Inventing Guitaraoke: A Tale of Tech, Bugs, and Rock'n'Roll - Dylan Beattie - CPH DevFest 2023

A few years ago, Dylan was in a karaoke bar late one night, with a group of NDC speakers, and he had an idea... what if you could do karaoke with guitars? What if you could go to a bar with your friends, choose your favourite song, plug in a guitar, get the guitar chords to appear live on screen - just like karaoke lyrics - and rock out? What if one of your friends could pick up a bass and join in? This is the story of how Dylan turned that idea into reality, using .NET, JavaScript - and WinAmp. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about audio and video formats, working with multichannel audio, building parsers for guitar chord charts, custom rendering pipelines, frame buffers - and the UX challenges of building software that you can operate live on stage, in a crowded bar, while you have a guitar in one hand and a beer in the other. Then after the session, join us on the Copenhagen Developer Festival stage for a live guitar karaoke session, as we invite speakers, attendees - and maybe even you! - to get up and rock out.