Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Guitaraoke


Thought I'd post a short bit on the software I'm working on. Basically, it's a glorified Notepad with big fonts! Sounds exciting, doesn't it? It's to support my incredibly weak memory. I enjoy playing the guitar and singing. Except that I can't remember chords. Or lyrics. So, unless I have something in front of me, my hot jams usually go something like, "ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER! Princess, somethin, something, outside in the cold, umm... GUITAR SOLO!!!!"

Guitaraoke is a simple program to display chords and lyrics. There's a list of artists, a list of songs, and a big text area so the laptop can be across the room. I have a foot control that I'm building from an old USB keyboard so I can switch songs and scroll through the lyrics without stopping the rock. Zac and I tried it out the other week, and it works great - we got through a lot more songs, a lot more easily, than with printing everything out.

I'm working on polishing it up a little bit and then I'll post it on the web for all to enjoy. I had some spare time in my meetings this week so I added the ability to play an mp3 for each song, and a little bit of an easier way to load songs in (they're just text files in folders, usually copy/pasted off the stellar www.guntheranderson.com
website.

6 comments:

Cate said...

Any chance of a Mac version? Ha.

Iestyn Lewis said...

Hells yes. As part of Your Tax Dollars At Work, the university has judiciously decided to purchase me a MacBook Pro. So I look forward to developing a Mac version as soon as I join your gilded ranks.

gashcrumb said...

d00d, what about a Linux version?

Keath said...

You know notepad has a font size setting, right? :-) The grouping by artist and easy song pickin' is very clever though, as is the USB foot pedal, which is certainly hellacooler than a morse code keyboard. Copyright that sucka.

Incidentally, gashcrumb has now created for me a vivid image of Tux playing the guitar. He's playing Neil Young songs, oddly enough, but has no voice, so they're all instrumentals.

Iestyn Lewis said...

I do know that notepad has a font size setting. I set it to FARGIN' HUGE and let Mia pound on the keys, as did her sister before her.

For Linux, you get 3 xterms and a shell script. If you're lucky. Although that recording stuff on your website looks pretty choice.

Unknown said...

a) when does become available for download
b) If you're going Mac you should model it on textmate, mate!