What's this lyric database everyone is talking about? And what's Emphatic? The program that runs it? me confused

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/a/m/amc156/empeg/emphatic.html

What's this lyric database everyone is talking about? And what's Emphatic? The program that runs it? me confused

emphatic was first written as a lyrics viewer. In the last version, I added a customizable full-screen info mode feature that I hope to expand on in future versions. In order to view lyrics, you need to first embed the lyrics (with timestamps) in your MP3's. The way that works right now is you use a WinAMP plugin (which I didn't write) to save the lyrics in the LRC text-file format, and then use lrctool, a command-line utility that I wrote, to embed those lyrics in the ID3v2 tag of the MP3. Then you sync your MP3's over to your empeg, run emphatic, and you've got lyrics.

There's a lot more info on the program's web page. There's also a few threads over in the Programming forum. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask and someone, quite possibly me, should be able to help you out.

As for the lyrics database, www.lrcdb.com , I hear it's about a week or two away from an initial launch. That's not my bag, but I am very appreciative of their work.

I noticed last weekend, after downloading WMP ver 9 there is a facility to add synchronised lyrics, with what appears to be quite a nice UI I have to say.

Does Irctool produce compatible results ?

Or conversely, could WMP 9 be used to add lyric information compatible with emphatic ?

Sorry if this has been covered already, just a thought ...

I noticed last weekend, after downloading WMP ver 9 there is a facility to add synchronised lyrics, with what appears to be quite a nice UI I have to say.

I was told in this thread that the UI kinda stinks. I can't actually try it myself because, apparently, Microsoft has decided that Windows 2000 users like myself should not be able to use ther "Advanced Tag Editor." Yeah, apparently it takes an XP machine to do what I can do with a few dozen lines of C code. Just so there's no confusion, I will be the last person on the planet to upgrade to Windows XP.

Anyway I think there is currently an incompatibility between the way emphatic expects to see the lyrics in the frame and the way WMP9 embeds them (surprise!) So I don't think WMP9 can be used for this purpose. The converse (lrctool working in WMP9) is I believe also broken. I think it might be an easy fix to work on, but so far, you're only the second person to ask for it, and I've had other things that were more important to work on.

The way third party programs work, the developers tend to work on the things that we ourselves most want to see. WMP9 compatibility is therefore towards the end of my queue. The code to my software is, however, open source, so if someone else can figure out exactly what the incompatibility is and fix it, I would be happy to integrate their findings into the software. If they could find a way to trick WMP9 into thinking I have Windows XP, that would also be helpful. If they could drop a large ballistic weapon on Microsoft's Redmond, WA headquarters after they're done, I'd owe them a Coke.

I was told in this thread that the UI kinda stinks

This doesnt suprise me. Being Microsoft, I would expect the first implementation to be garbage, with the third / fourth generation to be much better. Perhaps waiting for WMP ver 12 may be a good time to consider emphatic integration / compatibility.

I was told in this thread that the UI kinda stinks.

I had a play with it - looks pretty good. WMP 9 is a massive improvement over previous versions, with a lot of genuinely cool features such as this one. Unfortunately I think there are still fundamental UI design mistakes, and much of the glue underneath (such as WMDM) is a total hack.

Unfortunately the major WMP competitor is Real, and I don't want to get started talking about their product.

Rob

>I'd owe them a Coke.

I'll stump up a case of coke. Although, the most likely folks to do the aforementioned act of terrorism maybe prefer yak's milk to coke. Who knows?

Must be a better way to get M$ to stop churning out shite code...I'm just not sure what it is.

In reply to:

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Anyway I think there is currently an incompatibility between the way emphatic expects to see the lyrics in the frame and the way WMP9 embeds them (surprise!) So I don't think WMP9 can be used for this purpose. The converse (lrctool working in WMP9) is I believe also broken.

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Are there no standards to avoid just this problem?

I had a play with it - looks pretty good.

The WMP9 interface, or the WMP9 synchronized lyrics interface? I have WMP9, and I agree they've improved on older versions. The comments in the thread I linked to stated that the interface for adding lyrics was less than ideal, not that WMP9's interface itself is broken in any way.

Of course there are. Microsoft just decides which parts of the standard it wants to follow, which to ignore, and which to change for its own benefit, just like they do with every other standard.

Edit: Looks like I spoke too soon. As Tony reminds me below, it's more that both applications are a little too conservative in what they'll accept.

Yes, there is a standard, and I believe that we're both following the standard. I think the text encoding that Microsoft is using is Unicode, and the text encoding lrctool and emphatic are using/expecting is plain ASCII text. This is based on what's been reported to me, I can't test it out though because of Microsoft's planned obsolescence of Windows 2000.