I think with us getting a place to share our LRC files, at the beginning it may be a good idea to tell each other what we will be tagging, to avoid many wasted hours.

Oliver has mentioned he did 2 Beastie Boys CD's, and yn0t_ mentioned he would start his tagging process with Pink Floyd and Tori Amos. Naturally I can't speak for them, but by them creating those LRC files, it would save someone else lots of time. Of course finding the time to create all those LRC files...

Anyway, I am going to start out with U2 since they are my favorite band, and I have all their CD's (well, official albums, and many singles), then once I am done with that I will probably hit Collective Soul next, unless someone wants them first. Then when we have our server courtesy of justinlarsen, we won't have as many duplicates.

Feel free to post here with what you plan on tagging first!

Well, I'll start all of the Ace Of Base CD's.. once I finish my VFD project.

Me.

Nice, I'll be all over those U2 files. I'm assuming you'll be doing all the studio albums? How about the remix CD's that came with the 2 recent greatest hits albums?

I have already started a site to host the Lrc files its going to be at lrcdb.com, stay tuned it should be up in the next 2 weeks, i have lots of programming and UI to build for it. Its also going to be bbs members only who request memberships to try and avoid the hassel of getting harrased by higher powers.

Righteous. Let me know when it's ready for some testing.

I'll get right to work on Godspeed You Black Emperor and The Orb...

Out of idle curiosity, won't it depend on exactly what version of a song one has? And what it was encoded with? And whether it was padded with 2 seconds of silence? Not trying to be a PITA, just curious.

You bet! I'm thinking I will do all "studio" U2 stuff, including unreleased songs, demos, and B-Sides. My U2 collection currently consists of 576 MP3's. I don't know if I will tag the bootlegs yet though. That would be a lot of songs. I'm just finishing up Boy right now. I hope to do an album a day.

Version, yes. I'd assume that those are the things that would be annotated in the lrc file. As for what it was encoded with? I don't think that would make any difference -- lyrics that start at the two minute mark are going to start at the two minute mark whether the song is in .WAV or .mp3, or if it was encoded at 128 or 256.

The padding with silence is the only real issue I can think of. All I can think to say to that is... since when have you ever *not* had to fix errors in some music related bit of info downloaded off the 'net?

I'll take Van Halen, starting with the Sammy years.
If I remember right, I think Tony said he would take Rush, although I'm not known for my memory.

I'll get right to work on Godspeed You Black Emperor and The Orb...

LOL... good one. I'll get on the Do Make Say Think

ya it might differ a bit, but you can edit them which will still be way faster than starting them from scratch

I for my part will be doing most of the work by Jean-Michel Jarre, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream and Kitaro. Already I'm 75% done...

Have fun,

Paul

I'll try to get time to install this week, and then I guess I could start off doing Metallica, Megadeth, Pantera, White Zombie etc., although tagging a lot of my collection may not be of any interest to most folks on the BBS. I seem to recall from other threads that heavy ain't the most popular

I'm doing the Beastie Boys, already have Hello Nasty and Paul's Boutique completed. Working on the other albums now. I think after that, i will start with the roots, then maybe to a tribe called quest. I will gladly share the LRC files somehow

Not that I'm trying to get his website hammered, but http://www.leoslyrics.com has around 60,000 lyrics in a searchable database.

He also has a winamp plugin for viewing the lyrics, I know that had been talked about before. I haven't used the plugin personally, so don't take my word as a recommendation.

It's also a great site to search for song titles just based on a few lyrics that you remember from a song.

Thought this might save you all some time...

Godspeed You Black Emperor and The Orb

I need to stop reading this BBS, it's costing me a fortune in Amazon bills.

Peter

I would preview any Godspeed You Black Emperor CD before you buy it. You may not like it, it's hard to listen to in certain moods. It's very hard to describe but ambiant noise is probably the best description I can manage. It's not really similar to the Orb, if you were thinking that.

I would preview any Godspeed You Black Emperor CD before you buy it.

Too late! Actually, I did try Amazon's thirty-second previews of a couple of tracks. I guess their tracks don't really get going in the first thirty seconds, but it sounded a bit like the Penguin Cafe Orchestra or Steve Reich, which was good enough for me.

