Please include Lyric MetaEvent, preferably in UTF-8

[If this shows up in the forum, the spam filter must have relented.]

Right now, no notation software I know produces midi files with Unicode lyrics - that's why I said it would really make MuseScore stand out. The beauty of Unicode is that, in one stroke, you make the implemented feature instantly available in all the major languages and there is no longer any need to ask what language the user wants. In cases where the specs are somewhat ambiguous or not specific enough (as is the case here in some aspects, see the last paragraph below), the early implementation becomes the "Industry Standard" :-). So being the first to do something is not necessarily a bad position to be.

Many midi players (e.g., vanBasco's, KaraFun, Karaoke 5, SynthFont) display lyrics along with the music if the midi files contain lyrics. Unfortunately most (all?) of them do not handle UTF-8 at this point. This is one of those chicken-and-egg situations: They don't handle UTF-8 because nobody produces midi files with UTF-8; and music score programs don't produce such midi files because no players handle them. Once MuseScore breaks that bad cycle though, given the huge popularity of karaoke in countries like Japan, China and Taiwan, Karaoke players with UTF-8 will show up soon. (This is not even a problem for English lyrics since UTF-8 encoding of English comes out exactly the same as plain old ASCII.)

The situation is different with UltraStar Delux (available from sourceforge), which is a Karaoke game similar to Playstation's SingStar. USD does handle UTF-8 lyrics starting with version 1.1. USD plays mp3 rather than midi, which is no problem since you can ask MuseScore to produce wave, flac or ogg audio files and use programs like Format Factory to convert them into mp3. Or you can make mp3 files from midi files using programs like SynthFont, which gives you many additional controls such as changing instrument, soundfont, individual preset, tempo, pitch, individual channel volume, VST effect, etc.

Creating text files of synchronized lyrics for USD is a rather tedious and frustrating process now. For mp3 files derived from midi files with lyrics, it should be quite straightfoward to write a program converting the lyrics meta events into synchronized lyrics. (I am in fact considering writing one myself. I already have a program decoding events in midi files into readable text files. Adopting it to do this task is the kind of simple prgramming I can still do.)

Or better yet, in my opinion, maybe some developer of midi to mp3 conversion software can be persuaded to include ID3 tags with the synchronized lyrics right in it. ID3 version 2.4 already has a frame specifically for synchronized lyrics (in a slightly different format from that of UltraStar Delux), and one probably can use the 'Comment' field in version 2.3 for that purpose.

The use of UNICODE in Lyric Meta Event is mentioned in Section 5 of the specs of RP-026 but nothing is said about encoding. I would suggest issuing a Lyric Meta Event at time 0 with the tag {@UTF-8} to indicate Unicode in UTF-8 encoding. I guess one could include the BOM in there somewhere too, but that seems rather redundant.

Ying-Da