Busy as heck working on 7.0...

[Justin]

One more screenshot, just to show some of the possibilities, then I'm taking a break for a couple hours lol... it now looks even cooler...

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[Fabio]

it works really well.  I like that you can turn the SAFE area ON and OFF to see where you can drag things and not get in the way of other things.  I would suggest the ability to display both the text of however many singers are picked for the text plus the 3 pictures on the margin (or 2 or 1).  So it still allows people to see their picture when they're on the top 3 and still see the text list for the others. Right now I have to chose one or the other or sometime I switch in the middle of the night when I get really long lists and keep having people coming to see my laptop display to see where they're at....the only problem when I switch to the text only mode the people who like to see their pictures on screen will then complain...I know you can never please everybody but at least this would come closer 

So for example make it so I can display 10 text singers and 3 pictures on either margin (probably left is best with just the names underneath the pictures (it should truncate at a certain point so the text doesn't bleed into other areas or go off the screen. I guess that means they would see their name twice (under their pic and in the text list).  There should be an option on whether to display the pictures while singing or only in between songs.  You can probably just keep the radio buttons and then add an additional check box "display pictures in margin" and if this box is checked then allow the user to pic from a dropdown where the choices could be:

1 picture always
2 pictures always
3 Pictures always
1 picture in interim only
2 pictures in interim only
3 Pictures in interim only

I know the display gets too busy with both but sometimes you might not care. 

Also I would suggest a top to bottom centering (or is that justification?) of the text singers.  So if less than 10 are picked then it should add additional spaces.

BTW, I agree that the QR code should stay at the bottom.

Take a look at what I currently do on my songbook for the QR Code.  I'll be removing them shortly  (I put clear tape to attach them to the front and back of the books.

I was posting but I noticed someone has posted a reply...but I don't want to lose what I've typed so I'll post this now and then I'll go back and read and hopefully post a reply to that post.

[Fabio]

I like it better!  with everything shifted to one side or the other.  It looks cleaner.  On the zip you posted you didn't put the ability to shift the safe areas but I can see that it can be done easily.

[Justin]

Yeah, I have an idea of how to do pics + the full text in a nice way. I was getting tired of the current VDJ interface, where settings for the cdg screen are all over the place (one box on the Karaoke Queue, one on the Singer's list, then the new QR button was on the Server window... now it's all in one place.

I thought the TV graphic was a nice touch I added an "edit" checkbox that, when unchecked (default) it hides all the extra stuff and locks the graphic from being changed. This way when you're going in there just to change the text or something, you see a nice representation of the final result (which will vary by a few pixels here and there... what you see in that window is a representation that just sets a few numbers within the program. I will try to make it as close to 100% scale as possible).

PS, I think for fun I'll add an "undo/redo" buffer in there, say up to 32 levels...

[Fabio]

Yeah, I have an idea of how to do pics + the full text in a nice way

That good!...because it took me a while to think of the best way to explain what I thought would be the best way to implement it 

I thought the TV graphic was a nice touch

I did see that but I wasn't sure if you had taken a graphic of a TV or had actually taken a picture of it on your own TV screen. 

The buffer sounds like a good idea!

[Justin]

LOL no I found a royalty-free generic 16:9 TV graphic on Google Images, and modified it to perfectly fit the screen editor window. It just makes it more fun

Note that the "No Picture" graphics are going to be replaced with ones that show "Singer 1", "Singer 2" and "Singer 3". Unfortunately it is very easy to mix them up right now... but I need to make room for the singer's name underneath, perhaps in a smaller font. Right now with three and accounting for the header/footer, there wouldn't be room to add that. I'll keep playing with it and see what I can come up with.

Perhaps I could put their name *on* the image at the bottom? So when you are showing pictures along with the text of the next 10, their name is on the picture. And when you're showing just pictures, it will then add text to the right like it does now, without their name super-imposed on the picture.

The way it's going to work is this: The drop-down box to select whether you are editing the "Standby" or "Karaoke" screen will affect *all* other settings. So when nobody is singing, you have one configuration, and when someone is singing it's an entirely different configuration.

This way, you can show the singer pics on one side while someone is singing, and move them to the middle when they are not. Or whatever you like - I'm trying to make this as customize-able as possible (that word looks wrong with the hyphen, but Chrome insists...)  The only thing I am not going to do is allow the user to re-size any of the elements. That would add another level of sophistication that I'm not willing to dive into just yet.

