Viewing Lyrics in Cakewalk 9

[shyamwestwind]

JohnG , could you please clarify a few doubts about viewing and editing lyrics in Cakewalk 9.
The lyrics on a midi file show up in my Keyboard screen like karaoke, but the same file does not display the lyrics on the Cakewalk. I have gone to the lyrics view and all I have in front of me is a window with hyphenated stuff. The actual lyrics are not there and I'm crazy trying to find them.
Could you please tell me how this is done.
Thanks in advance

[freeway]

Hey Shyam. ...........have you tried looking in the tracks events list themselves........in the Track Pane view if you see lyrics or words written they should be on that particular track.......if not its just a matter of opening all the tracks or each track individually in the events list and you should find them .....John will prob go through it in more detail for you ........regards Barry .

[JohnG]

Hi Shyam,

In MIDI there are two different, competing ways of entering lyrics into a track. The first, and as far as I am aware, the most common way, is to enter each syllable as a "text" meta event. The second way, and theoretically the "proper way" is as a "lyric" meta event. I suspect your keyboard displays text events but may not display lyric events.

I'm being very careful here to use the proper terms. Don't worry about the name "meta event", it just means something that is not really part of the music itself but might be e.g. a place marker in the file, or something that may be displayed etc.

CakeWalk when creating "lyrics" uses the theoretically correct mechanism, a MIDI lyric meta-event. It is highly likely though that the lyrics in your file have been entered as text events, usually in a separate track without any note data, i.e just the text.

Not to worry, as the lyrics are there in your file, it's just that CWPA9 isn't able to display "text events" either in the lyrics view or in the staff view. However, as Barry has just said, you can see them if you open the track containing the lyrics in the "event list". It is also possible to edit them there it's just that it's nowhere near as easy to do as it is in the staff view, in fact it is a pain in the backside! In the staff view you can associate each note you can see as the melody line with a lyric event.

Dunno if that helps?
JohnG.

[shyamwestwind]

Hi JohnG, I'm trying to make sense of all this - it is a little difficult to comprehend.
In a particular flle, I found the lyrics with the Markers !!!!! I wish I could transfer or copy and paste these to the lyrics view side of things, but it just isn't happening.

[shyamwestwind]

Hi JohnG, this is the screenshot of the Cakewalk Markers page with the lyrics of the song "Nights in white satin"

[JohnG]

Hi Shyam,

Well that's a first for me!

I haven't seen lyrics put in as markers before ... at least I think not!

And you're quite right, it's an absolute pain trying to copy and paste from one type to another e.g. a marker to a lyric event, as you'd have to copy the timing as well as the text individually for each meta event. What we need is a CAL routine that does it for us. But I can't find one, amongst my collection, that does it. However what I have found is a CAL routine called "convert.cal" which converts musical events from one type to another. I'll take a quick look and see whether I can write an extra set of options that looks for (1) text events (2) marker events and changes either type to a lyric event at the same exact point in the file. Does that sound correct to you?

It isn't a five minute job so don't hold your breath, but I have a little bit of time today so I'll take a look.
Best regards,
JohnG.

[JohnG]

Hi Shyam,

Well, some good news and some bad news! (Same old story!)

First the bad news, there is no documented event type of "MARKER" in the Cakewalk CAL language that I can find. This means that one can't ask CAL to search for a "marker event" and then replace it with a "lyric event" containing the same text as before, at the same timing point.

However, not despairing and thinking laterally (a necessary requirement when one has been labelled "MIDI Guru"), I looked up what is actually entered in a MIDI file for these three different kinds of Meta Events. I got this:
All Meta Events commence with the marker FFh (the "h" means it's hexadecimal),
Text Event = FFh 01h <length> <text>
Lyric Event = FFh 05h <length> <text>
Marker Event = FFh 06h <length> <text>

So, as it is unlikely we will want to do much to change the text itself, just change its event type, all we have to do is change e.g. 01h to 05h and a text event becomes a lyric event OR e.g. change 06h to 05h and a marker becomes a lyric event. Of course we need to go through the whole file finding and replacing each text or marker event and substituting it for a lyric event.

Programmers have often used little programs called hex(adecimal) editors. I found another good one recently called XVI32.exe and using this I was able to navigate to the appropriate part of a file (full of text events) and ask XVI32 (politely) whether it would mind awfully if it would look through a file changing the text events to lyric events. No sooner had I asked the question than it told me it had completed the task and found 163 text events, which it had duly altered. At the blink of an eye! ;D And that, of course is the good news.

Actually there is a little more to it than that. One has to check that there aren't several tracks with text or marker events and make sure that only the one needed is altered. Usually the data about the file (also held as text events) is at the beginning of the file and that needs to be skipped over unaltered.

So, how are you with hex editors? If they're a problem for you just send me the file(s) and I can do the necessary, no sweat!

OR did you want both text and lyrics? Aaaargh!
JohnG.

[shyamwestwind]

Gosh, I am an ignoramous !! I think I'm gonna stick to my good old song books with a 24 sized Tahoma Font. Thank you JohnG for taking the time to go through my woes, but honestly, I'll just let it be and stick to my books.

[JohnG]

Ignoramus? Certainly not! Don't put yourself down, please Shyam!

Remember Shyam I have been messing with stuff like this since 1966, and I made my living from it too.

I'm sorry that what I wrote sounded like gobbledegook (once a techie always a techie!)

A hex editor is a bit like the MS Word program. What you could do with Word for instance is ask it to replace every occurence of the word "by" with the word "at" in a document. (Don't ask me why you'd want to do that!)

What I was trying to explain is that with a hex editor you could replace the thing that says "here is marker data" with something that says "here is lyric data" they just happen to be expressed in hex in the MIDI specification.

Actually if you did it you'd find it surprisingly easy. In the past, when I have taught people to do this sort of thing, they usually say "Oh! I didn't realise it was so simple!" ;D

What I'm saying is "I know you could learn to do it."

All the best,
JohnG.

[shyamwestwind]

Thanks for the encouragement, JihnG,,.............. I will keep trying.

[themd21]

Hi Lads

What you have here is probably a Soft Karaoke midi where the lyrics were Text. The file was also midi format 1.
It was then saved as midi format 0 which in turn puts the lyrics in as markers.
To reverse this may I suggest using GN Midi.
Load the file and convert it KAR to MIDI.
This will change the lyrics to Lyric, and show on the event list in Cakewalk 9.
I'm not expressing myself 100% but I hope you get the jest and it does work.

Best wishes

Jimmy

[JohnG]

Aha! Great idea Jimmy,

Now why didn't I think of trying GNmidi? I'll give it a try and confirm back to the group.

JohnG

[JazzCat]

Why? Because yer a guru and you have to do it the guru way. LOL! So, I am very curious. Did GNMIDI work or not?