Performous

Performous is an open source karaoke software solution for Linux operating systems.

Instead of just displaying the lyrics, notes are also displayed and the performance is scored based on how well you actually hit the notes.

Most of the songs available also contain the original vocals and actual karaoke versions are rare.

Features:

• Should work on almost any platform
• Very accurate singing pitch detection
• OpenGL-based graphics rendering
• Music videos as backgrounds
• Based on ffmpeg (supports almost all formats)
• Free software, licensed under GNU GPL version 2 or later

What is new in this release:

• This is a major update featuring duet mode support, modern rendering (stereo, shaders), improvements to asynchronous texture loading, controllers, MIDI, and Web cams, and fixes.
• In-game torrent download support has been left out for the next release.

What is new in version 0.6.1:

• Fix character encoding bug in device names
• Windows installer improvements
• Joinmenu usability tweaks
• Menu performance optimizations
• Spanish translation updated

What is new in version 0.6.0:

• The audio code was rewritten.
• There is a new configuration screen and controller configuration.
• There are new features in the song browser to allow instrument filtering.
• Webcam support. MIDI drums support.
• Many gameplay improvements.
• Support for more Singstar DVD decoding.
• Performance enhancements.

What is new in version 0.5.1:

• Advanced timing code for reducing jerkiness (but causes more jerkiness for some because it is not properly tuned yet)
• Dance gameplay improvements
• Many controller detection and mapping fixes
• Fix flashing singing note issue
• Fix dance game not working under Windows (missing file)
• Fix Windows font for scale in singing note lines
• Dutch translation
• Add a simple joystick button identification utility (--jstest)
• Other small tweaks

What is new in version 0.5.0:

• This is the first release to include Windows and Mac binaries as well. A lot of work has been done by Xaldyz, Zar, Stump and others to make this possible. Meanwhile a large number of improvements and new features have been added, including of course the all new dance simulator developed during December by Aave, JNikkola and Kemppi, out of whom Aave has already become a core developer, already boosting about 200 commits. Another new developer who has been very active in this release is Peque who created the new main menu and gave some face lift for the default theme, among other things. The new features include:
• Dance mode
• StepMania .sm format
• 4-8 panels on each dancepad
• Multiplayer (but not together with band yet)
• Mines, hold and regular notes in various different game modes
• Keyboard and USB dancepad support
• Crappy graphics, no ITG colors and no customization (for now)
• Band mode improvements
• God Mode for guitars (similar to StarPower)
• More graphical effects (glow, fire, ...)
• Joining during game & dead coming back to life
• Whammy bar gameplay
• Streak counter popup
• Guitar Hero X0 guitar support (not tested)
• Star when singing a note well
• Main menu completely reworked
• Localizations: Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish
• New song folder [Performous data]/songs
• The data folders depend on the OS the game is running on, including:
• On UNIX ~/.local/share/games/performous
• On Windows [Application data]/performous
• On all systems the data installation path (relative to executable)
• Old ~/.ultrastar/songs and other such folders continue to function.
• Usability
• Confirmation for song quitting
• Better usb controller navigation (e.g. drum/dancepads can be used)
• Instrumental part skipping for singing with FoF songs
• Previews start from further of the song
• In-game volume control
• Keyboard key repeat disabled (preparing for generic controller repeat)
• Internal
• Use libpng/libjpeg directly, instead of Magick++
• Navigation abstraction
• Windows fixes
• Head over to the download page to get the new version. Because of the very large number of new features and due to porting to two new platforms we expect the release to be buggy. Please let us know if you find any problems. We'll try to release 0.5.1 soon with possible fixes and more new features. The Windows version is known to have various issues but we need all of them reported so that 0.5.1 can be made better (surprisingly we severely lack Windows testers).

What is new in version 0.4.0:

• Guitar, bass and drums
• Initial highscore support (press End in song browser)
• Textual feedback for singers after each line
• Guessing background/cover images and videos by filenames (if not specified in song files)
• SVG graphics and fail samples from Frets on Fire (GPL for the win!)
• Major changes in the internals, including a completely new audio mixer
• Configuration system improvements, now properly supports system and user conf
• Always use desktop resolution for full screen mode (instead of mode switching)
• Many minor bugs fixed
• Build/install changes and cleanup

What is new in version 0.3.2:

• Workaround for FFMPEG bug that was making it crash on i386
• The Singstar ripping tools now use ss_ prefix in their names
• The performous.sh wrapper (used for non-standard installation path) now passes parameters properly
• GStreamer and PortAudio drivers disabled in our binary packages (let us know if you need them)
• A bunch of other things

What is new in version 0.3.0:

• Multiplayer with Singstar mics or any other stereo input
• Dramatically improved performance, runs fine on very slow machines now
• Fully OpenGL-based (some kind of 3D acceleration is now mandatory, but even Intel works fine)
• Heavily pimped graphics in singing screen
• Automatically zooming notelines in singing screen
• Real widescreen support (adaptive layout instead of stretching or cropping)
• Song folders are now scanned recursively, in the background without blocking the UI
• Ingame and preview volume may be controlled
• Audio roundtrip latency and audio/video sync controls added
• New score window (still no highscores)
• New menu theme song
• Separate game engine thread, so that slow graphics rendering should no longer affect pitch detection
• Our own audio library libda, supporting ALSA, Pulseaudio, JACK and others
• FFMPEG-based video and audio decoding (together with libda replaces Xine and GStreamer)
• CMake-based build (Autotools are gone for good)

Requirements:

• Graphics chip with OpenGL acceleration (e.g. GF2 MX400)
• Pentium III 700 MHz or comparable CPU
• A microphone