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