Now that I've been playing with it for a bit, here's a couple observations.

On custominfo, that large lyrics seem to have the bottom half cropped off. Maybe it's because I need to specify a height? I didn't see specs in the readme for what the options to a "lyrics" line are so I'm going by observation.

Using this custominfo is interesting and produces some odd behavior, but then it's an odd config so I say the bug is that I shouldn't try to do this:

custominfo1=lyrics lyrics large 0 3
custominfo1=lyrics lyrics medium 16 3
custominfo1=lyrics lyrics small 26 -1

The readme lists this twice:

-s n --space=n Set the number of pixels the program tries to

put in-between lines of lyrics in horizontal mode
Defaults to 30 pixels

I'm interested to see what types of custominfo settings people come up with.

Tony, did you also have custom info mode on?

Negative.

Come to think of it, it's not CPU... when it happens (and I've noticed now that it's not just that song, but the Animaniacs one too) I can pause/unpause the music and it's quite responsive. I can even pop up emphatic's menu. If I just pick "On", it goes back to the custominfo screen without scrolling the lyrics. But instead, if I change the mode to horizontal, the lyrics scroll (over top the player's vis) immediately. I quickly changed back to custominfo and it scrolled right away (could'a been a coincidence, dunno).

On custominfo, that large lyrics seem to have the bottom half cropped off. Maybe it's because I need to specify a height? I didn't see specs in the readme for what the options to a "lyrics" line are so I'm going by observation.

Nah, that's a screwup. medium gets chopped too. I never tested medium or large lyrics in custom info mode.. As I said, it's an experimental feature.

custominfo1=lyrics lyrics large 0 3
custominfo1=lyrics lyrics medium 16 3
custominfo1=lyrics lyrics small 26 -1

Okay, DON'T do that. I didn't think anyone would want 3 copies of the lyrics on screen, so I didn't mention it... Just one lyrics field on custom info mode, please. I know you're just trying to do kooky stuff to make it crash, and doing stuff like that, you're definitely going to succeed! I appreciate the effort, but something like that isn't something anyone's going to really want anyway...

But I will fix the medium and large lyrics thing for the next release.

I'll also fix the readme. Thanks.

Okay can you two do me a favor... Download this binary and tell me if your experience is different. It's 1.10 with id3lib instead of id3tag. It's likely to have its own bugs because I threw it together in 15 seconds, but it should be good enough to ferret out these dramatic slowdown problems you guys say you're experiencing.

FWIW this version doesn't seem any faster for me, but I wasn't seeing slowdowns in the first place. Of course, I don't have six other things running (TheAmigo), and I have ReserveCache (tfabris) so those two things are different in my case.

Can you guys at least confirm that changing tracks very rapidly is faster in 1.10 versus 1.01? Not like perfect, but in 1.01, changing more than 2 or 3 tracks ahead brought things to an absolute crawl, and buttons became unresponsive, etc. I kinda focused on this since it was a real drawback of 1.01, but I don't want to do that at the expense of performance under normal conditions.

I agree with you on that one. Track changing is MUCH better. Last version it would lag even trying to change to the next track... no problems on this one. Im still hoping for a boucing ball even though it seems near impossible without having to code every word with a time stamp... but it would be cool. Good work by the way. And thank you and everyone else who are developing these fun software/hardware add-ins. You guys are the reason for keeping this empeg scene alive and so great.

-Greg

Okay, glad to hear at least one user is reporting better performance. FWIW 1.10 is a lot faster in reading the tags, both when changing tracks quickly and under "normal" conditions. The sandbox version I built last night with id3lib instead of libid3tag seems a lot slower for me in picking up the info.

For now I guess I'll wait for tfabris and TheAmigo to test the v1.10 release against the sandbox v1.10 with id3lib. Then I can hopefully rule out the id3 library as the cause of this supposed drop in performance in 1.10. Then we can start adding ReserveCache or stopping other programs to see if those are getting in the way somehow.

