RSS to lyrics

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while. I spotted this article on converting a RSS feed into a Lyrics file and thought there’s something in this but din’t really know what. Surely the idea that RSS can be read on a portable device, especially some low-cost mp3 player with a screen, would be of use to someone. Perhaps someone who cannot ‘listen’ to a podcast in the ‘conventional’ way – and wants to be mobile with a small device. Someone with a hearing impairment perhaps.

Anyway, how does someone who cannot hear ‘listen’ to a podcast? How does audio get translated to a visual format – preferably easily and seemlessly? And then made mobile? Technology should be able to do this stuff nowadays. And it’d be great if publishers on new media would do what others before them in ‘traditional’ forms of media haven’t and think about these issues at the beginning, or design stage. (note to self – universal design apply to new media?)

It was all getting a bit complex and confusing and I was thinking I might need to try out making one of these lyrics files to see what exactly it does in the hope that might shed some light on my thoughts. That led to a page on LyricsShow software which is repotedly a LRC editor to be make these lyrics files. Then I realised I didn’t have a player to test it if I did create one of these LRC files. So it all got stuck in ‘drafts’.

Anyway, someone said I should share my thoughts, so there’s one!

pyLyRSS – http://orakel.tznetz.com/plog-1.0/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=31&blogId=2
LyricsShow ref. – http://www.likko.com/en/FAQ.htm
via make – http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2005/10/rss_to_lyrics_for_mp3_players.html