Whoa... Resurrecting an OOOOOLD thread there. Tony Fabris probably only had 1500 posts when that one was posted. :)

Lyrics are something I would like to work on. The idea's been in my head for a couple months now, but I haven't had time to work on it. My plan is thus (roughly)

1. Hack up one of the overlay patches to allow for a scrolling lyrics area which doesn't intrude with
too much of the display (waiting for 2.0 to choose the exact area.)
2. Develop a daemon which reads the current FID and current track time from the flash (at one point in my kernel hacking I located where these are actually stored. I'll have to jog my memory soon.)
3. Have the daemon scroll its output to this overlay window.
4. Come up with a standard for storing time data in the lyrics (see below.)
5. Integrate it all and test it.

The simplest thing I can think of for #4 is a list of timecodes in one of the user-defined ID3 fields which just tells the daemon when each line in the corresponding lyrics field would be played.. Something like (these numbers are fabricated):

User Field     Lyrics Field
0:32 - 0:39      Ticking away, the moments that make up a dull day
0:42 - 0:49      You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way

So when the player is at track time 0:32, the lyrics daemon would start scrolling the first line of the lyrics, and it would calculate how fast it needs to scroll to get to the word "day" by the time 0:39 is reached (relatively easy calculation). Then it would remain blank until 0:42 when the second line would scroll... etc. There are some bridges I haven't crossed yet in my analysis of this problem, but I'd love to hear some other ideas.

-Tony
MkII #554