Peter

This is great that you guys are doing this. I'll try to do my part get some stuff in there too. I'm wondering if perhaps we can set up this database in a similar fashion as the freecddb.org.

I hacked a ripping perl script to find the CD ID, do a lookup on Freecddb.org and get all the tracknames, etc - then it rips the CD, lames it and writes the tags. It would be great if I could grab the lyrics from lrcdb.com too and encode it all in in one shot. Hmm, maybe a lrcdb.org?

I'll start on BNL and Move to GBS (if no one else starts doing GBS )

I'll take all the Pixies and Frank Black cds.

If, as I wondered about in a thread over there , I can figure out a way to migrate lyrics into Ogg without loads of extra steps, I may be compelled to submit the entire Richard Thompson discography (I may only please myself!)....and maybe some Pogues!

As much as I would like to, I don't think I will volunteer for Firesign Theater.

A word to the wise regarding lyric tagging... emphatic calculates the scroll speed by figuring out when the next line is going to have to appear on screen. Because of this, it's probably best to put a "blank line" in during instrument solos, or any period where there's a long period of silence between lines. So let's say you've got a chorus and then a geetar solo

[01:45]Should have tried to do some more
[01:51]25 or 6 to 4
(guitar solo here)
[03:41]Feeling like I ought to sleep
[03:47]Spinning room is sinking deep


You should probably throw an empty time tag in with, a "start timestamp" that roughly corresponds to the "end timestamp" of the previous line, making it look like this:

[01:45]Should have tried to do some more
[01:51]25 or 6 to 4
[01:55]
[03:41]Feeling like I ought to sleep
[03:47]Spinning room is sinking deep


Otherwise, you may see the last line before the break scroll by pretty slowly, and if it's a long line of lyrics (obviously not so in this example), it might be so slow that the words don't sync up with the music well. This is because the software's algorithm thinks that line needs to take, in this example, almost 2 minutes to scroll. Now, I did set an absolute minimum on the scroll speed to make situations like this less of a problem, but adding the extra time tag right before periods of no lyrics does help things stay in sync.

So, in summary, if you're seeing issues with a line scrolling too slow right before a long period of time with no lyrics, add another time tag for the end of that line. Problem solved.

I've got "Thomas and Friends - Thomas' Songs and Roundhouse Rhythums." covered

I'm focusing mainly on actual karaoke type songs myself. For example, I've already done "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)", so no one needs to worry about doing that one.

Great you do GBS and I'll have a look at BWATOF. Though The Fables might be a an easier starting point.

Nice. SOMEONE needed to do the "cheesy" songs.

The SYLT spec references doing sychronized lyrics by syllable (``follow the bouncing ball''). Will emphatic deal with that properly, instead of the one timestamp per line paradigm (20 cents)?

The SYLT spec references doing sychronized lyrics by syllable (``follow the bouncing ball''). Will emphatic deal with that properly, instead of the one timestamp per line paradigm (20 cents)?

Not yet... I did consider it, but how useful is that on the empeg? It'd be "cute" to see the current word or syllable lighting up or even a little bouncing ball, but is it that useful? If enough people really want it, I can see what I can do...

Can you imagine trying to accurately tag every syllable of "One Week" or "It's the End of the World as We Know It?"

The great thing about writing (apparently) the only utility on the planet that's adding SYLT frames to MP3's is you can specify which mechanisms get implemented. Until lrc2sylt provides a mechanism for this (which would involve something that looks nothing like a LRC file, of course) are we really going to see any MP3's encoded with syllable timestamps?

I didn't mean that you should do a bouncing ball metaphor, although that would be cool. I meant to ask if it would be possible to specify the timestamps with more precision, say, down to the word, to make it, well, more precise.

the timestamps with more precision, say, down to the word, to make it, well, more precise

[2:13] So you wore out your welcome
[2:18] with random precision...

Peter

I didn't mean that you should do a bouncing ball metaphor, although that would be cool. I meant to ask if it would be possible to specify the timestamps with more precision, say, down to the word, to make it, well, more precise.