One other thing, and tell me if this is a bad idea... I think I'm going to remove the option to show the singer's picture in the background behind the lyrics, as well as the "Show one singer w/full screen pic". I never liked either of these, and removing them simplifies things for me... I hate removing any option, as there will always be one very vocal user moaning about it... "It worked in 6.x, wtf?"... but I really think those options were kinda lame and just add more complication to this whole thing.

Okay, break time is over, off to make some of this code actually do something   Maybe after a short TV break...

[Fabio]

I think I'm going to remove the option to show the singer's picture in the background behind the lyrics, as well as the "Show one singer w/full screen pic". I never liked either of these, and removing them simplifies things for me.

I totally agree.  I used them a couple of times myself and people thought it was weird to watch themselves on the screen behind the lyrics and at least once I did it to myself by mistake while I was singing and I must say it's not only weird...you start wondering as you're singing "I should get a better picture...I look weird on that one"...  anyway, it's very distracting.  After it happened to me I realized it was not a good idea for me and probably not the singers...so I made sure that setting was unchecked!
They only time I think they would be good would be for Halloween or costume parties.  But I could always do what I was doing before take pictures and put them as backgrounds and then just manually change them every few minutes...actually it would be nice to choose a collection of them in such cases and just let VDJ cycle through them every few seconds.  This might be good for crowd pictures too, where you take pictures of the crowd and "play" them in the background picture.  You could use your smartphone and send them to a designated folder and then have VDJ to play them from there in the background.

Chop it off!!

[Justin]

I'm glad you agree, because I already removed those options from the new design window   I now allow you to show pics, text, or both, and you can position them as you wish both when someone is singing and when not, as separate configurations.

But I got to thinking about Video again, the ability to show video behind whatever else is being displayed; either a static video, an animated gif, or even live video. I've already tinkered with live video (in the screen where you capture a picture), so I know it can be done with any camera supported in Windows... but now we get into Alpha-blending. It's not that difficult to pull off, but it does use a lot of CPU resources to pull it off in realtime. It's almost like green-screening - usually they use dedicated hardware for this task, very expensive equipment. Though I know it can be done, as I've seen it (iChat on the Mac specifically, did a very good job of showing an animation in place of the background behind the subject)...

I think I'll put a pin in that for now, *however* I do want to implement just basic video playback as part of the program. I'm going to look into using the VLC player's SDK, since for my purposes I absolutely need raw access to at least the audio portion (for crossfading/AGC/EQ) and WMP won't give me that. Raw access to the video renderer would be even better (header/footer text, QR code, etc). Maybe it could be yet another item you drag 'n' drop in the screen arrangement window...

At a very minimum, when 7.0 is released, I want at least basic video support, using either a URL or a local file. Winamp does this seemlessly, and VDJ's been around almost as long as WinAmp... it's about time...

All this is just food for thought for later. I want to wrap up the new Karaoke display first, and then get a BETA version out to you guys to check out, to test the new Karaoke plus the Web App feature...

I'm doing more brain-storming at this point, so I think I'll hang it up for the night. Been a long day staring at this screen I think I'll play with the DroidX for a while (haven't touched it all day lol).

By the way, I've been using my default search with "match all words in any order" (I now have that doing realtime "as you type results") and it really does do a better job. For example, I needed a DK version of Bon Jovi - since the graphics on those take the full 300x216 usable area, for test purposes - and I just typed "bon jovi dk". This would not have worked with my old "exact phrase" search; I'd have typed "bon jovi" then scrolled to find a DK version. Or even "jovi, bon"... much better, and I think I will make that the default setting now. Thanks again Fabio for pushing me to improve the search tool

[Fabio]

I now allow you to show pics, text, or both, and you can position them as you wish both when someone is singing and when not, as separate configurations.

This is perfect!

I'm going to look into using the VLC player's SDK, since for my purposes I absolutely need raw access to at least the audio portion (for crossfading/AGC/EQ) and WMP won't give me that. Raw access to the video renderer would be even better (header/footer text, QR code, etc). Maybe it could be yet another item you drag 'n' drop in the screen arrangement window...

I agree. VLC is really great in giving you so much control.  I think I mentioned I was usuing it to play video on top of the CDG screen.  I did have to make sure VDJ I unchecked the "always on top" setting.  This reminds me, I meant to mention...at some point that setting became grayed out so it can't be unchecked.  I did find unchecking the "Show CDG Window" was better anyway, and cleaner as I was able to do that with the laptop display instead of having to go to the CDG window and right-clicking.  It keeps the illusion of "the wizard behind the curtain" a little bit better.  Since I assume no one complained about that, I was probably the only one using this setting, so no need to fix it! 

