pykar (6)

pykar karfilename.kar

pykaraoke is a free karaoke player for Linux, FreeBSD and Windows.

pykar is a MIDI/KAR karaoke player built using python. It was written for the PyKaraoke project but is in fact a general purpose KAR player that could be used in other python projects requiring a KAR player.

The player uses the pygame library (www.pygame.org), and can therefore run on any operating system that runs pygame (currently Linux, FreeBDS, Windows and OSX).

You can use this file as a standalone player, or together with PyKaraoke. PyKaraoke provides a graphical user interface, playlists, searchable song database etc.

For those writing a media player or similar project who would like KAR support, this module has been designed to be easily incorporated into such projects and is released under the LGPL.

To play the MIDI songs on Linux, Timidity++ is also required.

To start the player, pass the KAR filename/path on the command line:

pykar /path/song.kar

You can also incorporate a KAR player in your own projects by importing this module. The class midPlayer is exported by the module. You can import and start it as follows:

import pykar

player = pykar.midPlayer("/path/song.kar")

player.Play()

If you do this, you must also arrange to call pycdg.manager.Poll() from time to time, at least every 100 milliseconds or so, to allow the player to do its work.

The class also exports Close(), Pause(), Rewind(), GetPos().

There are two optional parameters to the initialiser, errorNotifyCallback and doneCallback:

errorNotifyCallback, if provided, will be used to print out any error messages (e.g. song file not found). This allows the module to fit together well with GUI playlist managers by utilising the same GUI's error popup window mechanism (or similar). If no callback is provided, errors are printed to stdout. errorNotifyCallback should take one parameter, the error string, e.g.:

def errorPopup (ErrorString):

msgBox (ErrorString)

doneCallback can be used to register a callback so that the player calls you back when the song is finished playing. The callback should take no parameters, e.g.:

def songFinishedCallback():

msgBox ("Song is finished")

To register callbacks, pass the functions in to the initialiser:

midPlayer ("/path/song.kar", errorPopup, songFinishedCallback)

These parameters are optional and default to None.

If the initialiser fails (e.g. the song file is not present), __init__ raises an exception.

You can find PyKaraoke's home page at: http://www.kibosh.org/pykaraoke/

PyKaraoke was written by Kelvin Lawson <[email protected]> and William Ferrell <[email protected]>.

This manual page was written by Miriam Ruiz <[email protected]>, for the Debian project (but may be used by others).