Okay can you two do me a favor... Download this binary and tell me if your experience is different.

Yes. It performs better than the original 1.1 binary did without the reservecache. Still a little sluggish, but at least I'm not queueing up button presses 30 seconds in advance like I was before.

By the way. Something is really screwy with the way these programs (ALL of them, not just emphatic) hook into the Hijack menu.

For instance, when I ran Emphatic, I was getting graphics blitter from Emptris (I could see the text "you cleared 0 lines" on the screen briefly), yet I hadn't selected Emptris from the Hijack menu. All I had done was select emphatic from the menu.

This sort of thing also happens with GPSapp. For instance, if I run GPSapp after Empacman, I sometimes get things were the keystrokes don't work and then I get the Empacman screen when I try to exit and re-run GPSapp.

are you using the launcher to start the programs? or just using hijacks exec feature?

IIRC this was a side effect of launcher.

Yes. It performs better than the original 1.1 binary did without the reservecache. Still a little sluggish, but at least I'm not queueing up button presses 30 seconds in advance like I was before.

Okay, can you put some ReserveCache on (say, 32 or so) and let me know what the results are?

IIRC this was a side effect of launcher.

I am not using launcher. Just @DC EXEC commands in Hijack.

All Hijack-bound programs have always done this, even back when I was using Preinit. I just figured it was a bug in either the programs, or in Hijack.

Okay, can you put some ReserveCache on (say, 32 or so) and let me know what the results are?

A reservecache of 16 makes it behave quite nicely. Snappy performance.

Well, if you use the launcher, the programs won't eat up ram when they are not being used. I have pacman, sokoban, tetris, telnet server (stop, start) file viewer, and lyrics viewer all in the launcher, with setting in the config.ini, and the hijack exec starting only the launcher. I also don't have any reserve cache set, and everything but pacman works while music is playing perfectly.

A reservecache of 16 makes it behave quite nicely. Snappy performance.

Snappy on both the id3lib and libid3tag versions? I'm curious because my id3lib performance is much worse than my libid3tag performance. I kinda would like to lean towards libid3tag because of less executable bloat, and the fact that it performs better for me, but if you're seeing something different, I'd like to figure it out.

Incidentally, how much did you torture-test 1.01? I'm curious as to why you wouldn't have seen crappy performance in 1.01 without any ReserveCache. When I ran with no ReserveCache on 1.01, it was a complete dog.

Yes. It performs better than the original 1.1 binary did without the reservecache. Still a little sluggish, but at least I'm not queueing up button presses 30 seconds in advance like I was before.

Okay, can you put some ReserveCache on (say, 32 or so) and let me know what the results are?

I think that the previous sluggishness was CPU bound in the single thread rather than memory bound. Even with ReserveCache at 64 I could get emphatic to queue a horrendously large number of keypresses, and rapid multiple track changes could crash emphatic. I haven't seen either of these issues with this release.

On bizarre thing that I have seen is the lyrics disappearing, but only in horizontal mode. Switch modes to vertical, and they come right back. Back to horizontal and they're gone again. Nothing less than 'Quit' and restarting (from a command line) fixed it. I can't remember exactly what I had done prior to this happening, but I had been playing with how emphatic now sits in the background, and also with the new long knob press mode change.

I'll see if I can narrow it down more.

I'll give it a try when I get home tonight.

Overall, I've noticed that 1.1 seems to have a much better response time and not cause the FF problems that 1.0 did. I'll also see what it's like to leave reservecache set and not run all the other apps.

After Installing the new emphatic, when i run it it says 1.01. his is the newly untarred file i just downloaded and uploaded to my empeg.

Two suggestions:

1) is the new one trying to install to a different directory? Maybe you have both installed and it's finding the old one first in your path.

2) If you have emphatic running (doesn't have to be active, just listed as an option in the Hijack menu, you can't overwrite the file with the new version. Select it from Hijack so it's active, then press the knob again to get emphatic's menu and select Quit. Now try uploading again.

