karaokemanager 1.0.6

Karaoke session management utility

Karaoke Manager

Command-line karaoke session management utility.

• Maintains a list of singers and their selected songs, key changes, etc.
• Easily add/delete/move singers and songs with short, simple commands. No mouse required.
• Fast undo & redo functionality for fat finger syndrome.
• Singers can maintain their position in the queue, even if they currently have no songs cued up.
• Heavy OCD rating.
  • Enforces correctly formatted karaoke and music filenames.
  • Can analyze your library for duplicates, bad capitalization, similar-looking titles, missing "The" prefixes, etc (lists of analysis exemptions can be created).
• Writes the current list of singers to a file that you can display on-screen using software of your choice (for example, Rainmeter).
• Also has functionality and commands relating to cueing-up background music.
• Has been used in real life!

Installation

Just run pip install karaokemanager.

To run it

• First, install a driver! (see below)
• Copy the YAML template to .yaml, and modify it with your own settings.
• Then just run karaokemanager or py -m karaokemanager
• Type help or h at the command line to get a list of available commands.

If you hate the config filename, rename it, and provide it as an argument to the program, e.g. py -m karaokemanager renamed_file.yml

Drivers

This utility was created so that it could work with any karaoke player. For it to "drive" the player, you need to provide it with a driver.

Currently, one driver exists, for Winamp, the 90s music player for Windows. There are currently no drivers for any Linux apps, and if you know of a useable Linux karaoke app, I'm all ears.

Anyway, if you want to use the Winamp driver, you should install it first with pip install karaokemanagerwinampdriver.

• PyPI link
• GitHub link

If you want to create a driver for your favourite karaoke player, create a Python class that exposes two methods:

def __init__(self, config)
def play_karaoke_file(self, karaoke_file, key_change, errors)

• config is the pyyaml object that represents the driver-specific section from the YAML config file.
• karaoke_file is the path to the file that should be played
• key_change is a numeric value (from -5 to +5) that tells you how many semitones the pitch of the track should be shifted.
• errors is a list to which you should append any error messages that KaraokeManager will display to the user.
• The constructor should raise an exception if there is a problem.

Create a package containing this code, install it, and then set the driver->class value in the YAML config file to point to your class.

Output files

On startup, and during runtime, Karaoke Manager will create a number of text files in your configured tempDataPath, many of which are intended to be of some use if you are skilled with scripting or configuring third-party software to do your bidding. If that's you, then some of the files which might be of interest are:

• KaraokeManager.singers.txt contains the names from the current queue of singers (one per line). If a singer has no songs cued up, their name is prefixed with a tab.
• KaraokeManager.backgroundMusic.txt is a file containing full paths of background music files (one per line). This is generated on startup by cross-referencing the contents of the backgroundMusicPlaylistFilename (as specified in your configuration) with the music files that are found in the paths that you have specified in the music section of the config. You may find this file useful as a playlist for a media player that you can fade in between singers.
• KaraokeManager.musicRequests.txt contains paths (one per line) of songs that you have selected with the cue command. You could write a script to monitor this file and deal with the request queue as you see fit.
• KaraokeManager.songSuggestion.txt is written to every ten seconds with the artist & title of a random track from your karaoke library. I use this to show a 'Why not try ...?' rolling display along the bottom edge of the karaoke screen.

Scanning

On startup, Karaoke Manager will scan your karaoke and music paths for files. If it finds files that it doesn't like the look of, it'll let you know, and it will also write various reports to files in dataPath for you to examine at your leisure.

You can also ask Karaoke Manager to perform a deeper analysis of your files with the scan command. This command will analyse your files, looking for duplicates, bad casing, inconsistencies, etc. The scan,quick command will perform this basic checking, but scan,all will go a bit further and report similar-looking titles as potential duplicates.

The various parts of the scan can be enabled/disabled in the scan section in the YAML configuration file.

To prevent false positives being reported, you can create lists of exemptions (one per line) in text files in dataPath:

• The scan will look for duet "reversals", meaning that if you have files by "Chas & Dave", but also some by "Dave & Chas", it'll flag them up. ReversalExemptions.txt can contain a list of those that are valid, with the two halves of the pair separated by a tab. Note that, currently, only an ampersand separator is considered.
• If the scan finds a file by an artist called, for example "Greatest Band Ever", and also a file by an artist called "The Greatest Band Ever", it will flag that up. TheExemptions.txt can prevent this by listing either of those values.
• The scan will nag you about artists or titles containing words that are not capitalized. CapitalizedExemptions.txt can list those are valid (e.g. 'kd lang')
• The all scan will nag your about artists or titles that look very similar (though only by comparing artist with artists, and titles with titles). SimilarityExemptions.txt can list those that should not be considered. Put both values on the same line, separated by a tab.
• The scan will nag you about artists that are identical apart from case (e.g. "Paul McCartney" and "Paul Mccartney"), but exemptions are not currently supported for this part of the scan.

Like It?

If you like this, and/or use it commercially, please consider throwing some coins my way via PayPal, at [e-mail], or buy me a coffee.

TODO

• More customization.
• More code comments.

v1.0

First release