Cold spell. That means indoors till noon. Which in turn means grilled ham and cheese, butter for Wallace, 80% vegetable oil margarine for me. And lots of coffee. I’ve been trying to catch a History Channel documentary on music devices. The really good programs tend to air when I am busy and, primitive as it sounds, I have no provision to record television. My TV capability is light years in the past and I am bragging about that, sunshine. And cold or not, flowers still bloom in Florida. Here is a flowering vine along the east wall. The prevalence of flower pictures this winter is intentional.
I hate the Brother company and their crappy printers. Now, I can't use my scanner because one ink cartridge is dry, meaning I can't install the driver on my new hard drive because the printer won't turn on without that cartridge. If I said I’ll never own another Brother, let me repeat that. Do not buy a Brother printer. My stance is the same as ever: printers are 35 year old technology and there is no excuse for stupidity in the design.Yikes, dead silent in the shop all day. Mike purchased one of those 4-stroke bicycle motors that drive the wheel with a spindle. It looks like a small lawnmower engine with a short pipe out one end. When mounted to Mike’s tandem bike, he can to 35 mph. I once pedaled to half that speed and concluded the roadways are too decrepit in this town for even that. I would not mind a motor around half that size and weight that moves maybe 10 mph. Mike says they drove his all the way to Miami Beach. I’ll pass, both on riding a bike that fast, and Miami Beach.
The rest of today is technical material, but read it anyway if you are at all curious about the challenges I face with computers. With help from Arnel, I have been scouting for Karaoke software suitable for my act and I believe I have some good news. I’ll run over the nature of the experiment first. The goal is my “live” karaoke show by adding those scrolling and color-changing lyrics to the music as I play along. It seems so simple until you try it. Here is my progress report.
One thing I never knew is that you can add lyrics to MIDI files. Arnel showed me how to add lyrics to the track of any instrument with a melody line. I thought that was a feature of the Van Basco Karaoke player. It is also a laborious process, involving a lot of back and forth. Furthermore, every MIDI manual I read failed to spell out in plain English how it works. Usually they said something like “the ability to add lyrics is defined in the MIDI standard.” Whatever that means.
Today I find out that the MIDI lyric track is called “meta event type 5”. This means, I think, that lyrics can be matched up with other MIDI events, which could be what I’ve been looking for. I had touched on this by trying to attach lyrics to the drum track (that was a complicated dead end). It says here that drum track is Channel 10 on the MIDI. As usual, there are incompatible exceptions.
My search led to “Serenade”. It is software that places the text into the MIDI file. Here’s something else I did not know. The file extensions .mid and .kar both mean the same type of file. It is custom that says use .kar when lyrics are present. Expect this to cause confusion. Serenade seems to do much more, however. It will extract or add lyrics, which is important because most MIDI files don’t have [any] lyrics [attached], but I’ll bet the ones that do have to be fixed.
Now get this. Instead of the gruelling chore of using all those Van Basco hyphens to match the words to the event, Serenade uses a neat system simple as you please. You type or paste in the words, then use Serenade to play the MIDI file (as opposed to playing the MIDI file in standalone mode). While the music plays, you tap the Ctrl key along to the melody and Serenade memorizes that sequence of text syllables. Beautiful! Result: instant Karaoke from ordinary MIDI files.
[Author's note 2017: I had to reject Serenade, as it works, but the quality of sound reproduction is adequate only for headphones. It is not good enough to use through PA speakers. Too "bassy" and it distorts if you try equalizing it out. Also, in the end, I could never find anyone who would give me the quick rundown on how MIDI works--so often just a bluff meaning they don't really know themselves.]
I have not yet purchased the software. What a boon to my project if it works as advertised, for I can then focus on getting realistic sounds out of my equipment. Changing the sound is called using “patches” and it almost certainly is a better documented procedure than plugging in lyrics. And just as certainly, this is going to cost a bundle (estimated $800) to get decent sounding samples (digital representation) of quality instruments. Predictably, they want more money for sampling more expensive instruments although the sampling process is the same even if you are recording frog farts.
All of this knowledge was, so to speak, dug out of solid rock. Nothing useful naturally came along. I ask the same question now as I did when I started college. Where do these programmers get their knowledge of what is not yet done, and the specifications of how to interface with it? There is no central repository of this information and no school seems to teach it. If they did, I’d sign up tomorrow. Fred experienced the same thing when he first saw a home computer.
Many a year ago, a customer came in and wanted to sell it. Fred looked asked what it could do. The reply was, “Well, anything you want it to.” That is like no reply at all unless they can demonstrate it. Nowadays we know it requires software, but I can see Fred staring at it sitting on his counter, him wondering what all the hype was about. Today, I downloaded the entire operating manual for Serenade and had it memorized by midnight. I may not be a musical virtuoso, but when it comes to getting useful things done on a computer, “There’ll be no Dunkirk here.”
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