffer to the filesystem as a file called /proc/empeg_notify.

So technically, yes, I think that file is only in the RAM of the player, and not actually anywhere on the hard disk. It's also only going to be available if you're using Hijack and if notify=1 is entered into your config.ini.

....So you can't believe it! You get the EOL2001 with illuminated buttons, the kernels, the logos, the fascia, the java, the lenses AND the optical interface AND THE FULLY VENTILATED SNEEZE-THROUGH WIND VENTS!

A 2000 dollar value ALL for just $699!! WE MUST BE CRAAAAAZY!!!

BUT WAIT!! That's Not ALL!!!

IF YOU ACT NOW, we'll throw in a Lyrics Viewer -- A 14,000 DOLLAR VALUE!! -- FOR FREEEE!!!

ACT NOW! DIAL 1-800-EXPLODE-MY-HEAD! YES, DIAL 1-800-EXPLODE-MY-HEAD!!!

Hmmm... Interesting situation regarding copyrights and a lyric database; the addition of the timing parameters could qualify the lyrics as a new work of art in their own right - and the fact that it would not be used as any kind of competition to anything that the music company publishes would also reinforce that.

As a non-perfect analogy, consider a phone book. You're not allowed to go through the Yellow Pages and copy it number for number, page for page, and then sell the resulting 'Green' Pages as your own creation. But you're perfectly entitled to recreate the works from scratch.

Another (perhaps better) analogy would be CDDB. Created from scratch, it contains a superset of the track listing that appears on the album cover. This would not be far different.

Yet another way to look at it - if you've legally bought that album, or anything containing the lyrics, you'd have the right to make a backup copy of the lyrics and to use any method you saw fit to backup and display those lyrics. And current copyright law gives you leeway to share that with friends - and I certainly count myself amongst friends here.

That all being said, you would definitely want to limit access and keep it hushed. If it got to a C&D letter stage, you'd have to comply - it'd just be too much hassle (and money) to try and defend a court case, and we know that the RIAA have deep pockets when it comes to lawyers.

Another reason to keep it hushed and protected - if it ever got well populated, then eventually through a friend of a friend of a brother of a wife of someone on this board (or something like that...), it's existence would probably end up being posted on a slow news day at Slashdot.

the addition of the timing parameters could qualify the lyrics as a new work of art in their own right - and the fact that it would not be used as any kind of competition...

A wonderful line of if/then reasoning and self-justification... but it's fantasy and wouldn't stand up in court.

I'm currently in the process of recoding all of my CD's in OGG and MP3 format, so I think I'll start adding synced lyrics fo them.

This really is *too* cool. I was actually thinking a few months ago just how cool this would be....

You say you'll add synched lyrics to Ogg...I just googled for a minute on "Ogg+lyrics" and came up empty, more or less. Are you actually doing this already? Any pointers?

Sweetness! Working well for me so far. Of course there are a couple bugs to work out, but your scrolling code is pretty damn smart about things. The right words were almost always on the screen in the couple files I tried out, and any errors were probably the result of poor time-tagging in the LRC file.

By the way, I don't think it's spaghetti code at all, I'm not having too many problems following the overall logic... Great stuff!

ROTFL.

It's about that time of night though

Can I get a Bowie Knife thrown in too?

Certainly, it would have been even harder to follow if I kept my first idea and coded in French, as it's my native language (and mabye not yours ;-) The few times I coded in French, variable name ended so long it was a pain to remember all their name... That's what got me code in English.. and also the though that you might like to look to the code;-)

Happy the program works for you.... should do because it did "fail" only with a few rapid songs when I can't even say all the words myself ;-) and fail is a large word.. lyrics were simply late...

Once 'we' get the 'correct' lyric tags working, would be it useful to page Magnus Brading? He seems to be fairly responsive to empeggers' needs.

That'd be fun to have a lyric editor in MP3 Tag Studio.

