Download Linux Journal | April 2009 | Issue 180

NEW PROJECTS
Fresh from the Labs
Ultrastar Deluxe—Home
Karaoke Game
www.ultrastardeluxe.org
This project really caught my eye
when browsing through SourceForge
this month, and not being a big
karaoke guy, this well-established
project (more than 12 million users
strong) has somehow passed me by
all this time. For any others not in the
know, Ultrastar Deluxe is “A free and
open-source karaoke game inspired
by the Singstar game available on the
PlayStation. It allows up to six players
to sing along with music using microphones in order to score points,
depending on the pitch of the voice
and the rhythm of singing.” Ultrastar
Deluxe also runs on Linux, Windows
and Mac OS X.
leaves the entire process open to fans
syncing up their own lyrical cues to
any track they like, from any band.
The game also comes with an editor
built in, which will save hours of
headache-inducing raw text editing.
the following:
$ sudo apt-get install fp-compiler fp-units-base
¯fp-units-misc fp-units-fcl fp-units-i386 fp-utils
¯libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev portaudio19-dev
¯libsqlite3-dev libfreetype6-dev libavcodec-dev
¯libavformat-dev libswscale-dev
You can download the source either
by SVN or wget, but for the sake of
space, we’ll just run with SVN here. If
you don’t have SVN, grab it with the
following command:
$ sudo apt-get install subversion
Although I’ve got it set up with only one
song, you can see how clean and colorful
the interface is.
Open a terminal where you want
to save the Ultrastar source, and enter
this command:
$ svn co
https://ultrastardx.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/
¯ultrastardx/trunk usdx-source
SVN will save the contents to the
directory usdx-source. Enter that
directory with this command:
$ cd usdx-source
And, compile it with these commands:
Ultrastar Deluxe brings you an amazing
karaoke program with gorgeous graphics.
The most impressive feature I found
was the ability to use pretty much any kind
of video you want in the background,
including MPEG, DivX, YouTube .flv—
whatever you like. An extremely impressive and professional demonstration is
available on YouTube (au.youtube.com/
watch?v=uvBSeme34bE), where you
can see the program in action with
karaoke cues taking place on top of
videos from artists such as the Foo
Fighters and Tenacious D. Ultrastar
isn’t limited only to videos though.
Standard gameplay generally takes
place with an MP3 playing with a
possible artist’s picture in the background while the program takes
information, such as timing cues and
the like, from an accompanying text
file. As the text file is raw ASCII and
the format is well documented, it
The guys from Ultrastar have put up a great
YouTube video of their program in action. Here’s
someone rockin’ out to the Foo Fighters.
Installation Installing Ultrastar can
be a pain without someone holding
your hand, but luckily there’s a quickstart guide available that’s well worth a
look. The guide to installing it quickly
under Ubuntu is very good, and it’s
probably the best guide for many other
distributions too (if it doesn’t work right
away, or your distro doesn’t use apt, at
least the package names should help).
I’ve chopped the Ubuntu guide down
to the bare essentials that worked for
me, but if you need more information,
see the installation guide on-line
(ultrastardeluxe.xtremeweb-hosting.net/
wiki/doku.php?id=development:compile).
First, you need to satisfy Ultrastar’s
dependencies. Open a shell, and enter
4 6 | april 2009 w w w. l i n u x j o u r n a l . c o m
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install
You can run Ultrastar Deluxe now, but
I found with the SVN download, there
weren’t any songs added along with it
(hence, nothing to load up and sing along
to). If you check the project’s Web site,
there are some free songs to download
provided by the community. Download a
song’s zip file and extract the contents
somewhere locally. Then, with root or
superuser permission, copy the files to the
folder /usr/local/share/ultrastardx/songs.
Once those are in place, you should be
good to go.
Usage After all that, you now
should be able to run the program
with this command:
$ ultrastardx
Once you’re in the game, you’ll be