hmm.... i've downloaded the brown eyed girl song that somebody posted here on the bbs and for me it works with empathic & wmp9 ?

Yeah, I downloaded that it and it kind of works for me on both as well. I tried a couple of my other files, and they appear to kind of work for both also. The file that I was using for testing (The Piña Colada Song) wasn't working before, and was leading me to some erroneous conclusions, I guess.


After more testing, here are the conclusions I've come to:


1. Synchronized Lyrics created in WMP will not show in emphatic. WMP uses Unicode, and emphatic won't deal with it. This wouldn't be fixed unless emphatic gets fixed to deal with Unicode, or someone can figure out how to get WMP to do ISO-8859-1 for lyrics instead.


2. MP3 files processed with lrc2sylt may or may not show their lyrics in WMP. My test case (The Piña Colada Song) didn't work, but when I removed the ID3v2 tag and tried again, it did work. Everything else I tried worked as well. So, this seems to be purely dependent on the phase of the moon and your standing in the universe. It SHOULD work, though.


3. Mp3 files processed in lrc2sylt have problems when you try to edit their lyrics in WMP. Specifically, when you bring them up in the lyric editor, only the first line appears to be there, although all the time stamps are there. If you actually click on one of the lines and click "Edit", the text for that line reappears. What's actually happening is that there's a newline character ($0A) at the beginning of every line, and that's confusing the editor. If you go through each and every line, though, and redo the first letter, the newline character goes away with it, and the line displays correctly.


4. Files edited in WMP will be saved as Unicode, and will not show in emphatic. Refer to #1.


So, for full interoperability, emphatic would have to support Unicode. I think the Lyrics Editor in WMP is a PITA, but maybe some people find it preferable to the lrc2sylt dance. I have no idea how hard this would be, Tony, but it seems worthwhile for the future. Also, to edit the lrc2sylt processed files in WMP, something's got to happen about the newline's saved in the SYLT frame. Tony, what's you're reading of the spec as to whether or not those are requred? The way I read it, they're explicitly allowed, and the WMP editor shouldn't choke on them, but they're not required except in content type 3 and 4. Will emphatic work without them? If so, maybe lrc2sylt should strip them before writing. (edit: or is it more correct to change them to $20? Is the whitespace before the content chunk required?)


By the way, these ID3 specs are wonderfully vague in their non-specificity.