Ok, I've been playing with this quite a bit today...Firstly, Wow...this is great.


Some usability observations;

1) ReseveCache=2 seems to work for me. At some point I'd somehow removed it, and emphatic wasn't very happy. Lot's of disk churning, and high CPU usage (ISTR that disk I/O is CPU bound on the empeg), resulting in a rather unresponsive empeg. I tried ReserveCache=4 too, but this seemed to have equally bad results - I guess that the player was being starved at this point.

2) Yes, the horizontal scrolling definately still needs some work - it goes in fits and spurts too much. This is most obvious with the large font. My test track appears to be good - the timings work well in vertical mode. I wonder whether horizontal scrolling will ever be as smooth as we like, give that we are bound by the 40Hz screen rate anyway. I also wonder whether looking another line into the future might help with timing.

3) emphatic needs to be better behaved with buttons. It really shouldn't keep the buttons bound during general use, and I have seen some quirkyness with the left and right buttons when lyrics have been active. (Typically a short press being translated as a long press). I know that you've mentioned wanting to make emphatic sit back more in the background. I think that the ideal solution would be to separate out the lyrics display and UI functions into 2 processes, ie emphaticd and emphatic_control. Then bind emphatic_control to the hijack menu, and bind all the buttons for menu use only. When you exit the menu (ie, emphatic_control), unbind all the buttons, and wait for selection from hijack again. I'm hoping that future versions of hijack will enable userland apps to be assigned to the Popup menus.
The question is whether hijack supports a process binding the screen *only* (as emphaticd would need to). Not sure.
Oh, I'm also trying to promote the idea that a long knob press should always quit back to the hijack menu (without making any changes)

4) Slightly modified Menu options; On (exits menu leaving lyrics on), Off (exits with lyrics off), Mode, Font, Quit. Functionally I think it's identical to what you already have, but I think that it's marginally clearer - putting 'On' and 'Off' next to each other would help people to grasp the real effect that they have.


Now I just need to add lyric tags to all my music and I've got a ready made Karaoke-Business-in-a-Box.