THe problem before was just a dumb mistake lol but now that i have the new emphatic running, (the menu says its v1.10), It will not read any of my lyrics. When you run the program the player works normally and you can reach the emphatic menu, but the lyrics just won;t appear. Nothing particularly interesting appears on the telnet console either.

Nothing particularly interesting appears on the telnet console either

Try starting emphatic with the -d (debug) option. I tried to cut down on the number of things I was printing in non-debug mode to avoid slowdowns when the serial port gets clogged with meaningless print statements. The -d output should give me *some* clue as to what's going on.

A couple sanity checks though...
1) The lyrics were available using v1.01?
2) You used lrc2sylt to add the lyrics? v1.01 actually allowed Lyrics3 tags, by accident... So if you used some Winamp plugin to add Lyrics3 tags, instead of my lrc2sylt utility, those files would show lyrics in 1.01, but not in 1.10, which uses a new ID3 library.

On bizarre thing that I have seen is the lyrics disappearing, but only in horizontal mode. Switch modes to vertical, and they come right back. Back to horizontal and they're gone again. Nothing less than 'Quit' and restarting (from a command line) fixed it. I can't remember exactly what I had done prior to this happening, but I had been playing with how emphatic now sits in the background, and also with the new long knob press mode change.

Thanks for reporting this one, I'll try to reproduce and keep an eye on it. Haven't seen this exact behavior, but I'll look for it.

The problem must be that I used the winamp plugin. Does that mean i have to reenter all those lyrics again? Cause i spent like a week inputting lyrics for 700 songs. PS. The lyrics did work in 1.01

700 songs! Wow! I hope you plan on contributing those to the LRC database that some folks are developing! That would be sweet.

No, you don't have to re-enter them. But the problem with those plugins is they mangle your MP3's. You might not notice it, but the Lyrics3 tag they're using causes a lot of MP3 decoders to stutter or choke. I believe the empeg decoder is smart enough to skip over these tags without a problem (or, maybe more likely, the lyrics data is so short that it's not noticable) but in my case, I don't want to bother with them when there's a more proper specification (ID3v2) which guarantees the data is written to the MP3 in such a way that nothing gets mangled. This is especially important to ensure gapless playback on albums.

But back to the lecture at hand. I'm not sure what WinAMP plugin you used, but it should have an option to export the tag to LRC format. Once you have them exported, you need to run the lrc2sylt utility which is in the Windows ZIP file on my page, or if you're running Linux at home, the Linux version is included with emphatic. I guess you'd also want to remove the Lyrics3 tag from your MP3's at that point.

Sadly I didn't build multiple file support into it, it just does one file at a time. I wa hoping someone out there would be writing either a WinAMP plugin which writes proper lyrics tags, or a GUI-based utility that could do the same job of adding the LRC files to the MP3's as proper ID3 fields. I think Oliver said he's give a shot, but I haven't heard anything recently. So for now, my cheesy command-line program is the only game in town. The author of MP3 Tag Studio threatened to include ID3v2 lyrics support in one form or another, but don't hold your breath.

The other option is, of course, to stay with 1.01, or find the 1.10 binary with the old tag library which I built last night for testing purposes (I linked to it earlier in this thread.) I am not going to officially support that version, but it should work for you until you can convert your MP3's to the new format. The tag library in 1.01 was real slow in reading tags, so I'm ditching it in the future. But I don't want to leave you hanging out to dry, either.

This was all explained in the README file, incidentally, so please don't go cutting my car's brake line because you have to do something manual to get your MP3's to work with future versions of emphatic!

Just a suggestion, but why doesn't somebody write a Lyrics3 to SYLT converter? That way you could use the existing winamp plugins to write Lyrics3 tags to your mp3s and then run the converter on the whole batch of them that would rip out the Lyrics3 and replace it with SYLT? It would be simpler than going through the intermediate .lrc file export step and come in awfully handy right about now for fink08. Since id3lib appears to support both formats and lrc2sylt already does most of the work it should be pretty trivial to write.

