What is it?
Performous is a free cross-platform music and rhythm game.
Karaoke?
While Performous might be classified as a karaoke program, it is actually much more than that. Instead of just displaying the lyrics, notes are also displayed and the performance is scored based on how well you actually hit the notes. Unlike in most other games in this genre, you will also see the precise pitch that you are singing, so that you can see what you are doing wrong and easily (well, everything is relative) correct your pitch.
Most of the songs available also contain the original vocals and actual karaoke versions are rare.
For those who sing rather than well, a karaoke mode is provided. In this mode only lyrics are displayed and there are no notes or scoring.
SingStar?
Until version 0.3 we aimed to create a free cross-platform alternative for SingStar but after scrolling notes and other gameplay improvements, and actually seeing SingStar for the first time, Lasse realized that the project has gone past that and thus Performous is now actually quite different from SingStar games.
Guitar Hero or Rock Band?
Performous uses the same instruments and songs as these games and obviously the gameplay is quite similar. However, we have deviated from the original concept by changing the scoring system and other things. We aim to make the game fun to play with and to make the scoring system judge playing skills as accurately as possible so that scores rather than percentages can be used for comparing players.
StepMania or Dance Dance Revolution?
Since 0.5.0 you can use dance pad to play dance songs in StepMania format. Again, the performance is scored based on how accurately the scrolling notes are hit. Let the rhythm guide your feet!
Features
- Should work on almost any platform
- Very accurate singing pitch detection
- Noisy environments are not an issue
- Multiple simultaneous tones can be detected and separated properly
- Intelligent gameplay with guitar and bass
- The engine determines what was intended rather than simply picking the nearest chord
- Hammer-ons and pull-offs are undoed when the player accidentally does them and then picks the note in the regular way
- Drums
- Dance pads
- Device autodetection
- Guitar Hero and Rock Band instruments
- Generic dance pads
- SingStar and Rock Band microphones
- Fallback to other audio devices when no SS/RB mics are detected
- Top-notch visuals
- Fully OpenGL-based rendering
- Music videos as backgrounds
- Smooth UI animations and other eye candy
- Solid C++ engine
- Performs well on slower machines too
- Rapid but still safe development thanks to advanced C++ features
- Plenty of threaded stuff like background loading of songs and videos
- Free software, licensed under GNU GPL version 2 or later
Hardware requirements
Minimum
- Graphics chip with OpenGL acceleration (e.g. GF2 MX400)
- Pentium III 700 MHz or comparable CPU
Optimal
- OpenGL 2.0 (e.g. Intel GMA950 or any modern ATI/Nvidia card)
- Faster CPU, multicores are properly utilized
- Up to four microphones, any combination of:
- SingStar wired or wireless microphones
- Rock Band microphones
- Regular microphones (connected via sound card)
- Webcams (usable but not recommended)
- Plenty of controllers
- Guitar Hero or Rock Band drums and guitars
- Dance pads
How to get performing?
Install the program from the download page, get some song packages from the song page and browse through the documentation if you have any problems.