That is really cool! Great Job!

i haven't tested this yet, but have you tried to use a lyric tag thats longer than 255 characters? a while back, i encoutered a limitation w/ the comment field being expressed w/ 2 bytes... probably the same w/ all other fields.

Emplode keeps crashing for me when i try and replace a tune with a copy with lyrics tags. I'm using the version of the winamp plugin you linked to. Is there anything i'm missing?

The error i get is
An established connection was aborted by the software in your host machine (error 0x80072745)

I used to have a playlist called "speed lyrics"
(not sure what happened to it)

BNL's One Week has a lot of lyrics, but it's not as fast as some others.

Bree Sharp's Guttermouth and Weird Al's You Make Me are pretty fast ones.

But the fastest lyrics I can find in my collection (~14K songs) is from the Animaniacs sountrack (the first one) called Yakko's World. In 1:35, he runs through almost all the countries of the world!

So how about combining a bunch of apps together:
Have GPSapp detect where you are and play certain songs that may be more appropriate to that setting. Using a serial connection to an OBD-II link, the player could automatically show lyrics when you're stopped. After a song had been played a certain number of times, emptriv could quiz you on song lyrics using the TTS engine to read questions. Of course all of these apps would be installed by the future jEmplode's auto-installer and run via preinit. Then there's Hijack as the glue that holds all the apps together.

i haven't tested this yet, but have you tried to use a lyric tag thats longer than 255 characters? a while back, i encoutered a limitation w/ the comment field being expressed w/ 2 bytes... probably the same w/ all other fields.

If the lyric tag is a proper ID3V2 tag for lyrics, and not just text slapped into the comment field, then emplode will never know about it and it won't run into that limitation in emlode.

Lyric_tag != Comment_Field.

Currently, the lyrics spec that he's using is not an ID3v2 tag, but the Lyrics3 spec, which is rather akin to the ID3v1 spec, in that it's a big chunk of non-mp3 data appended to the mp3 file.

I don't know exactly what comment field problem you're talking about, so that may not be relevant, but it's definitely not ID3v2, although there's good hope that we can get that to happen in the future.

in that it's a big chunk of non-mp3 data appended to the mp3 file.

Argh, that's the stuff that usually confuses emplode, and I want no part of it.

Someone call me when he's using a proper ID3V2 tag.

Hi!

I really don't know why some of you are having difficulty uploading lyrics3 tagged songs to the empeg... It works very well for me... I just uploaded an album full of tagged lyrics3 mp3 flawlessly...


Too bad you can't see the scroll by yourself ;-(

You might want to take a look at a file on kazaa network:

Search for:
Artist: John Mann
Title: Acoustic Kitty
served by elperepat
it will be there for a day or two...

It is lyrics3 tagged and it uploaded just fine on my empeg this morning with 2-0 Beta 13 software



Regarding the 255 chars limit:

The software is currently limited to 100 tagged lines of 100 chars long. It's not that bad... I've seen a couple of time when the end lyrics lines have been cut, but none when 100 lines where not enough.. Maybe on some real long songs though... This will be adjusted in future versions..

Patrick

could you just paste the lyrics into the a reply to this message? i don't have kazaa installed because it screws with my computer and locks up explorer. I would really like to get this working, i think i have everything tagged right, but it still says sorry no lyrics found!

Here's the lyrics file ;-) It will certainly not make a great sense with your own mp3, but you should see it scroll


Open the attached file and copy all the content in the clipboard

Just be sure you set lyrics 1.22 (editor) to save into the mp3 and not anywhere else... (Winamp Options Preferences Plugins General Purpose Lyrics 1.22 Preferred lyrics format: Lyrics3.2) See picture 1

Return to winamp, press CTRL-Y to make the lyrics window popup, press CTRL-L to enter edit mode, press CTRL-V to paste clipboard into edit window and the press CTRL-T to save (these are all shortcuts of the "wrench menu" on the lyrics window)... If you want to see if timstamps are ok, you press the buttons at the bottom of the lyrics window (Press CTRL-Y to make it appear/dissapear) so all little dots on them are green (see picture 2)
If you play that song in winamp now, the lyrics should be "selected" as the song progress...