-Mike

Just a suggestion, but why doesn't somebody write a Lyrics3 to SYLT converter? That way you could use the existing winamp plugins to write Lyrics3 tags to your mp3s and then run the converter on the whole batch of them that would rip out the Lyrics3 and replace it with SYLT? It would be simpler than going through the intermediate .lrc file export step and come in awfully handy right about now for fink08. Since id3lib appears to support both formats and lrc2sylt already does most of the work it should be pretty trivial to write.

Exactly, why doesn't *someone* write it?

Edit: Bah, I was being an [censored]. I'll give it a shot.

Edit: Bah, I was being an [censored]. I'll give it a shot.

Hah! Actually I was trying to refer to anybody but you as I figured there was probably something better you could be doing and you already provided a functioning tool. Actually, I'd also like to rule myself out as I don't have anything running windows (to use winamp on) and I am feeling like a lazy ass today anyways ;-)

-Mike

Okay guys, I think I have whipped up something that will work for those of you that seem to already have a massive library of Lyrics3-tagged files. It ended up being easier than I thought, the id3_reader and id3_writer stuff scared me, but it turns out they have a simple API which converts Lyrics3 to SYLT, though they don't make it obvious what's happening underneath.

HOWEVER. By default, it's leaving the Lyrics3 tag in along with the proper ID3v2 SYLT frame. I have no way to remove just the Lyrics3 tag without also removing the ID3v1 tag.

What this means is, if you have MP3's which are tagged with ONLY ID3v1 fields, my attempts to remove the Lyrics3 tag after converting it to an ID3v2 SYLT frame will will end up with MP3's with no artist, title, etc. info.

So what I'm thinking I'll do is try to add some intelligence to it, so it does the following, all automatically:

1) reads the Lyrics3 tag
2) writes it to a SYLT frame in the ID3v2 tag
3) if you've got ID3v2 fields, it will remove the ID3v1 tag (removing the Lyrics3 tag also)
4) if you've only got ID3v1 fields, it will copy the info over to an ID3v2 tag, and then remove the ID3v1 tag (Lyrics3 tag go bye-bye)

I'm not sure I'll be able to do the last part. If I can't, I'm going to release it the way it is, meaning it will strip your Lyrics3 tag AND your v1 tag, and you'll be responsible for making sure you've got ID3v2 Artist, Title, etc. information. Most taggers do this nowadays.

Is this good for everyone? Also, is there ANY reason why I should consider leaving Lyrics3 tags in the MP3's?

Finally, I'm going to try to include a facility for exporting the synced lyrics (in whatever form they're in) to LRC format text files. This will hopefully allow people to share lyrics more easily, i.e. nobody will have an excuse that it's too hard to export their lyrics to a text file.

So, for all this effort, I would like you guys that supposedly have all these Lyrics3 MP3's to assure me that you'll share your LRC files with us once the database is up. Can I get some kind of assurance that you won't just disappear after I release this utility? I'm going to have to put at least another couple hours into this thing so it can do the right thing with the Lyrics3 tags and also output LRC files, the least you could do would be to share your efforts with the community.

Deal?

Edit: Oh, does anyone *NEED* this on the Linux version of lrc2sylt as well as the Windows one? The reason I ask is that the Windows version uses the C++ interface to id3lib, while the Linux version uses the C interface to id3lib. I'd essentially have to back-port the C++ code I'm writing for the Windows version to C just for the Linux version. Anyone really need that? Is ANYONE using the Linux version of lrc2sylt to begin with? Besides me...

You could code in a portion that takes all of that information and posts it to a web site, or emails it to someone, so that every one that uses the tool automatically contributes.

Evil!

Okay. You could make it an option, to make it easier for people to share.