Aegisub (http://www.aegisub.org/) has the ability to time karaoke lyrics - but it saves them as its own text-based format: ASS (Advanced Sub Station Alpha).

 

Coming from an Anime fansub background, I (and hopefully everyone else here) will find it much easier to sync/split syllables in aegisub and time each individual syllable then bashing the space bar in ultrastar editors, and then spend hours dragging lines around in EOF, scrolling all over the place, and hitting CTL M over and over each time i tweak a line ending time.

 

If EOF can support importing these ASS files (which are the basically the successor to the SRT format), then I'll probably advance lyric creation/editing in EOF by providing a more streamlined workflow.

 

Example line of an aegisub karaoke line:

Dialogue: 0,0:00:41.81,0:00:44.66,Default,,0,0,0,,{k40}se-{k18}no-{k38}bi {k29}shi-{k49}te {k17}i-{k35}tan-{k59}daDialogue: 0,0:00:44.92,0:00:51.62,Default,,0,0,0,,{k14}ku-{k18}tsu-{k34}zu-{k34}re {k29}da-{k35}ra-{k53}ke {k182}no {k16}se-{k56}ma-{k54}i {k30}se-{k54}ka-{k31}i {k30}de

The first two numbers are the times which the line - with the syllables that go along with the sentence -  is visible

 

The rest of the commas after are formatting, styling, and fonts, which we don't care about. The good part starts when the {} brackets show up. These signify special commands. k or kf or ko are karaoke tags which break down a line into words/syllables. They have special appearances inside of aegisub, but for all purposes of EOF importing, they're all the same. the number immediately after the k tag signifiies the number of centi-seconds (100centi-seconds = 1 second) which the following syllable is "active", after this amount of time passes from the start of the line, the syllable goes inactive and it activates the next k tag, and so on until the entire line is done.

 

Anyway, while EOF can do all this, you have do manually split each syllable one by one in ultrastar OR by the edit lyric function. Aegisub also supports cut n paste with the windows clipboard, which allows charters to grab an entire song lyric and paste it into aegisub and start synchronizing the times - without having to start all over.

 

I'm currently experimenting with aegisub and massaging the contents and doing a save-as srt - but native support for the ASS format would be ideal if that is possible. (Yes, one more thing on your to-do list, if you think this idea has value.).

Sounds like something, I can get behind. It would be nice to have a more efficient way to work with lyrics.

ASS

Sounds like something, I can get behind.

I see what you did there.This is probably doable, would you be able to provide me some sample audio files with subtitles for testing?

Awesome. :D I didn't even think about that. Your mind is definitely dirtier than mine. ;)

https://www.mediafire.com/folder/6s8ha9aaizmc4me,kbcto2u88sjg1ko/shared

 

Here's one example. download both ass and ogg to the same folder. open your ass with aegisub and hit yes to load the associated files.

 

You can sorta ignore the english styled lines, im planning on hacking the translations into rocksmith by loading them at the end of each line of the karaoke. I'll be splitting them up and stuffing them as tight as possbile, as seen here: http://i.imgur.com/a7vuDVM.jpg

 

Ideally your import would automatically add whatever dash "-" syntax between syllables, as well as doing that ctl+m thing that groups the syllables into lines (or whatever eof needs to correctly display these lyrics with as little post-processing as possible)

 

Let me know if you need a more specific example or something.

Anyway, this is what it should look like (with possibly a bit of tweaking) after importing:

 

I still plan on working on this at some point, I just haven't had time yet.