Karaoke Forums

What are Midi players?, and do they just play cheap versions of songs?
How about " Karaoke on demand", is this any good?
I know of one KJ who uses K.O.D for his show, and it seems to be ok.
Opinions..

I know next to nothing on KOD but I know a little bit about the MIDI and how it works. Compared to CD+G or even just MP3+G music, the MIDI tends to be inferior for two reasons. First reason is While the other formats include the digital format of the actual analog music, MIDI does not. What MIDI contains are just digital representation of a music containing what instrument, how long the note is and what note it should play. The actual reproduction of the music is done by whatever MIDI player you have. So, depending on how good the instrument reproduction is, it can sound decent to god-awful. What you are hearing MIDI on CD+G is a MIDI file that was played through a MIDI player and recorded on to the CD+G. The download version of MIDI tend to rely on the computer's MIDI reproduction software to reproduce the sound.

If you use a CD+G player, all you need is a digital-to-analog circuitry to reproduce the sound, which is fairly cheap now days. So, even a high end DtoA chips are pretty cheap. This is also true for the computers using MP3+G format. However, since the MIDI player has to reproduce every instrument sounds, it's expensive to do a great MIDI player. That's why most of the MIDI files sound pretty cheesy, because the MIDI reproducers don't contain quality musical instrument sound. You would have to go to higher professional instrument to get a good MIDI sound. They are out there but not particularly for Karaoke, mostly for bands.

Second reason why the MIDI sounds awful is that the Karaoke creation stage. Since it takes a good professional musician to produce a real sound track, like CD+G analog sound, they tend to be more aware of producing good music for the end product. There are exceptions of course but in most cases, they are better than MIDI. Since there is no music talent required to produce MIDI files, every amateurs can produce what they think is a good music based on the MIDI file the quality of MIDI based sound tend to be bad in general. The reproduction of sound tend to be missing certain instruments or the nuances required for a good music reproduction.

Those are the main reasons why I avoid MIDI if possible. There are some exceptions, specially some CD+G that was recorded with MIDI file, that sounds pretty decent. They probably used a professional music equipment to record the final sound to the CD+G disc. However, in general they don't do a very good job.

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