Any problems with the precision as currently implemented? I have about 10 test tracks tagged right now, and aside from some dodgy timestamps in the original LRC files, I always have the current word somewhere on the screen in horizontal mode (usually in the middle) and always have the right line selected in vertical mode. Within the one-second resolution, of course. I don't know if the LRC "specification" (if you can call it that) allows millisecond resolution on timestamps, but I'm fairly certain that it doesn't allow for timestamps for each syllable, in which case, we'd have to come up with our own way to share text representations of the tagged lyrics.

If you want to see this just to improve the precision of the scrolling, then I'd rather work on doing that without having to tag each syllable. For me, though I'm getting precise results. Then again, there is a known bug in the current release with things scrolling too fast on occasion, maybe that's what you're worried about?

[2:23.1234567] Come
[2:23.2985482] on
[2:23.7092442] you
[2:23.9949842] tar
[2:24.1010303] get

[2:24.4020421] for
[2:24.7427741] far
[2:24.9394932] a
[2:25.2093931] way
[2:25.5827131] laugh
[2:25.7928813] ter

...

To be honest, I haven't used it. [sad]

But my thought was more along the lines of not fast songs, but slow ones. Think of a languid, say, Nat King Cole tune. Only tagging one line at a time could conceivably make the scroll not match the singing. But I've done no testing.

Highly syncopated singing could throw a wrench in the works, too. I'm not sure I have a good example for this. Maybe some Ella Fitzgerald or Rosemary Clooney stuff?

You've got to try it out. That's the beauty of it -- if scrolls a line just fast enough to clear the screen for the next line. If Nat takes 15 secconds to get through a line, that line will scroll really slowly. See the whole discussion of making sure to tag drum solos.

That being said, a bouncing ball from word to work would be pretty damn cool.

Matthew

I see where you're going, Bitt. There is the potential for that, or, to be more blunt, I have no way of predicting exactly what word within a line should be on screen in horizontal mode. All I know is there's X amount of real estate for that line to cover in Y amount of time. That's why I added the above caveat about long periods with no lyrics, so people can work around it a little bit (although I do impose a minimum speed to keep things within reasonable limits.) I do also provide for a time offset to begin the next line a little early so it shows up towards the middle of the display instead of the rightmost edge. Then there's the obvious concept that using a smaller font increases the chance for the current syllable being on screen...

My point is that I can't imagine anyone will go through the labor of adding time tags to syllables, and I don't see a problem with the way it's scrolling right now. You're more than welcome to try it out with some more syncopated tunes, and if there's an issue, I'd be happy to try to find a solution.

f you're using vertical scrolling mode, this is moot, because the entirety of the current line (and several of the next lines) are on screen.


Edit: Editted variable names. Derrick : Math :: Bitt : Grammar

All I know is there's X amount of real estate for that line to cover in X amount of time.

Screen real estate is a 1:1 function of time?

Sigh. Now you know why I took every math course twice in college, and a particular one 3 times...

Gosh, this lyic "coding" is horrendous! A cooler idea would be to implement some sort of voice/word recognition that would analyze the mp3/ogg/etc. file and do the coding automatically.

I imagine that it would be pretty tough with all the music in the background, but once the package was created, it could be used on all the songs.

perhaps it would be easier to do with a regular lyric file available, then the program would know what word to look for and just "listen" for when it starts.

A cooler idea would be to implement some sort of voice/word recognition that would analyze the mp3/ogg/etc. file and do the coding automatically.

Sounds good to me. I think I could link up to one of these in the trunk to run it and pipe the decodes back to the Empeg.

Gosh, this lyic "coding" is horrendous!

Then don't do it, and don't download anyone else's timed lyrics either.

Jerk.

Sounds good to me. I think I could link up to one of these in the trunk to run it and pipe the decodes back to the Empeg.

Jim, as usual, one of your timely and witty posts has made my day.

Yeah, if we all had in-car voice recognition that could understand the lyrics to "Louie Louie" I'm sure that'd be the first thing we'd put it to use for.

Then don't do it, and don't download anyone else's timed lyrics either.

Jerk.




Damn dude. Why don't you calm yourself, the guy has an opinion for crying out loud, and he wasn't making a personal attack on you.

