Multilingual Minnie

[muckefuck]

On my iPod, I have songs in Arabic (several dialects, mostly Maghrebi), Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Creole (English and French), Dioula, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Latin, Lingala, Mandinka, Mongolian, Nubian, Portuguese (Brazilian and European), Russian, Spanish (many varieties), Teke, Uyghur, Welsh, Zulu, and more.

And I want to know how to sing along to all of them.

So far, I've had decent luck finding lyrics: Hits for Orishas, Ffa Coffi Pawb (only some songs), Alpha Blondy; nothing for Xiomara Fortuna, Kanda Bongo Man, or Patience Dabany. Memorising them is going slowly though. What I really need is a way to display them while the song is playing. If the iPod could only do that, that would be like the coolest thing ever.

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

If the iPod could only do that, that would be like the coolest thing ever.

I agree. But it's probably in development. It'll be iKaraoke.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

It's actually surprising that there doesn't seem to be any sort of karaoke add-on for the iPod (which seems to be basically what you're looking for). While mapping foreign lyrics to songs as they play is probably a niche interest per se, portable karaoke strikes me as a market opportunity. There is Mac software to use your iTunes playlist to make karaoke files, but that's the closest I've seen.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I don't even need any fancy-ass synching-up; I'd be happy just to have some alternative to printing out all the texts, stowing them in my bag, and pulling them out to study as the songs play.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Hmm... can you read text notes files on an iPod while a song is playing? There's an online converter that will convert text files to the iPod's notes format. (It only does ASCII, which makes it non-ideal for your purposes, but maybe there's another than can handle diacritics and/or other character sets.)

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

The iAudio devices can handle lyrics files, though I've not figured them out myself yet.

[(Anonymous)]

Windows Media Player is able to play back WMA files with embedded lyrics; I once went through the tedium of adding lyrics to a song so that they'd play back in sync. The technology is there to provide closed captioning capabilities for video files; I suspect QuickTime has something similar. I don't know of any portable devices that can play back the subtitles, although I suspect the Creative Portable Media Center might be able to do it. Even if it did, though, it's still not a great device to carry around just to listen to music.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I'm impressed (and slightly jealous).