The other day Jodi's cousin referred to her a piece of software called 千千静听 (Qian Qian Jing Ting, TTPlayer in English) to play her MP3s. Now Jodi is no softie when it comes to computers so when she called me over to check it out, I knew something was up. Sure enough, it's a cute little next step in the media player evolutionary chain.

That's because the guys who developed the free Qian Qian Jing Ting player also run a lyrics server for the player. So when you play a new song, it checks on the server for the lyrics using a combination of the file name and ID3 tags. Then it downloads the lyrics and shows them alongside the song, synchronized to the words in karaoke fashion.

The player also comes with a built-in lyrics editor and timer so you can add lyrics to your favorite new song and contribute them back to the server. It supports the playback of MP3, WAV, AAC and Ogg files. Ogg! According to the Chinese Wikipedia, TTPlayer is made by a software developer who lives here in Shanghai.

Using this in combination with Baidu or Yahoo would be a good way to practice Chinese reading and polish up for your next night out at the KTV. It recognized all of our Chinese songs, and a few of our English ones. Plus the interface is all in Chinese, so even more practice!

(This is almost, but not quite, as cool as my Baidu/Flickr/Adsotrans mash-up idea.)