Announcing as3-karaoke-player, my first open library

Today I’m very excited to announce my first open source library: as3-karaoke-player. It comes from a request to make a small karaoke website. The idea is that karaoke is a popular kind of entertainment in Vietnam so I thought I would make the core rendering engine open source so that everyone especially my fellow developers can make and/or enjoy karaoke online. (About the said karaoke site, of course I only charged the GUI customization and the Red5 recorder)

You can check out or download the source at Google Code site: http://code.google.com/p/as3-karaoke-player/. This library is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Here's the sample player:

(The background photo is taken by me :P )

This library will render lyrics and music in synchronization so that viewer can sing a long. The core player was designed as simple as a screen to render karaoke only. Developers can implement their own graphical interface to control the engine and add other features.

The library was implemented with performance concerns and open standards kept in mind. The lyrics data file is adopted from W3C standard Timed Text. The player uses AS3Signals as communication mechanism among components.

Current features:

• Load and parse a Timed Text-based lyrics XML file (see specifications)
• Load and play progressive beat audio (MP3)
• Lyric texts are synchronized with audio
• Play, pause, stop, seek allowed
• Set global lyric styles (font, color, size) and few options

I have also created a sample player (demo above) based on the Lunar skin from RealEyes OSMF Media Player with these additional features:

• Set volume
• Turn lyrics (A.K.A captions) on/off
• Go to full screen

These are features that I plan to add (random order and no promises):

• AIR application for editing the lyric data file
• Song-specific lyric color styling
• Multiple text lines (more than 2, not decided how to show/animate them)
• Custom transition for text line instances
• Photo slide show for background
• Red5 application for recording from user's microphone
• Play video as background
• Play karaoke video (videos with music and running lyrics)
• Flex Component 
• AIR application for local recording
• ... (please suggest)

If you find any bugs or have any suggestion, feel free to post a new ticket to the issue tracker. I welcome anyone wants to join this project.

[Vietnamese tag: công bố thư viện nguồn mở đầu tiên của tôi as3-karaoke-player]