NAME

       pykaraoke - free CDG/MIDI/MPEG karaoke player

SYNOPSIS

       pykar karfilename.kar

OVERVIEW

       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.

USAGE

       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.

SEE ALSO

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

AUTHOR

       PyKaraoke was written by Kelvin Lawson <kelvinl@users.sourceforge.net> and William Ferrell
       <willfe@gmail.com>.

       This manual page was written by Miriam Ruiz <little_miry@yahoo.es>, for the Debian project
       (but may be used by others).

                                          july 16, 2006                                  PYKAR(6)