Thanks a million for that Jim. I was 2" away from buying a Android or MS tablet the other day for just this purpose, lyrics. I too will re think my hate for all things Apple.
Right now I use a corner of my 15" laptops screen and Note Pad.The rest is displaying Win Amp and my Playlist. It's been working fine as I normally don't need lyrics. But as the times between gigs grows longer, my over 60 memory is going to start to forget some of my songs verse by verse.
I have never used a book. I refuse, it always looked like you where an amateur to me if you have a music stand at a paid gig. But a digital song book would not be as embarrassing being small. Ideally my laptop would be all I need but I'd like to try and keep it hands free.
What I want is a way to scroll through the song lyrics the same way I do with my X keys foot switch and Win Amp for my backing tracks. The issue is, my foot controller has to have focus on the software,, the minute you change focus to Note Pad you loose control of Win Amp.
Back in 1986 we used Atari Computers to play our midi sequences using various sound modules. We used software written by a kid from our home town. Jeff Koftinoff.
http://tamw.atari-users.net/promid.htm Jeff later on worked for Roland. If you ever owned an MT 32 he was on the team and wrote the editor for it.
I asked Jeff to program a foot control option and he used the Joystick port and we made our own using standard push buttons ( heavy duty doorbells) and a Radio Shack metal project box. Up/Down/ Start/Stop/ AND PANIC ( remember stuck notes! )
So I had foot control at my very first gigs. He also set the software to display TXT files if the name was the same as the MID file. So back then all you did was step on the play button and the song would play and the lyrics displayed on the screen. Pray the power stayed on.
I have been dreaming of software that did this same thing but with Wave or MP3 instead of MIDI. Win Amp is the closest I have found.
My Wish list:
Foot control of Playback - Start/Stop/Up/Down/ = X Keys ( up is missing )
Automatic lyric display ( Win Amp can do this with Karaoke files but I can't get it to work)
Stop after playback - manual playlist advance
Drag and drop playlist
The other thing would be midi control of EFX parameters. So I can see why people would complicate life and use a DAW which will play both MIDI and Audio but that scares the heck out of me. DAW's are not designed with live performance in mind. But if someone ever wrote software that was made JUST for live performance I think there is still a market.