Pikaraoke 1.2

Big change: the player and splash screen is now HTML-based

Why? Less pesky dependencies for one. Pygame was previously used to render the splash screen and VLC would pop on top of it. Both these packages proved to be difficult to maintain on Raspberry Pi OS versions. This has been replaced with a browser-based renderer which will host both the splash screen and video playback (streamed via ffmpeg) which should work much better on a wide variety of OS. Secondly, this means standalone server support: now you can run pikaraoke as a dedicated server process, launch the splash screen on a remote browser, and don't have to have your pi connected to the TV!

• Splash screen player is way more dynamic feature-rich now
• Better python environment handling and yt-dlp install isolation
• Lots of under-the-hood bugfixes and improvements from the backlog
• Sunfly-inspired singing dolphin logo and screensaver :)

Installation/launch is simple from a fresh pi image:

./setup.sh
./pikaraoke.sh

1.1.2

What's new (1.1.2)

• Translation framework, with Chinese language support. Thanks tbelaire!
• HTML splash screen at /splash for remote browser display of QR code and up next
• Use yt-dlp instead of youtube-dl for faster downloads
• Drop omxplayer from pi install script (no longer in Debian package manager)
• Bugfixes

The 1.1.2 pi image is running Raspberry Pi OS Buster and confirmed working on pi4 and pi3.

Pi 4 users: make sure to plug your display into into the HDMI0 port, not HDMI1, otherwise you may experience issues playing video in VLC.

Note that it is not running Bullseye OS, which appears to still be problematic for running vlc on the CLI (see #161 ). I cannot recommend upgrading to Bullseye at this time.

1.1.1

Primarily bugfixes for maintaining mega-libraries

• Fix slow loading of huge libraries #85
• Paging controls on browse screen for libraries > 500 #85
• Fix issue with singer names with spaces and special characters not appearing #106
• Support scanning subdirectories #108 (thanks jramboz)
• Support more video formats and weird case sensitivity of mp3/cdg files #107 #95
• Singer names persist for 90 days #105
• Fixed lowercase sorted after uppercase #104

Sorry, no time to do a pi image. Download the 1.1.0 version and update with:

cd ~/pikaraoke
git pull
./setup-pi.sh

1.1.0

Nice, big update full of great suggestions from supporters and kind patrons of this project.

• Singer names! Each new device is prompted for a name when first adding a song, so that singer name is shown in the queue, splash, and nowplaying. This value persists in a cookie for that device.
• Administrator mode! Every karaoke party has some drunken mischief, this keeps things from getting out of hand ;) Can be enabled with "--admin-password " option. Log in via the info screen. Regular users can add songs, but cannot modify playback, queue order, or edit songs.
• VLC playback overlay can show the pikaraoke connection QR code with the "--show-overlay" option
• Advanced search option allows searching for non-karaoke results and downloading directly from a given Youtube URL.
• Expand the raspberry pi filesystem to fill the remainind SD card from the info screen.
• Loads of suggested UI improvements, polish, and optimizations.
• Bugfixes, refactoring

PiKaraoke 1.0.0

• Actual version number! v 1.0.0
• VLC is now the default media player. You can still use omxplayer for slower pi devices with --use-omxplayer
• CDG file support! Also supports zipped cdg + mp3, just add the files to the root of the download directory (must be using vlc)
• Refresh song list manually from the info screen.
• Default download directories are now ~/pikaraoke-songs on MacOS, Windows, and Linux
• General overdue cleanup of libraries
• Removed the --show-overlay feature since it is omxplayer only and not supported on pi4
• Prebuilt raspberry pi image that auto-launches pikaraoke: https://github.com/vicwomg/pikaraoke/releases/latest

---

Well, it's been a couple of years of pikaraoke... perhaps it's time for a 1.0.0?

Mainly publishing this release for the purpose of offering a pre-built raspberry pi image. Installing all of pikaraoke's dependencies can take a while, so this image should have everything ready to go and get you started right away.

After you write the image to an SD card, you will need to configure your wifi (unless you're using ethernet):

• Mount the SD card to your computer to access it's boot partition (should auto-mount as a drive in MacOS and windows)
• In the root directory of the SD card, make a copy of the file "wpa_supplicant.conf.example" to "wpa_supplicant.conf"
• Edit this wpa_supplicant.conf file and replace the country code (example: "US" for United States) and SSID / password fields to match your wifi access point. Be sure to INCLUDE the double quotes surrounding the SSID/password
• Safely eject the SD card and plug it back into your raspberry pi and plug in a TV display.

The image will auto-launch pikaraoke on start if it detects a valid wifi or ethernet connection. Connect to the web interface using the QR code displayed It is recommended that you immediately update youtube-dl from the info menu, as it will probably out of date.

If you need to log in to the device the credentials are: username: pi / pw: pikaraoke

• After first boot, you may want to expand the filesystem to fill the rest of the SD card, run sudo raspi-config --expand-rootfs
• To update to the latest version of pikaraoke, log in to the pi, and run: cd ~/pikaraoke; git pull