Karaoke player proof-of-concept

Click here to download my in-progress karaoke player. This project is still in its infancy, and I just want to know if songs stay properly synced on a variety of hardware and software setups.

You'll need karaoke songs in MP3+CDG format. Just put the files in the same folder as the exe file and name them "test.mp3" and "test.cdg" If you don't have any karaoke files laying around, a little birdie told me you could find the excellent Bill Withers Song "Ain't No Sunshine" here. That same birdie told me you can find the less excellent, but widely known, Bobby McFerrin song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" here

All this program will do is read test.mp3 and test.cdg and play them as a karaoke song/lyrics combo. If your songs are in zip or kar format, you'll have to extract them, as I haven't added archive support, yet. If your song contains scroll commands (fairly rare), the graphics will probably go all screwy on you.

Let me know if you experience any problems with playback.

Thanks,
SpaceAce

not downloaded this (yet) but does it support normal cd+g discs?
ive got a 100 (s)hits karaokie box set and noticed there was a 5-10 second delay from track start to song really starting, and assume thats where all the lyrics gumph lives

Well, as far as this project got in BlitzMax, it only supported MP3+CDG files, so you would have to rip the disk. I ran into too many issues with BlitzMax, though, so I decided to learn C# and rewrite the program in that language. Right now, that version also only supports MP3+CDG files, but will support discs before it is done.

Damnit, I think the server I keep that domain on is down again. You probably can't download the file, right now, anyway.

SpaceAce

Funny you mention this. I have just completed a port of a blitzmax script from Space Fractal (not sure if that's you) to C# using Blitz3d SDK. Works ok, but not stable yet. What does your new C# version going to do with the writepixelfast? A 3d alternative?

Would'a been funnier if you posted at the same time he did.

:P

lol

Whoa, thread necromancy. What I do in the C# version is use a custom BackBuffer class that manages the screen as a grid of images and repaints/invalidates the dirty areas. The pixel access itself is using pointers to the bitmap memory, so I just use array-style notation to directly manipulate the pixel data. Come to think of it, I may have reverted to flipping the whole "backbuffer" in the last version. So far, it seems plenty fast.

SpaceAce