Hi everyone!

I thought I would put this in the Off-Topic section so it doesn’t conflict with the other board topics.

Open Indie Project Dot Org is a recently established non-profit organisation which has been set up to support independent development (both “indie” and “independent”) in a wide range of areas. I’ll not go too far OT here by explaining all of the other things that the organisation does :-)

One of the purposes of the organisation is to promote Open Source licensing and the use of content published with those licenses. We are also researching and developing new uses of technology which will allow a wider range of people to make use of the content we will be creating and publishing under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence (we will use another licence for content such as software).

Back on-topic :-)

We are looking to adapt and distribute the best Creative Commons licensed music available in the karaoke format. We are also looking to develop open source applications and hardware which will allow the CD+G and MP3+G format to be extended so alternative methods of making use of it can be provided by us free of charge and under an Open Source licence. This includes Braille and sign language displays. We are also looking at using the karaoke system to produce music and dance learning/training resources. There are quite a few games available on various platforms that allow this but they are usually quite expensive and proprietary. All of the content we will develop and release will be Open Source and downloadable without charge.

To help us do all of this, we will be looking at making use of Creative Commons content on ccMixter.org and will contact the artists wherever possible to seek prior permission before releasing their music in our karaoke discs. We will ensure that we comply with the requirements of giving full credit to the content creators, in fact we will go even further than this by including a html file in the MP3+G format discs which will link to the original song (the page on ccMixter.org and not just the MP3 file), the artists’ profile page, to ccmixter.org and the Creative Commons site. If an artist also wishes to have a link to their own site or twitter feed, we will be more than happy to include this.

I thought it would be a good idea to post this to let you know what is being planned and so you can give feedback or (hopefully) request your own songs to be added.

You can find out more by going to our site https://www.openindieproject.org or direct to the relevant page at https://www.openindieproject.org/?page_id=244

We plan to use a slightly different credits template (the first screen shown on the karaoke track) for content obtained from ccMixter.org:

https://www.openindieproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ccmixterBLANK_CC_BY_SA.bmp

As space is severely limited on the CD+G format, we had a tough job deciding what to add. We will use this template if there are no objections from the ccMixter.org admins.

If you do not have any objections to us using your music in this manner, please let me know ASAP and then we can get the ball rolling. If you have a complete set of individual tracks for your music, we can use those to encode the MP3. If you have the lyrics in a text file, that would greatly assist us. If you have uploaded the finished recording only and would like us to use your content, please provide us with a copy which does not include the vocal track.

If we can obtain the individual tracks, it would allow us to provide other types of karaoke content. For example; if we provide a CD+G track which has everything in it (including vocals) except for the bass guitar, we could show the chords used on-screen instead of lyrics. That way people can learn how to play this music.

If you think this is something you’d like to help with, please take a look at the links provided and either reply here or contact us at alpha@openindieproject.org.

I look forward to reading any replies.

All the best!

Edit: corrected a typo in the email address: