My previous post on creating karaoke tracks got me thinking of creating a karaoke player and what better tool to use than the most interesting member of the Office family. I have used it mostly for boring purposes and a quite a few interesting ones which I shall unfortunately never be able to share.
Hence, this one is a fully open, quick and dirty take on fulfilling an idea. I usually like to focus on design and error handling when creating anything new, but I have given those a miss here, thereby following an engineer’s ethos of “if it’s working, it’s done”. It worked fine for me with the Groove Music player on Windows 10 along with a lyrics file (*.lrc) that I found on the web. I have posted this lyrics file (with some clean-up and synchronization) along with the Excel file, so you can feel free to try it out with the same track (not supplied, har har har) or indeed with any other.
The logic it follows is quite simple.
1. Locally store the MP3 path
2. Copy the contents of the lyrics file to the ‘LRC’ sheet
3. Extract the timing and lyrics from the contents (using only minutes and seconds here, so the player is not millisecond accurate)
4. On clicking of ‘Start’, open the MP3 file and start a counter using VBA that tracks the progress
5. Highlight the lyrics using conditional formatting by comparing the track progress with the timing of that specific line
If you like it or indeed re-use it, then just leave me a High Five.
Links:
1. Excel Karaoke Player
2. Sample Lyrics File