Speaking of video...

At a very minimum, when 7.0 is released, I want at least basic video support, using either a URL or a local file

This is gre,t as I would be able to stop using VLC (at least in it's current implementation).
This allows me to support other languages as well.  I know I've been asked about Armenian songs, but they're only available in video format. Also my wife is Thai while she's not too much into singing in Thai, her friends are....so much so that I got this DVD package with 40,000 midi karaoke songs...yes midi.  I wish I could play them in VDJ if only so I don't have to launch a separate application and keep a separate queue of the singers...but that would be going backwards.  In reality what I end up doing is put a zip file titled "Karaoke Song" in the VDJ Queue so I know when they come up I have to do the switcheroo of applications.  Currently, I do the same for video songs I just have a zip file called "Video Song". Luckily this only happens occasionally.

By the way, I've been using my default search with "match all words in any order" (I now have that doing realtime "as you type results") and it really does do a better job.....Thanks again Fabio for pushing me to improve the search tool

No problem...but my intentions were not entirely altruistic...I was looking out for myself on that one 
I'm glad you implemented that and I like that you added the realtime.  Does it still do quote searches such as "9 to 5" dolly?

[Justin]

I agree. VLC is really great in giving you so much control.

VLC has been my default player on my laptop for a few years now... I just haven't dug into using it within a program yet...

Does it still do quote searches such as "9 to 5" dolly?

That's something I hadn't thought about, but that would be nice... I'll have to think on how to implement that, but I agree, it would be nice, as I do quoted searches all the time in Google personally. I suppose that in my code, the point where I am splitting the search string into words, I could find a way to interpret a quoted string as a single "word"...

Challenge accepted!

[Fabio]

I meant to answer this in previous post and totally forgot...

Perhaps I could put their name *on* the image at the bottom? So when you are showing pictures along with the text of the next 10, their name is on the picture. And when you're showing just pictures, it will then add text to the right like it does now, without their name super-imposed on the picture.

This would work for me...too bad Ron is MIA  otherwise we could get his opinion too.

[Fabio]

Speaking of pictures...one thing you could do to make this even more interesting and I think I mentioned this before...maybe not...

Anyway, if you could combine pictures like the Android gmail app does when two singers with pictures sign up for a duet  (I'm not sure if the iPhone gmail app does it...or if there is even a gmail app  ) I'm not sure if you've installed set your gmail account on the DroidX but I've attached a jpg for you to see.  This would be really neat!



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[Justin]

I'm not sure if you've installed set your gmail account on the DroidX but I've attached a jpg for you to see. 

Actually you have to sign in to Google Play, and since I used my Gmail account for that, it just automatically started notifying me on the Droid when I get an email... lol, gotta love integration

I like that though - that's a good idea. I never did add any provisions for duets in the Singer's list, and that's something I should address, and yes, if there's a duet I can easily put two pics together into one space

On another topic, why the hell does Facebook convert everything to JPEG? I posted a PNG screenshot of the new Karaoke screen editor, and because of the purple "sample" lyrics, it looks horrible! Mind you I've been meaning to change the example lyrics to something more representative of VDJ (outline/shadow etc), just haven't gotten to it yet... right now I'm stuck doing a bunch of math, figuring out the scaling of the editor window vs the output screen, etc. It's becoming a real pain lol, my brain hurts today...

[Fabio]

gotta love integration

Yeah, I forgot about that...it still surprises me every time it happens when I download a new app that requires signing on...it just gets your permission to do it and it just happens.

if there's a duet I can easily put two pics together into one space

Where's the thumbs-up smiley when you need it!

Re: Facebook
Facebook does a lot of weird stuff...I still hate you cannot search your wall for comments you know you've made...at least I haven't figured out how. 

[Justin]

I still hate you cannot search your wall for comments you know you've made...at least I haven't figured out how. 

Agreed, I've had this problem as well. You'd think a full text search would be pretty easy to implement...

I swear, every day I have to ban at least 1 or 2 spambots from the forums - I have every possible method enabled (email confirmation, CAPCHA image, etc) to prevent the spammers but it just keeps happening. I wonder if they aren't bots, but users being paid to SPAM forums... ugh!

The only way around this would be to manually approve all signups, and I really don't want to do that... I guess I'll just keep checking the forums and delete SPAM as it happens, banning the username. Ooh, I should have it notify my GMail for every post - then the Droid will make it easier to ban them wherever I am