Umm wow. This is totally amazing. I've been lurking around here for years without any blinky flashy, but after seeing the potential in this decided to "throw" together a Halloween display. I have a couple of singing pumpkins doing three songs at the moment with a week left to go!
A few comments on what I've experienced so far.
- I lost the maps on two occasions. I originally thought it had something to do with the web server or the sequencer, but I haven't been able to reproduce it. It may have just been that I had started multiple songs before I had finished building the maps, and they reverted somehow.
- It seems to remember the phoneme 'spelling' for new words. After I enter a word once, it never asks again. This is great, but as I'm not sure I always get it right the first time, it would be nice to have access somehow to the dictionary so I could correct (or at least delete) errors.
- I've been using the word marks to input. This has been relatively easy (the phoneme mark method made me break out in hives) but the equal spacing obviously does not always represent the way the word is formed. it seems some phonemes-sounds ('M' and 'S') are always proportionally shorter in a word. It's not that big a deal to adjust, but if you had a chorus or an oft repeated phase it might be helpful to have a dictionary that track a weighted spacing in a word (e.g., the word "see" is 15% "s", 85% "e".) Just an idea, like I said it's not a big deal.
Other minor items - Not sure if in the module you can add the ability to select-all in the text-to-lipsync box on triple-click. It would be nice to be able to just triple click and then type the next set of lyrics rather than finding the beginning or end and scrolling.
When using the word-mark method to insert lipsync phonemes, it would be great if the offset mark was automatically advanced to either the last used or last used + 1 value. I can't count the number of times I clicked insert and thought something was wrong only to later realize that I had inserted (often several times) my intended text at the start of the last phrase, which was often off the screen.
Anyway, none of this was to imply that what has already been done is totally awesome, the items at the top of my list are already things that you have indicated are in the next release.
Thanks again, and thanks from the
singing pumpkins.
Glad it was a good experience. I have a list of new features that I am planning for next year. I am thinking about ways to do fades, color changes, eye blinks, etc at that time.