To timestamp a song, Paste the lyrics in the window, but don't save yet... Press CTRL-D to enter timestamp mode (CTRL-D again if you want to exit and return to edit mode) Play the song and click on the line when the singer begin to sing it. If there's a blank line, click on it when the singer ends the previous line... Then CTRL-T to save


Then upload via emplode and it should work...





For anyone concerned with corruption and lyrics.......

Maybe saving lyrics in a completely separate file would be a good alternative: If Jemplode or any third party program would offer an menu or button to "attach" lyrics to a selected song, then opened a browse window. We would select the .lrc file on our computer we want to send to empeg. The process would rename the file to FID.lrc corresponding to the FID of the mp3. Lyrics viewer would just have to look for the corresponding .lrc file. These files could live up on the music partitions... Good idea?????


Patrick

Maybe saving lyrics in a completely separate file would be a good alternative:

I think it's better to do it right, and get the lyrics into the ID3v2 tag. I'm workin' on it.

In reply to:

---

Real id3v2 SYLT support (BTW, I looked at id3lib doc.... whew too much for me ;-) and can I include C++ lib in a C prog?

---

Yuppers, can, assuming your linker knows about it, and yoiu're linking correctly.
(Do it in my stuff for work alla time. And I don't even consider myself a 'programmer'.)
Me.

the lyrics viewer works great for me, havent had any problesm uploading songs with them. The only problem is on some reaslly fast songs it cant keep up, but this might be partly due to my tagging o the lyrics. Great Work!

Hmmm, I'm not sure anyone here can say what will or will not stand up in court. ;-)

Something must be completely f'ed up with my computer. Because i cannot get this scroller to work. I have everything setup like you've said, and still no luck. Before my lyrics were not scrolling in winamp, now they are, but still not on the empeg. owell, i guess maybe i will have better luck with the next version.

Yuppers, can, assuming your linker knows about it, and yoiu're linking correctly.
(Do it in my stuff for work alla time. And I don't even consider myself a 'programmer'.)
Me.

Yeah, id3lib has a slick C wrapper around its C++ innards. Real nice, though they should have just implemented it in C to begin with. C++ is a steaming pile of dog poo. ("Tell us how you really feel, Tony.")

Anyway, I made a good amount of progress on the first half of the ID3v2 SYLT portion of the program, which is the part that adds the synced lyrics to your MP3's. It's basically taking LRC format lyrics (like the ones the aforementioned WinAMP plugin uses) and puts together the ID3 frame, which id3lib then adds to the MP3. Believe it or not, it looks like it's actually working. I need to error-check the parsing of the input LRC, but right now, the id3info program is telling me that my program is creating a valid SYLT frame:

[root@spaz lyrics]# id3info test.mp3 



*** Tag information for test.mp3

=== TSIZ (Size): 4821577

=== TCON (Content type): Alternative

=== TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Smells Like Teen Spirit

=== SYLT (Synchronized lyric/text): (test)[eng]: Text transcription

Load up on guns and bring your friends [34000 ms] 

It's fun to lose and to pretend [38000 ms] 

She's over bored and self assured [42000 ms] 

Oh no, I know a dirty word [47000 ms] 

And I forget just why I taste [214000 ms] 

Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile [218000 ms] 

I found it hard, it was hard to find [222000 ms] 

Oh well, whatever, nevermind [227000 ms] 

=== TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Nirvana

.

The SYLT frame can take timestamps in either MPEG frames or milliseconds. I chose milliseconds, since those are much easier to compare to seconds than MPEG frames are.

Next step is to clean this thing up, including modifying it to handle LRC lines with multiple timestamps on them (lyrics that are repeated at two or more times in the song.) Then I'll work on modifying Patrick's lyrics viewer to pull the lyrics from the SYLT frame instead of the Lyrics3 tag. After that, maybe I'll flex my Windows programming muscles a little bit and break off a little GUI thing to add time tags to untimed lyrics. I'll keep y'all posted.

i tested it out, but for some reason dint see the lyrics.

oh yeah, my vfd is broken.

my program is creating a valid SYLT frame

Thats great news!!

