I need advice on software for creating karaoke that can easily be
viewed over the web. For a website that I run, I would like to
present karaoke with bouncing-ball animation (or, almost as good,
color changing of the lyrics animation) that is timed to the playback
of a midi file, that users could view (and listen to) easily,
preferably with no need for the user to download additional software.
The music files I'm starting with are in midi format, and the lyrics
are in Word files. So, I'll need to manually synchronize the words
with the notes in the midi file, probably after cutting and pasting
the lyrics into the software. Because I have a lot of songs that I'd
like to post, it's important that the software that makes this
synchronization easy. For example, it would be close to ideal if you
could do the synchronization by playing the midi file and tapping the
spacebar as each new syllable is sung. It would be even better if the
midi playback could be slowed down for this synchronization, so that
when syllables go by rapidly you'd have a better chance of tapping the
spacebar at the correct time. (Then, of course, the playback would
be sped up to normal speed in the final version.)
I have tried, for example, the free download version of "WinOKE".
This requires you to highlight the words with a mouse as the midi file
plays at full speed. I found it very hard to use, and I'm doubtful
that even with a lot of practice it would be good enough. The program
?Del mp3 karaoke? is closer to what I?m looking for, in that you can
use the spacebar for synchronizing lyrics to the music, but the
documentation was pretty bad, so that I could not figure out how to
use it very well, and there seemed to be no provision for exporting
(except to a .kar file, which I think would need a special player to
be played.)
I suppose that, for users to be able to play the karaoke without
having to download any additional software, it would be necessary for
the software to export to some type of movie file that can be played
by a typical browser, but there may be a more clever way to do it. In
any case, the converted file needs to be kept fairly small (hopefully
no more than 1MB per minute of song), so that the download time will
be reasonable.
I'm willing to pay up to $250 for the software, if it really works
well. I've spent a reasonable amount of time hunting for this on the
web, and found many pieces of software designed for karaoke production
that don't fit my requirements. So, I _don't_ want to see a long list
of programs that I should try and see if they're any good. I _do_
want the researcher to determine to a reasonable level of confidence
that the program(s) s/he recommends will do what I want; this probably
means that the researcher will need to try out a demo version of the
software, to make sure. I can well imagine that the best approach
will be to combine two pieces of software. For example, perhaps one
piece would be used to create a .kar file, and another to convert it
to a format that could be easily played by a web browser, conceivably
via screen capture.
(I have looked at the Google answers post related to this subject in
2003, asked by Bowman-66 ga, and have checked all the possibilities
suggested in the answer to that ? none seem suitable to me.) |
