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The implementation is based on Qt as planned earlier and we will
continue with this approach if no serious issues are encountered. We
also considered an implementation as a feature of Performous and decided
to use this as a fallback in case Qt turns out to be problematic.
We also reviewed Editor on Fire but determined that it is not suitable
for our use because it is primarily designed for entering guitar notes
and a lot of manual labor is required becaus of that. Also the
implementation is in rather unmaintainable C code (instead of clean C++)
and the user-interface is not very good.
Instead of separate modes for creating new song or editing an existing
song we aim to provide all tools in the main editor view. This allows to
user to choose his workflow in a more flexible manner and one can also
go back and redo parts of an existing song using any of the tools
available.
Lyrics are imported in the format commonly used on lyric sites (text
with sentence per line). Next the user can give timing information
(beginning time) for each word e.g. by tapping space while listening to
the song. Not all words need to be timed and anything that is not timed
will float freely and all floating words will be evenly divided into the
time period they take (between words that have been already timed). This
allows the user not to time each word but instead time only what needs
to be timed (e.g. each sentence) and the rest will be done
automatically.
Pitch detection is used to find the pitch and then the exact timing is
determined from the detected pitch. The user may adjust pitch and timing
(beginning, end) manually to correct possible problems. Here again it
was planned to have autodetected parameters float, i.e. have them change
flexibly if anything in the song is changed, until locked down by user's
manual adjustments.
It is initially planned to display the flexibly created notes as soon as
lyrics are available so that the user will technically be fixing a song
rather than creating one. This should allow doing the minimal amount of
work for getting the job done.
As we won't be able to store all the required metadata about flexible
parameters and such in SingStar XML nor other established formats, we
will implement our own project file format that contains all the actions
taken for creating the song (this also allows for implementing unlimited
undo/redo).
SingStar XML requires a constant BPM value which is not realistic for
most songs because BPM usually varies. We considered implementing a beat
detector for getting the actual beat timing but this would not work for
all songs and we would have to use a bogus value for SingStar XML
anyway. Because BPM is not relevant for singing, we plan to simply use a
bogus value and not even try to detect the beats.
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