Culture: Karaoke
CD+G "bouncing ball"   (+4)  [vote for, against]
Include a "bouncing ball" on CD+G karaoke disks

I was just reading the detailed spec of how CD+G data is formatted. A CD+G disk can display 300 6x12-pixel tiles per second. Assuming an average of six per frame were used to display a bouncing ball, the ball could be updated 30 times per second while leaving a 40% of the subchannel r-w (where the graphics are stored) bandwidth available for displaying the lyrics; since highlighting the lyrics already uses half the bandwidth and would no longer necessary, 40% of the normal bandwidth would probably be sufficient.

If a 30fps update bouncing ball used too much bandwidth, a 25fps one would only use half the available bandwidth and should almost certainly fit within the constraints.

Before someone chides me about the importance of backward compatibility, I should point out that I read the spec and am explicitly figuring on something that should be usable with current equipment.
-- supercat, Aug 03 2002

Sure, what good is it without the bouncing ball! Curved bread for the supercat.

24 fps is what movies use so that should work fine.
-- gootyam, Aug 03 2002


Easy on the eyes, easy on the bandwidth - what more can you ask for other than this bassackwards-compatible rubbery, yet flaky chewtoy in the shape of a croissant bouncing your weigh?
-- thumbwax, Aug 03 2002


…STOP THAT! No singing!

I assume the ball is on a separate track for graphic rendering, so why not ? Sounds likely to appeal to retro interests and way cool; however, are today's ‘sophisticated’ musical aficionados (like, know all the words to ‘Without me’) ready to use this? I recall from early days that when people used the teleprompted ‘bouncing ball’ they tended to sound like a group of hypnotised people singing along with a bounding ball.
-- reensure, Aug 03 2002


The ball would be on the same subchannel streams as are normally used for rendering CD+G graphics. The purpose of using the bouncing ball is to give the singer a clearer indication of when they're supposed to sing than is possible with highlighted lyrics alone (if the lyrics are highlighted in exact time with the music, a singer who's trying to follow them will be late, but the amount of "lead time" required varies from singer to singer. With a bouncing ball, the ball can be made to hit the words exactly on the proper beat, and the singer can anticipate that precisely by singing as he sees the ball approach the word.
-- supercat, Aug 03 2002


I would be more in favor of a system that had a delayed output to the Amplifiers ... during the delay a digital footprint of where the lyrics should be sung would provide a pattern to digitally quantize the beats of the singer ... along with digital pitch shifting you could make a howling dog sound more like a circus Chihuahua ... if there is any merit in that
-- phantomcorndog, Feb 26 2004


Interesting. Sounds like an audio version of paint-by-numbers.
-- normzone, Feb 26 2004



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