Maple slideshow builder 1.02

Maple slideshow builder 1.02 is a freeware application which is designed specially to help you make music slideshow and karaoke. Using this powerful software, you can easily convert a set of pictures, MP3s, and text lyric files into: a slideshow applet, an executable slideshow file. Slideshow videos can be generated manually through external encoders such as mencoder. The executable sideshow file runs in any OS with J2SE6 support. Text captions can be added to each picture in Maple slideshow builder too.

Getting started with Maple slideshow builder:
Note

• To improve performance of Java applets and applications, J2SE 6 Update 10 or higher is strongly recommended.
• Firefox 2 does not support the latest Java plugin, please  update to FF3 or use other browsers, e.g. Chrome, Opera9 Safari 3.1, IE6/7.
  

1. Add Image/Mp3/Lrc files:

• You can select multiple files in the filechooser by holding down the shift key.
  
• Synchronized lyric files and mp3 files can be added too. If you're not familiar with ".lrc" file, please read "How to make a synchronized (timed) lyric file" at first.
  

2. Layout the image

All images were centered when added. You can drag them to a proper place in the layout pane with mouse. The size of images can be changed with mouse wheel or zoom slider on the right side.

3. Click the "generate" button: The slideshow will be shown in a preview pane after generating.

4. Tuning: transition, animation and timestamp for each picture can be set from the image list.

5. Kenburns animation

• Set animation from the image list
• Click the left end of the timeline slider, and set the initial position of kenburns animation with mouse.
• Click the right end of the timeline slider, and set the destination of kenburns animation with mouse.
  

6. Export

7. Project

Major Features:

1. Image enhancement for making low bitrate web videos (e.g. Youtube video)
2. A built-in gadget for making synchronized song lyric file
3. A built-in anti-flickering filter for Kenburns animation.
4. Kenburns animation (panning and zooming)
5. An optional mp3 player
6. Two-line lyric display for karaoke
7. Popular transition effects
8. Image filters

Enhancements: minor bugfixes and major feature enhancements

Requirements:

1. Recommended hardware specs

• Intel Pentium4 (1.7GHz) or higher
• 512M memory or higher
• Mouse wheel
• Multi-core or hyper-threading CPU is recommended as Maple slideshow builder  can take advantage of  multi-threading to process image/lyric/mp3.
• A large cache (> 2M) can boost performance significantly for large-size slideshows.
• If your hardware is lower than the recommended specs, you should keep the dimension of slideshow bellow 480x360.
  

2. Free Hard Disk Space

• 30MB for cache files
• 2GB for video creation (optional)

3. Software:

• J2SE 6 or higher is required.
• J2SE6 Update 10 or higher is strongly recommended.

4. Restrictions:
Due to the memory limitation, do not add extremely large photos (e.g. 4000x3000)  into the slideshow.  If you had to,  you should use  maple.jar and launch it with the following command:  "java -Xmx512M -jar maple.jar"

5. Video Encoder (Optional):
If you wish to generate a slideshow video, mencoder (part of the command-line version of Mplayer) must be installed.  The directory of mencoder's binary file must be added into the environment variable "PATH".