Contents

• What you see
• How the syncing works
• Yamaha XF karaoke files
• Duets
• Supported lyric data
• Tips
• Related pages

Lyrics & Karaoke

Plenty of MIDI files carry the song words tucked away inside them as text, especially karaoke files (often with a .kar extension) and Yamaha XF files. PXR pulls those words out and shows them in a dedicated, synced lyrics window that behaves just like a karaoke screen. Time to warm up the vocal cords.

• Open it with ⌘L (Display → Show Lyrics).
• The lyrics button becomes available whenever the loaded file contains embedded words.

What you see#

Here is what fills the window once the words start flowing:

• Smooth scrolling lyrics: the line being sung sits in the upper part of the display with the next few lines waiting below, each a little dimmer the further away it is. As each line completes, everything glides gently upwards, and the line you have just sung stays filled in pink until it drifts off the top.
• Syllable-by-syllable highlighting: the current line fills with pink in time with the melody, crossing each word exactly as it is sung, so you always know precisely where you are.
• The word being sung swells letter by letter, rolling through the word in time with the notes. Hold a long note and you can watch it travel.
• Long lines wrap onto a second row rather than shrinking, with the highlight flowing through both rows.
• A melody note roll below the words. This is a scrolling piano-roll of the melody line: notes approach from the right, light up as they sound, and fade as they pass, with pitch bends shown. It is a great guide for singing or playing along.
• On a duet, a small key sits right at the top of the window naming each part, and both the words and the notes below them are drawn in that part's own colour. See Duets below.
• An optional animated starfield background for atmosphere.
• A toolbar with transport controls, a Key transpose control to move the song into a comfortable singing range, and a melody channel button that mutes or unmutes the melody part. The button names the channel it acts on, and on a duet it names both, for example Melody (CH1+2). The window can also go full screen.

How the syncing works#

The clever part is the timing, and it looks after itself:

• PXR follows the song's melody and advances the highlight note by note as it plays.
• Intro text such as copyright lines or credits stored at the very start is skipped, so the display begins when the singing actually starts rather than on a wall of credits.
• When you pause, the lyrics and the melody roll freeze in place, then pick up again when you resume.
• A beat-aligned countdown appears before the first sung note, and again during long instrumental breaks, so an entrance never catches you out. Where the file names the break itself, INTERLUDE or ENDING, that name appears on the countdown.
• Labels are not sung. A line the file marks as a heading rather than words, such as INTRODUCTION, is shown but never lights up as though somebody were singing it.
• Words with no note under them still light up. A chanted "oh oh oh" that the melody part does not play is timed by the words themselves rather than waiting for a note that is nowhere near it.

Yamaha XF karaoke files#

Hundreds of Yamaha XG files carry their words in a Yamaha XF karaoke chunk, timed syllable by syllable to the singing line. PXR reads those in full, so a great many files that used to look wordless turn out to be complete karaoke discs.

• Syllables, not lines. XF files time each syllable of each word, so the highlight crosses a long word exactly as it is held.
• Japanese, and more. Japanese lyrics read properly rather than coming out as unreadable characters, and so do Korean, Chinese, Russian and Vietnamese.
• Pronunciation guides are tidied away. Japanese files often carry a reading alongside the written word. PXR uses it and keeps it out of sight, rather than showing brackets in the middle of the line.
• The song's own details. XF files name the song, its composer, lyricist, arranger and performer. PXR shows the real title and artist in the player and the playlist instead of the filename, credits the song under the track name in the lyrics window, and lists the rest in File Info.

Duets#

Some XF files say who sings each line. When a file does, PXR colours the singing accordingly:

• Male vocal lines are blue, female vocal lines are peach, and a chorus is gold.
• A key across the very top of the window names the parts that appear in this song, so there is never any doubt which colour is which.
• The melody note roll matches, drawing each singer's notes in that singer's own colour.
• Muting the melody silences both singers, not just one. A duet usually puts each part on its own channel, and the melody button acts on all of them.

Files that do not name their singers are shown the usual way, in white with a pink highlight.

Supported lyric data#

PXR reads the standard ways words are stored in a MIDI file (lyric and text events), including karaoke .kar files, and the Yamaha XF karaoke chunk described above. Short songs such as nursery rhymes count too. If a file has no embedded words then there is simply nothing to show, and that is nothing to worry about. You can confirm what a file contains in the File Info window.

Tips#

For the clearest view, give the lyrics window its own space or pop it on a second screen, then let the melody roll guide your timing.

Related pages#

• The Visualiser for the main display.
• File Info & Cover Art to see what a file contains.
• Yamaha XF for the sections, chords and song information the same files carry.
• Playback & Transport for play, pause, and seek.