Lyric colours

royandreno

Hi Peter, I am a 20 year user of a Window XP(!) program called OnStage Performer. It was developed by two Canadians. I was a Beta tester in 2003. After some time it turned out to be an excellent backing tracks player. When Windows Vista was introduced, they gave up. I think I'm the only one in the world with this program😃 Not until now have I found something that can match it, namely your ST3. There is one feature I had on OSP that I would like to see in Stage Traxx. I can highlight sections, like verse, chorus etc in different colours which is great, but when that section is played it turns white. It would be nice if played sections can remain coloured, and the current timecoded lyric also has the option of colour white.
Thanks for a great app though, Peter!

peter

You can turn off the highlighting of the current line. That way autoscrolling will work and your colors will not be changed during playback.

royandreno

peter But I like having the highlighting on.. When I lose myself playing fills, solo or drifting off mindlessly, it's just a quick glance on the screen, and I'm back. Maybe a feature request for version 4.0?

peter

But how can colored parts be highlighted if they should not change color?

royandreno

I tried your suggestion and that works better. Now the current position just stays white which is fine.
However, what I would like is that the current line is white, but as the current line changes to next, the played line reverts back to the colour I have chosen. In my case I highlight choruses green, verses yellow, interludes blue, and so on. This is with black background obviously. The way it works now is that everything that is played remains white. I would like lyric colours to go back to my colour of choice. This gives you a suberb positional awareness of where in the song you are at. My colours match the audio regions btw. The way it works at the moment is, if I want to loop a previous chorus or solo, everything is white, and I lose the easy positional awareness I had.
Thanks for your patience🙂

peter

I took a look at my code and it was only a single line change to also highlight colored text in white. So you can expect this change in version 3.7 later this week.

royandreno

peter Fantastic, thanks😃 Does that also mean the lyric color stays colored as the song progresses, if you understand what I mean. In other words, only the highlighted line(s) is white, but everything else, before and after is colored?🙏🏻

peter

Yes, but that always worked so far. Until 3.7 the colored parts stay colored through the playback. So I'm not sure what you mean by "they turn white".

royandreno

peter I have a picture that shows what I mean, but it won't allow me to upload it because the file size is too big. How can I show you this?

royandreno

peter Ok, I managed to send you the picture on your support mail. Hopefully that shows you what I mean.

peter

Mail it to support@stagetraxx.com. And also copy & paste your lyrics into the mail for that song so that I can try to reproduce the issue.

royandreno

peter Thanks Peter, I sent you the lyrics as well. All the lyrics in my songs are like this, not just this one.

peter

Yeah, I can see it.

The issue is that formatting tags can not span multiple timestamps. In fact I even do not recommend to make them span over more than 1 line.

I also would not recommend to place timestamps within tags. So instead of writing:

{c:blue}[00:01.97]Intro B shuffle {c}

you should write:

[00:01.97]{c:blue}Intro B shuffle {c}

And instead of

{c:yellow}[00:12.00][Verse 1]
Well [B]bless my soul, what's wrong with me?

it should be:

[00:12.00]{c:yellow}[Verse 1]{c}
{c:yellow}Well [B]bless my soul, what's wrong with me?{c}

The reason is that each line creates its own rendering context and rendering information like the color is lost when it does not start and end at the current context. See the blue note here: https://stagetraxx.com/user-guide/lyrics/#text-formatting

royandreno

Ahh ok.. That's a shame. Time to start editing the lyrics.. All that work.. Thanks Peter

royandreno

By doing it the way you described, the highlighting doesn't work. The autoscroll function works, but it will not highlight current line. In the song I sent you, I made every single line yellow, ending up with the whole verse yellow and no highlighting.
I think I prefer it the way it was.
This is how I edited the text:

[00:12.00]{c:yellow}Well bless my soul, what's wrong with me?{c}

[00:15.33]{c:yellow}I’m itching like a man on a fuzzy tree{c}

[00:18.43]{c:yellow}My friends say I'm actin' wild as a bug{c}

[00:22.36]{c:yellow}I'm in love, I'm all shook up{c}
[00:24.52]{c:yellow}Uh huh [E]huh, [F#] ohh yeah, yeah!{c}

[00:30.00] {c:yellow}Well my hands are shaky and my knees are weak{c}

[00:34.14]{c:yellow}I can't seem to stand on my own two feet{c}

[00:37.63]{c:yellow}Now who do you thank when you have such luck?{c}

[00:40.42]{c:yellow}I'm in love,I’m all shook up{c}
[00:43.03]{c:yellow}Uh huh [E]huh, [F#] ohh yeah, yeah!{c}

peter

That's because the highlighting will be available in version 3.7 as I wrote above. That's the change I did.