Producer

kJams Producer today allows you to open and tweak existing CDG files, or create new CDG files.

Click Here for some good info from the forums.

Screen Shots

Above you can see the timeline, the orange "Time Selection" brackets, the purple "Time View" brackets (that let you zoom in in the timeline), the blue "Time Thumb" (drag it around to set the time) and single purple "Comp Keyframe" (inverted triangle) which shows where you have composition frames. If you press the timecode button you can type in a time to go to. Up and Down arrows set the time marker to the next or previous interesting time. The Templates button is a menu that lets you create, edit, save and load templates, eg: a song intro screen, text with pictures, a "break" screen, outro screen etc. There are several built in. For example:

When you apply a template, if there are any meta tags used (shown on left) (tags appear with square brackets around them and are documented here) then they are expanded to contain the actual information (shown on right).

On the left you can see that you can edit existing graphics, you can drag the pencil tool to change the bitmaps of the "Font" records, or even change the instruction (shown on right).

You can change the color used in any instruction by dragging it's chip to the color that you want to use from the palette. You can change any color in the palette by clicking it.

What it CAN do today

• Import graphics: you can import a graphical picture of any size or bit depth, you can resize it, and position it on the screen. You can import as many as you want to compose a frame.
• Enter new text: You can enter new text blocks, each block can have a different position, size, font, color. You can have as many blocks as you want to compose a frame.
• Mix text and graphics on the same frame.
• Optimize Palette: While composed your frame, you can currently slide the graphics around, and watch the palette change, to optimize the palette. When you're satisfied, you can then lock the palette so it will no longer change, then complete the composition. Soon you'll also be able to import / export / directly set the color palette.
• Fade out: specify a duration and it will encode a fade out for you, you don't have to manage the palette or the timing yourself.
• Change the "screens" at any time, to manually create a slide show or change the text on the screen
• Tweak CDG graphic records: use the pencil tool to drag on the "tile" to change the bits in it.
• Fully supports Unicode, so you can do: 日本語, العربية, 中國, 한국어, русский, ภาษาไทย or whatever!
• cut copy and paste selections of time (graphics only) it does not actually make edits in the sense of cutting a section of time shortens the song, it only "cuts" the graphics channel info (replacing it with "blanks" for the duration of the cut). This allows you to adjust the timing of the graphics relative to the song.

What it can NOT do (but certainly will)

• "sweep" text timed to the song
• import / export LRC files and TunePrompter files

What it may possibly one day do maybe

• parse lyrics from existing files: the "lyrics" you see on the screen are not composed of text, they are composed of little bit-maps, or little graphics, that when composed together seem to humans to form the glyphs that we can interpret as text and words. It's a picture, not text. So you can't just fire up a word processor to edit the text. The plan would be to run the screens thru an "Optical Character Recognition" engine to attempt to recover the text.