Uknighted Manganime Life is too short to watch bad anime

All about Ultrastar.

Ever played Singstar on the Playstation 2? Heres a thought for you, wouldn’t it be great if Singstar was avalible for your computer?
Good news, it is, in a limited fashion.

After wondering whether there was a clone of singstar for the computer, i stumbled upon Ultrastar.
Ultrastar is an open source PC version of singstar, which pretty much clones singstar. They haven’t sorted everything out, and the program is still in beta. However at the moment it is more then playable, with a wide variety of songs converted for it. If you want a song that is not yet avalible, there are tutorials for how to make a song playable with Ultrastar.

Screenshots:

Problems:

The program isn’t perfect - voice recognition doesn’t always work, even if you sing perfectly, and it’s pretty easy to get some notes, even if you’re kinda flat.

Sometimes, the Ultrastar songs you download may not work correctly - because this is an open source effort, there isn’t the same amount of effort and error-checking that goes into a corperate product.

The other thing i found was that while initially i got videos working, a while later when i loaded the program again, it would crash whenever I tried to play a song that used a music video. I restarted, and while the song now played, it was lagging, andgoing about 0.5 frame per second.

Still, if you don’t have a playstation, then this is the perfect solution. Even better, is the fact that you can theoretically convert any song you like for it.

How it works:

Basically, you download a text file, which contains the timings and lyrics for the song you want to play. You then get the mp3 of the song that the lyrics are for, and put them in a directory in the SONGS folder of your ULTRASTAR directory.

Here’s an image i made to illustrate the basic workings:

So lets say you see a text file for Linkin Park - My December, on the web. You download the text file, and place it into a directory called “Linkin Park - My December” in the “Songs” folder of the “Ultrastar” directory. Now, put your “Linkin_Park_-_10_-_ My_December.mp3″ song, into that directory (which of course you got by ripping your linkin park album that you bought at the local record store). Next, check the text file, and look at what the mp3 call is,

#TITLE:My December
#ARTIST:Linkin Park
#MP3:Linkin Park - My December.mp3

As your mp3 and the actual call in the text file use different names, change them to match each other. Ie, rename “Linkin_Park_-_10_-_ My_December.mp3″ to “Linkin Park - My December.mp3″. Now, Ultrastar will beable to find it, because the text file call’s the song’s filename.

If you did this all correctly, it should work.

Links:

Download the program:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ultrastar/

English Tutorials and song downloads:
http://ultrastarstuff.com/index.html

More song downloads, site translated from french by bablefish:
http://ultrastar.tuxfamily.org/

Official Site (Polish) and Forums:
http://www.ustar.prv.pl/

More Songs to download:
http://www.webspace-giant.com/markaay/home/download2.html