[attempt to calm possible flame war]
I hope that bowman was trying to say that the coding was difficult or at least that He would like to see certain changes in future versions. Terms like horrendous are almost always overstatment. The goulag was horrendous, Hitler was horrendous, etc, this software is incapable of being horrendous. This software is free and it works (already better than most M$ programs).

I am also hoping that yn0t has had a little too much coffee this morning and will return to his congenial self. (I was going to jump to your defense, but you beat me to it.)
[/attempt to calm possible flame war]

I think what he meant is that actually typing in the lyrics and timing them is excessively difficult and tedious. I don't think that he meant that emphatic was bad or poorly coded.

Okay guys, I didn't take any of what he said the way you guys think I did (as a personal attack), and I'm not attempting to start a big flame war. If bbowman had said "the current implementation is not ideal", or "it's more difficult than it could be", that'd be fine. But to say it's horrendous? And then his solution to this allegedly horrendous process is to develop a voice recognition system which is going to recognize your lyrics? You've got to be kidding me.

All I'm trying to say is:

1) Adding time tags is not "horrendous." About a half a dozen people on the BBS have already tagged several albums each, in not much more than the time it takes to *listen* to those albums. With many more people doing so once a proper GUI tool is developed, we could all have a nice library to build off of. The WinAMP plugins (which I assume you've used if you're saying it's horrendous) let you just hit a key or click the mouse to insert the current time tag. Is that so hard?

Also, justinlarsen is working on a site where we'll be able to post them, so not everyone will have to tag every album they own. Oh, by the way, are you all aware that lyrics to virtually every song written are already on the Internet? So the idea that you have to hand-type them out first (Bitt) is utter nonsense. All you need to do is find them on the Internet, double-check them for accuracy, and then add time tags to them, which takes about the same amount of time it takes to listen to them. That's horrendous?

2) A solution involving performing voice recognition of the lyrics and lining untimed lyrics up with the lyrics in the audio file is so far out of the realm of what can be done on the empeg car audio player (OR even an Altix 3000), it's absurd to even suggest it. It's one thing to criticize something, but to try to buttress your point by suggesting an alternative, you should probably make sure that alternative has a basis in reality.

I could have probably stated my case without the "Jerk" comment, but I was late for lunch, so that was the one word that summed up what I was feeling at that particular moment. Yes, calling bbowman a jerk was uncalled for, but for someone to nay-say when there are plenty of people who are contributing to this effort is also uncalled for. bbowman, I apologize for degenerating into name-calling, but I hope you recognize that it's not as difficult as you've made it sound, and there are no other legitimate options. It's either what we have, or it's nothing.

Next time I'll just follow mlord's advice and ignore the nay-sayers.

In reply to:

---

I seem to recall from other threads that heavy ain't the most popular

---

The older I get the less I listen to the heavy stuff.... but you can't forget your roots... Pantera, Megadeth and the like was what I grew up on (or shall I say what got me through high school).....

You guys are really tripping out over nothing...

I was googling around trying to find some lyrics that had time-stamps already and found this site. http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Hub/6086/ they only had 18 lyrics for songs I have but all 18 matched the words close to perfect so I thought I would share. Anyone else have some sites with .lrc time-stamped lyrics? I can't wait untill our database is up

On a some what seperate note, I was thinking it would be cool to have a program that searches the db and shows a result of matching lyrics. Then you can chose and it will tag your mp3 with the lyrics. Afterwards any adjustments could be made. I would help with making such a program but my coding skills are somewhat lacking right now. I'm learning java but im only in the basics so far.. and I havn't used c++ or vb in such a while that I might take a while to remember everything.

-Greg

I was thinking it would be cool to have a program that searches the db and shows a result of matching lyrics. Then you can chose and it will tag your mp3 with the lyrics.

Yes, yes. Great minds think alike. I've been thinking of adding this as well; eventually. Probably some sort of XML backend, not sure yet. First though, I need to quit being lazy and get the site up and running, then worry about implementing features later.

It seems as though people are really itching to have this working. The first version is going to be fairly simplistic, and somewhat lacking in features. Not to worry though, we have a ton of ideas that will get implemented in the future, and are always open to suggestions (especially if someone else codes their “suggestion” before hand ).

