Secret Prefs

There are some kJams preferences that are not exposed in the user interface.

To change these, you can use an XML or plist editor (like the excellent PlistEdit Pro) or you can just use a text editor. If you do use a text editor, you need to be careful not to break the formatting (in short: don't touch the angle brackets or anything inside them -- except to change <false/> into <true/> or vice-versa. That is: you can change <tag>this</tag>, but not <this>data</tag>.)

You must edit them when kJams is NOT running, so shut it down before you open the file.

To reveal your preferences file, run kJams and go to the Help menu and pick "Reveal Preferences". It will then open a Finder window on the folder containing your prefs file, which will be in this location:

Mac: ~/Library/Preferences/kJams/kJams Preferences.plist
Win: ~/AppData/Roaming/Preferences/kJams/kJams Preferences.plist

note: click the tilde above if you don't know what it means.

Once the folder has been displayed, switch back to kJams and Quit the program. Then you can open the preferences file with your editor, and change any of these:

• "Browser Font Size" - default is 11
• "Launch Midi Files" - set to true
• "Half Ring buffer size (in megabytes)". Default is 1.5, set it to 3 if the ring buffer ever runs dry on your particular system
• "Maximum number of items in web search results list" - default is 200
• "Don't erase before sweeping" - Karaoke text, of course, changes color in time with the music. This color-changing is called "sweeping". to do this, we erase only the part of the word that is "swept", then re-draw only that part in the new color. Erasing first keeps the text looking crisp on the edges, as otherwise the anti-aliasing can show the previous color on the fringes. In certain cases however, erasing first causes problems, so you can use this switch to turn it off.
• "Show Rotation when less than time remaining (seconds)" - how long before the "end" of the song should we show the Rotation ShowScreen
• "Show Rotation Duration (seconds)" - how long should we keep the Rotation ShowScreen up? Tweak these last two to make it show earlier, or end earlier if you need to

You will see all the preferences that are accessible in the Preferences dialog here too, and you can, of course, edit those here as well if you like. You can even make a backup copy of the file before experimenting, which we encourage.