This post is here to tell you about what’s planned for Karaoke Mugen’s future. If you thought releasing version 2.0 meant we were done with it, you couldn’t be more wrong.

We’re always looking forward to recruiting more people who’d like to help the project, and I guess it would be easier for you to see how you can help if you know about our goals (spoiler: we want world domination through karaoke).

Karaoke Mugen 2.1 « Gabriel Glamoureuse »

If you wonder, this Gabriel definitely is the one from Gabriel Dropout.

The main new feature in Karaoke Mugen is a user management system. As of now, users are only identified by their nickname, and anyone can change it whenever they want. The idea here is to allow users to login with an authentication system, basic but reliable. Why basic? Because we don’t wan’t to uselessly complexify Karaoke Mugen.

This system has multiple advantages :

• Having a user profile means persistent datas for and about users, allowing to log each users’ most requested karaokes, but also allowing them to add them as favorites so they can find those songs more easily.
• We can now add more karaoke selection modes : votes from the public, « like » suggestions to help the admin choosing, and more. It’s important to understand a lot of functionalities are way harder (if at all possible) to code without an actual user system.

Others features are planned to enhance the software, and you can stay informed on 2.1 milestone page on the lab.

With all these ideas in mind, we could really use a developper willing to code in NodeJS, or traditional JS for the frontend. Also note it’s totally fine if you’re just starting with javascript, we’re here to work and learn together. Karaoke Mugen is an excellent project to start learning a new language! As for myself, I didn’t know about NodeJS only six month ago.

Jingle Bells

If you’re already a Karaoke Mugen user, you might have noticed we implemented cute jingles that play from time to time between your songs. We’ve had this crazy idea in a late evening, and Nock took a shot for it : taking some eyecatch from known series, and editing them to display the name of the software. An occasion for a pretty transition between karaokes, and a bit more time to display the connection information to the audience.

We’ve got a small dozen jingles, so of course, one quickly sees them all! If you think you can make new ones, we have a few eyecatches in stock waiting for someone to Karaoke Mugenify them.

Also note we had the idea to add « sponsor times » with fake advertisers. You know, those small ads we get after an anime opening song : kono bangumi wa goran no suponsaa no teikyou de okurishimasu.

If you feel like helping in making these kind of short video clips, be welcome, this is something we really don’t have time to spare on :)

IN THE DATABASE, DATABASE, WOW WOW

The karaoke database is always available on it’s own Git repository. Anyone can contribute and submit modifications, and that really matters, ‘cause we need a good bunch of improvement.

Every karaoke is associated with quite a lot of metadata, such as production year, animation studio, singer, composer, or even the language, obviously… These metadatas are important as they allow for more precise searches from the interface, or making filters effective.

Filling all this is an easy task, but takes a lot of time. All one needs is to be efficient in searching the Internet. Most of the time, all infos are available, but if we can’t find them, that’s no big deal.

In addition, there is also :

• Poorly timed karaokes. We could identify quite a lot of karaokes to « fix », and probably more we couldn’t notice yet. Once more, we really need feedback to spot them.
• Karaokes with bad video quality. As the base itself exists for many years, some videos now have better quality available on the web… That can take some time, furthermore considering some lyrics times have to be fine-tuned to fit this new video!
• Suggested karaokes. There are a lot of songs that could be added to the base, wheter because we love this song or because it’s so well known by your friends. Well eh! That means making a karaoke from scratch, and it takes a bit of time!

We have to fetch titles, series’ names, song types and such from .kara files rather than reading them from the filename. That’s trivial for anyone knowing tools such as grep or sed, but still needs to be done. Also, we want to normalize the lyrics among karaokes, and some need to be rewriten seriously…

Dealing with the website and documentation

As you can see here, the website is quite basic, mainly because we don’t really have the time for it neither. We’d like to promote Karaoke Mugen better, or, for example, write an FAQ for recurring questions. A really good thing would be to merge the documentation site and the one you’re browsing but that means knowing about both Jekyll and MkDocs…

I probably forget about even more

Gitlab is our main platform for keeping track of the progression and manage what needs to be done. It’s not the best option, but we really need a unified interface to move forward peacefully.

What about you ?

It’s not easy to ask for help, but when I see the HUGE amount of stuff to be done, I really understand how much we NEED volunteers to help maintaining the base, manage the websites, and, of course, develop the application. The slightest idea, good or bad, can be a step forward our reflexions, and are always welcome in!

This post was intended as a way to take stock on the progression, but now I realize it’s much more of a call for help. Karaoke Mugen will keep it’s own pace, with the means available, and if it takes a lot of time, it’s still gonna happen. But of course, it will happen faster with your help! ;)