Thanks!!!

C++ is a steaming pile of dog poo.

Oi!! You. Outside. Now.

http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/98/May/stroustrup.html

Well, I see that my doppelganger and I agree on one thing.

OMG, that Stroustrup faux-interview is freaking hilarious.

..i agree..not a big fan of C++, I write stuff in 'C' and a multitude of different assembly languages.... There is some cool stuff about C++ and I used it once at work (implemented a rather snazzy excel style grid control for use in a visual basic program), but then converted the C++ back to C to use in another project... MFC in particular sucks, I don't know what's wrong with the standard Win32 API... In fact the gnome people got it right by not using C++.... (At least in Gnome 1)...

Adrian

On that note - how about an emptriv-like app that is name that tune - based on the music collection in the empeg -

And hell, if it was good enough maybe we could get Drakino to put in on Riocar

Glad someone made the argument I was getting ready to say when I saw this. While I'd love to put togther a lyrics database, the legal issues surrounding this aren't something I'd really like to deal with. The whole My.MP3.com thing from ages ago indicates trouble even if you do verify the user owns the music.

Yeah, could someone post the "times" for R.E.M.'s It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)? Just kidding

lol i was thinking the same thing when i saw this first. i dont think thats gunna work very well

Yeah, could someone post the "times" for R.E.M.'s It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)? Just kidding

lol i was thinking the same thing when i saw this first. i dont think thats gunna work very well

That sounds like a challenge, guys! You just happened to pick one of the songs I'm using to test out my modifications to Patrick's lyrics viewer.

Using the small font, it's not too bad, even with a song that has a new line of lyrics every 2 or 3 seconds.

Anyway, I should be releasing something in the next week or so... Just couldn't resist the urge to post that, since you guys mentioned it.

The whole My.MP3.com thing from ages ago indicates trouble even if you do verify the user owns the music.

Eh... That's an apples to bananas comparison if you ask me. You can do a google search to find thousands of high-profile lyrics sites that have been around for quite a while. If we did something on the down-low on riocar.org, it would never show up in a Google search, because nobody would be linking to it. The my.mp3.com thing was actual unauthorized distribution of music, whereas lyrics are generally transcribed by the masses. As I mentioned, the record companies HAVE gone after some of the heaviest-hitters (The LEO archive that used to be on FTP, lyrics.ch, etc) but there's no way they'd go after a private database where only a few dozen people are accessing them.

We could even use this BBS to post LRC files if we wanted to. One thread per album or per artist or something like that... The BBS's search feature could be used to find them.... It sounds like you wouldn't endorse this, but if you just created a forum that required users to be registered and logged-in to view it, I think it'd be secure, and I can't imagine a scenario where you'd hit any legal trouble.

But, of course, that's your decision to make. I just think that there would be hundreds of sites they'd go after first.

You can do a google search to find thousands of high-profile lyrics sites that have been around for quite a while.

Remember that there was a lyrics archive on ftp.uwp.edu, and they got shut down. A guy named Dave Datta who IIRC also ran the Orchestral Manoevers in the Dark fan mailing list ran it. I wish I remembered what the details were, but amusingly until recently mirrors.aol.com had a mirror of it. It went away in the last few months.

Yeah dude that thing had gotten to be HUGE though. Like you said, there were mirrors of the UWP archive *everywhere*. If we did this, it'd be a very small archive with a very small audience. I think we'd stay well underneath the radar.

If I had a website with PHP and MySQL abilities, I'd do this myself. I can run my own web server on my own machine, but my upstream bandwidth would probably be limiting.

