Inventing Guitaraoke: A Tale of Tech, Bugs, and Rock'n'Roll - Dylan Beattie - CPH DevFest 2023

A few years ago, Dylan was in a karaoke bar late one night, with a group of NDC speakers, and he had an idea... what if you could do karaoke with guitars? What if you could go to a bar with your friends, choose your favourite song, plug in a guitar, get the guitar chords to appear live on screen - just like karaoke lyrics - and rock out? What if one of your friends could pick up a bass and join in?
This is the story of how Dylan turned that idea into reality, using .NET, JavaScript - and WinAmp. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about audio and video formats, working with multichannel audio, building parsers for guitar chord charts, custom rendering pipelines, frame buffers - and the UX challenges of building software that you can operate live on stage, in a crowded bar, while you have a guitar in one hand and a beer in the other.
Then after the session, join us on the Copenhagen Developer Festival stage for a live guitar karaoke session, as we invite speakers, attendees - and maybe even you! - to get up and rock out.

[@romankaruschka7328]

Dylan Beattie talks are great for reliably doing two things for me. They put a smile on my face, and they teach me something or make me engage with something even in cases when I thought I already knew plenty about it

[@IanBLacy]

They reliably make it super easy to procrastinate studying and homework

[@LeonardChurch33]

Leave it to Dylan to start with a Duck Tales parody song. I've only just started and I'm already excited for this talk.

[@davecgriffith]

re:bass - brilliant. Just brilliant. Loved it!

[@linco95]

This dude is a great gitarist

[@kaiserruhsam]

hell yeah i love nottetris2

[@Dinnella]

Is there a recording of the demo? I'm curious if subtitles could make light of some of the rendering. Step 1 looks similar to a subtitle track with timestamps and text, plus would give you some typeset that could probably support the musical notation. You could make the main video whatever you want, maybe the music video? And just add the subtle with ffmpeg. Anyway I enjoyed the talk as always! 🎸

[@Jakub1989YTb]

re:bass ... masterpiece

[@Quephara]

One of the future popular videos on this channel

[@tarawright4339]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="422">7:02</a> for when the talk starts

[@gushiperson]

DUDE HOLD STILL

[@Posiman]

I'm pretty sure you can do most of these things with Guitar Pro software . Or make the automation way esier with power tabs or pro tabs...

[@Drastonar]

If only he knew about Cifra Club

[@FunctionGermany]

great talk, but why not render chords in the browser instead of heavy ffmpeg work?

[@mrmimeisfunny]

I assume it's so you can just send a bar a video file and they play it on whatever video player works.

[@FunctionGermany]

​@@mrmimeisfunnytrue, but just having a web version and using fullscreen should also do the job. and with web it's much easier to design and control the animations etc. and you can still turn it into a video using a bit of headless browser work e.g. with puppeteer.

[@TesterAnimal1]

Was the camera operator stoned?

[@TesterAnimal1]

I mean how fucking hard is it to keep him in the frame?

[@TheScarvig]

@@TesterAnimal1 as you might have noticed the camera operator did not center frame him all the time.... in the parts where the camera feed is cropped to fit the slides next to it you essentially got the video editor trying to track him over the already partially tracked camera material, which makes this a really annoying task that might not fully be automatable because he keeps turning away from camera

[@edgeeffect]

Ouch! Dylan throwing shade at AC/DC!

[@DylanBeattie]

Nah, AC/DC absolutely rock. But if you're just starting out playing guitar and you're looking for songs to play along to, you're gonna have a way easier time with Highway to Hell than you are trying to play Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love. Trust me, I speak from experience. Thunderstruck, on the other hand... one of the greatest guitar riffs of all time and damn near impossible to replicate. Again, I speak from experience... 😉

[@IanBLacy]

Not a fucking music video teaching git better than 100% of all classes using it