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