Hi. I've been lurking on this list for a while as I contemplate buying a second generation Empeg. BTW, I'm also curious to see what the S3/Sonic|Blue acquisition will produce in the short term as far as new products go but that's a different question.

Is anyone aware of any attempt made in the Empeg developer community to have lyrics be the visual output on the screen? Ie. when you're listening to a song, you'd see the appropriate lyrics on the screen. There are all kinds of timestamp and synchronization issues, along with actually putting together lyrics and then displaying them, but I'd like to know how difficult such an endeavor would be.

Here's the reason. As some of you might know, the Holy Qur'an (the Muslim book of revelation akin to the Bible and the Torah) is recited in Arabic. It's often nice for English speakers, even those who may understand Arabic, to see an English (or Arabic) translation/script up on the screen. I for one would love to choose different reciters and see the translation and Arabic pop up on the display as the person recites. Since the empeg is infinitely hackable, or appears this way, this looks like it might be a fun weekend project. How difficult do you think this would be (ignoring the time to create MP3 files - if it means breaking them down verse by verse - and appropriate lyrics)?

ID3V2 tags support lyrics, although I've yet to see anyone use this feature. Some of the proprietry talking book formats do likewise - and I know that the Qur'an is available in a number of such formats. We did some work with an OEM in Malaysia who had an in-car Qur'an application, and also prayer notifications (using GPS!). It was rather a sweet system for those that follow Islam.

Supporting lyric tags in the car player may not be too hard a task, but it has to take a back seat behind the rather major work we're currently doing for release 1.1. If anyone knows of any MP3 files that utilise these tracks (preferably free ones) let me know!

One last thing - it may not be a good idea for lyrics to be available in the car. For safety reasons I can see an argument to restrict them to home use.

Rob

ID3V2 tags support lyrics, although I've yet to see anyone use this feature.

And that's really the only problem I see with the lyric tags in ID3v2... no one's using it right now. Even if Empeg spent the time to add the feature, there wouldn't be any files with the ID3v2 lyrics encoded unless you created the files yourself.

Not to mention the fact that if someone else gives you an MP3 file with lyrics, and they're not really the artist who wrote the song, you have to trust that they entered the lyrics correctly.

But still, wouldn't it be great if we had that feature? Having the Empeg scroll the lyrics would be so cool!

To answer the original question, though: "Can the empeg be hacked so that a third party could add this lyric feature?"

The answer is: Right now, not very easily because you'd have to completely replace the player software with a new from-scratch player of your own (only the Linux kernel is open-source).

But very soon, empeg will offer a plug-in architecture for creating visualization modules. Assuming that this architecture can return a handle to the MP3 file, then someone could easily write a "lyrics" visualization as a plug-in. It's projects like this that make us drool at the possibilities of a plug-in architecture. Toby, how's that coming? Will we see it in 1.1?

___________
Tony Fabris

1.1 doesn't have any plug-in support, for anything. It's got lots of other stuff, but plugins are still on the wishlist. We're pretty busy with lots of stuff, of which 1.1 is one part.

Hugo

Thanks for the information guys. It looks like since the player is closed source and doesn' thave a plugin architecture for the visuals, I'm kind of out of luck.

Rob, could you email me the name of the OEM in Malaysia? If they have a Qur'an application (with GPS, all the better) and it still has MP3 functionality - meaning I can also carry music - that would be perfect. The hacker in me is disappointed but the yuppie in me is perfectly willing to pay for it.

It was actually a UK company, though the name totally escapes me at the moment - I seem to remember it was the same name as an old UK car company. They do lots of electric car research.

The Qur'an app was actually a little PC-based handheld box with a small TFT screen - just a prototype, but it was very impressive - they had someone famous in to sing the whole book, and it displays both english & arabic texts, with a cursor showing where the audio is up to all the time - which may be different places in the arabic & english text. Looked very slick!

It wasn't a music box though, it was single purpose. The GPS stuff was in other of their products (including a car demonstrator!)

Hugo

Oh you tease me! That's exactly what I want to buy. Although I'd like to choose between multiple recitations. If you guys could find the name of that company, I'd love to talk to them.

If this was a PC handheld, since I'm assuming you guys did the work, would it be too hard to port their stuff over to the empeg? That is if I knew who they were or a person I could contact there.

I'd love to have this, along with an empeg and a GPS system, in my new car. If not, at some point I'm just going to have to grow this on my own - although I was kind of hoping that since empeg already went through the trouble of building a nice system designed for the car, I could piggyback on it.

I would really appreciate it if at some point you could help me by digging up the name. It's not urgent, but you'd have my gratitude.

Edited by hussein on 30/11/00 11:34 PM.

I'll see what I can find by trawling my email folders tomorrow. We didn't do the singing book for them (they were doing stuff with empeg mk2's, nothing to do with the Qu'ran!) and they're R&D, not commercial so they don't deal with end users. Still, you could ask them if it's likely to come out, and who might sell it.

I'm sure their stuff could be ported to an empeg - in theory, they could do it themselves as the tools are there; I suspect it wouldn't be an easy or quick job though.

Hugo

I've remembered!

www.frazer-nash.com

No mention of the product on their site, but worth an email - they definitely have done it!

Hugo

Thanks, Hugo. Much appreciated. I'll see what I can find out. Do you know who I can forward my inquiries to?

Also. I'm a little confused. If they didn't do the Qur'an with the Arabic and English, did someone else? Or did that never happen in conjunction with Empeg? What would be great for me is to track down who has used an Empeg for that purpose and volunteer to do any additional porting, etc so I can have a dual mode Empeg/Qu'ran.

They did the Qur'an in Arabic & English, on a PC platform. We were nothing to do with it, they just showed it to me when I visited...

Hugo

What did Rob mean then that he knew of an OEM in Malaysia that did an in-car player. This is what I'm most interested in.

No, it wasn't an in-car player. Frazer Nash sell some of their technology to a malaysian company, and in a demo they used an empeg mk2 linked in with their in-car systems.

Hugo

You wouldn't happen to have the name of the Malaysian company, would you? Or a specific contact at Frazer-Nash? My emails have gone unanswered (I'll try the phone on Monday).

Scrolling lyrics added to the huge capicity for music, easily searched playlists, easily portable, aren't we heading towards turning the empeg into a karoke machine.

What a fate for such a fine machine.

Don't kill the Empeg

No, I can't give out the name of the company - but that really wouldn't help you. What you're looking for is an internal project done by F-N themselves, so mentioning the other company just confuses the picture.

I'll see if I can find a contact on monday.

Hugo

Hugo,

This is far from urgent but if you had any luck finding the contact at Frazer Nash, it would be appreciated.