Incidentally, can some creative soul out there come up with a better name for an empeg lyrics scroller than... well, empeg lyrics scroller? My apps tend to be named "emptriv" or "empwake" which are not entirely creative, but a little more catchy than "empeg trivia game" or "empeg alarm clock." I can't seem to come up with anything for a lyrics viewer that doesn't sound dumb.

as long as it's not empaoke... (empeg karaoke)

Yeah, I already ruled out any derivatives of the word "karaoke." The word alone conjures up images of sweaty fat guys singing "Piano Man" after more-than-one-too-many belts of scotch.

empscroller? lol.. no idea.

-Greg

empoet?

empoet... empoet.. empoet... hmm. My first reaction was "no" but when comparing it to "empaoke" or "empeg lyrics scroller", it doesn't sound half bad...

Hmm. empoet is officially in the lead.

emplyrics?

just so everyone knows im already int he process of creating the lyrics website, i have 2 php mysql programs, and im making the gui and layout. have fun.

just so everyone knows im already int he process of creating the lyrics website

Bitchin'. If nobody else stepped up I was gonna do it myself, but it'd definitely be towards the end of my priority list. PHP is also like my twelfth best language (it's even behind Tcl and awk) so you'll probably whip something up faster than I would have.

Hopefully you can provide known-good users like myself with a means other than form-based upload to contribute lyrics? FTP or something hopefully?

AWK? I haven't used that in a while. Some guy has been bored enough to write a webserver in AWK. I still prefer sokoban in sed tho...

- Trevor

Hmm. empoet is officially in the lead.

Emphasis.

(Oh, and somewhere there has to be a utility that could be called Empath...)

Just to nip it in the bud:

Empedocles
emperor
empery
emphases
emphasis
emphasize
emphatic
emphysema
empire
empiric
emplacement
employ
emporium
empower
empress
emprise
emptor
empty
empyreal

I kinda like Empedocles for this. Inventor of rhetoric and all. But whatever.

Just to nip it in the bud:

You left out empyema!

Thanks, though. I revise my suggestion: Emphatic. Much better form, IMO.

I've never been too big on struggling to achive a literal name if something suggestive will do. I don't really get to vote, though. *I'm* not writing the software!

How about YAELV?? (yet another Empeg lyrics viewer)

emphatic it is! Wow. I can't believe I didn't think of just looking in a dictionary. Or asking Bitt, which is approximately the same thing.

You guys rule.

How about YAELV?? (yet another Empeg lyrics viewer)

I know you're joking, but I always hated those "yet another" names. The first guy who ever called something "yet another ------" probably deserves some credit, but now it's a pretty tired schtick.

Besides, this isn't really "yet another" lyrics viewer. I consider this program the continuation of Patrick's version, and borrowed heavily from some of his ideas (though I'd like to think I've improved on it some.) But until it's released, all this is moot. I just wanted a better name, and emphatic has a pretty nice ring to it.

Incidentally Patrick mentioned he was going to give a WinAMP and/or XMMS plugin a try for aiding in the association of timestamps to untimed lyrics. That's probably a better arrangement, because I have more C experience, and he's probably got more GUI experience than I do.

Edit: Yes, I am, in fact going to bold-face emphatic every time I type it from now on. Look what you guys have done.

Quite a variety of words to choose from...

Given the voice quality of flite, maybe I'll rename TTSd to emphysema.

Hmm... someone knows how to grep /usr/share/dict/words (or the equivalent).

Given the voice quality of flite, maybe I'll rename TTSd to emphysema


LOL......although it sounds more like Flite is suffering from throat cancer and had 'his' larynx removed, rather than emphysema.

If we did this, it'd be a very small archive with a very small audience. I think we'd stay well underneath the radar.

Small in terms of content or people able to access? The former might not be very useful.

The latter, silly. But initially, it would be both, until people contributed lyrics to some of their own tunes.

empyric? (sounds like "empiric")

I will make a webste design and the layoiut if soemone can write a simple php script that connects to a database to help drive it.

I have a server and the ability to setup the database are you still up for building a front-end?

I think someone's already handling it

How about "Karioke"?