Stay tuned.

hey only had 18 lyrics for songs I have but all 18 matched the words close to perfect so I thought I would share.

Hey, not bad! I managed 28.

Cool. And Geocities didn't even disconnect me from using up all his bandwidth...

Um just FYI, I already downloaded all of these and put them on my site... I mentioned this awhile back in Programming but I guess some people missed it. For those (like me) who don't want to deal with Geocities or having to find your song in a dumb HTML interface.

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

Ricin, I guess you're working with Justin to make this happen? I forget if you guys said you were teaming up on this or not.

For what it's worth, I soon hope to release another version of emphatic that has a few major annoyances taken care of. It will use a new ID3 tag library which reduces the binary size from > 2 MB to under 400k, and it also dramatically reduces the time it takes to load the lyrics. It will also have the reading of the lyrics in a background thread, so that the UI and buttons won't freeze up while we're loading lyrics. These were two of my personal gripes with it, and they'll both be fixed.

There will also be other bug fixes, and, depending on how far I get, maybe few surprises.

If you guys want help testing out the LRC db before it goes live, drop me a line.

ya ricin is teaming up with me, we are currently knee deep in the process. as ricin said its going to start off basic to get it up and running which means its going to only be able to input one lyric at a time, but once we get the inital site launched we plan on adding zip support to add large collection such as your on your temp website ynot. I will drop you a PM with the website the devlopment is taking place so you can check it out.

I matched up 86. What do I win?

I found a site that had a very large listing of song lyrics here: http://www.musiclinks.nl/songteksten/

Granted, it's all HTML-ified, but if you look for what's within the H5 tag (there's only one, kinda nice), and remove all of the P and BR tags, it'll give you the lyrics.

Oh yea, no timestamps, but if anyone is looking to add lyrics to their MP3's, it seems to be a pretty complete lyric archive.

Ok, so it's not the greatest archive for me.. only 7 Pink Floyd songs tagged.. geesh.. I've got all the albums, no way I want to tag them myself..

Yeah there is a lot of sites with lyrics.. even programs that will search for the lyrics from your mp3 tags. Problem is that they don't have time-stamps and thats the part that takes the longest.

p.s. I just put buttons lights on my empeg.. Will take some pics soon.

-Greg

The attatched file is a playlist with most of the songs i have timestamped the lyrics too. Just let me kow where to drop the lrc files.

u

da

man

Cool - if you fire those lrc files into the common store, that'll ease some of my work. Okay, I'll still have another 5100 tracks to do, but the overlap is good:-)

Excellent work - way faster than I can do it, although I'll try lrctool this weekend

Where do you want me to send those lrc files?

I'll setup ftp for lrcdb.com later tonight*. It will give us a central repository for now, until I finish the site.

* - I have to wait for a friend of mine to get off work so he can poke a hole in the firewall. The firewall he's using only allows administration from a specific machine behind the firewall, with a specialized front-end. Secure, yes, but it's also frustrating that I have to wait, sometimes a few days before he can make changes.

I'm working on T. Rex: The Slider & Electric Warrior.
I should have those up in a couple of days.
(g/f permitting)
Then: CCR Chronical,Typo World Come Burning Down,
The Beatles,etc.

I'll check back

Dude, why call me a jerk for a little fantasy. Chill out.
I'm sorry for my bad choice of words:
My terminology for horrendous was not directed at the software, it was directed at the prospect of hand coding all the lyrcis for my 300+ CD's. As I had mentioned before in this thread, I think that your software is wonderful and I want to do my part to contribute.

The whole idea of the voice recognition was more for humor than anything else - I guess mine is a little too dry at times.

Okay, I understand now that it was humor. Sometimes it's hard to tell. Had you known that there would be an online site where we can trade LRC files, and that people are working on easier ways to associate lyrics with MP3's (including jEmplode integration) I think you might have looked at things a little differently. I wouldn't have bothered releasing the software if people were going to have to tag all of their songs one by one. I have heard unconfirmed rumors that the LRC DB might be up as early as next week or the one after. Then it's a team effort!