Poetical versus Lyrical
While both the Lyrical and the Poetical plugin are commonly used to “sing” song lyrics, we use Poetical in our band.
Both Lyrical and Poetical work by having a cursor move through a text file. The cursor is visually represented by highlighting some line of text in the file. When you press the button at the bottom of the Lyrical or Poetical, the line of text that is currently highlighted is output to the chat window, and the cursor advances and the next line of text in the file is highlighted.
But here is the difference ....
Sometimes both Lyrical and Poetical can fail to output the highlighted line of text. The reason for this (as near as I can tell) is keeping the mouse button pressed for too long when you click to output a line of lyrics ... to keep this from happening, click and release the mouse button quickly!
When Lyrical fails, it cannot recover from this, and the only solution is to reopen the file, and scroll down to the line you wanted to output .. this can take quite a bit of time, and you can easily lose track of where you are in relation to the music.
When Poetical fails to output the highlighted line of text, it sends the words "TEST" to the chat window instead of the highlighted line, then the cursor advances and highlights the following line of text in the file. So, at this point, if you just press the button at the bottom of the screen again, you will lose the line that got skipped and output the following line to the chat window. Which is not great, but not a disaster either. But, the other thing you can do is to first mouse click on the line directly above the currently highlighted line of text, which puts the cursor back on the line that got skipped, and then click the button at the bottom .. and if you do this, you will output the line of text that got skipped and you can continue on normally. So that way, you don't lose any lines of text at all.
The other thing is that Poetical has some options for redirecting the text to different chat channels, so, for example, if you wanted to send the text to the /shout channel instead of the /say channel, you can do this quickly, without having to change the text of your song. This comes in handy at places like Weatherstock, where we output text on both /say and /shout channels.
One thing I’ve found about using Poetical is that some mice seem to be better than others.
As I mentioned in the above post: when you are clicking on the button in Poetical that outputs a line of lyrics to the say channel, sometimes the word “TEST” will get output instead of the current line of lyrics. One thing that seemed to fix the problem for me was changing mice.
I had previously used a Microsoft Wireless Mouse 5000, and I would frequently get the TEST message. I recently switched to a wired Microsoft Intellimouse, and since doing that I haven’t gotten the TEST message at all. I am not sure whether the issue was the fact that the mouse is wired instead of wireless, but one other thing about the Intellimouse is that it takes much less pressure to press the left mouse button, and the action seems .. well .. “springier” .. that is, it seems that the mouse button springs back up more readily on the Intellimouse than on the wireless mouse.
The Intellimouse is an older mouse, and so you might have to look around a bit if you want to buy one, but my real point is that if you are getting TEST messages frequently, you might be able to fix the problem by trying a different mouse.