Karaoke Forums

Now that I have a decent laptop, I'm thinking about installing MTU Hoster. (I ruled out Compuhost because I'd have to pay extra for the database lookup.)

I have a couple questions though:

How do you organize your songs? Put them all in one big honking directory? Does MTU hoster handle subdirectories?

I'm thinking about going with Hoster Lite to save a few dollars. I *think* can do without the Prepare Song Books because I entered them into a database. I'm not sure about the other limitations. It would seem that talk over Background would be easy to do by going through the mixer.

How useful is Remove Leading/Trailing Silence, Background Audio Player and Append Playlists?

What exactly does Append Playlists do? Does that mean that the Lite version won't allow me to add songs to the queue?

The software introduction blurb indicates that songs on thumb drives are copied to the hard drive then erased after playing and seems to be included only to allow singers to bring their own songs. Does that mean that I can't keep most of my song catalog on a couple large thumb drives instead of sticking them all on the hard drive?

Do you use an external hard drive instead of internal?

thanks for any help you can offer (especially for answers you give to questions that I'm too in the dark to even ask).

I have all my songs on one hard drive by themself, no reason to separate them all IMO. But You can add folders for the song search when you rebuild the database.

I only use the remove silence feature on songs that I want to remove long intros - example NIB - Black Sabbath has 1 full minute of bass solo intro. Not very karaoke friendly, I have it manually set to begin the song 1 minute in, completely bypassing this uneeded time waster. I personally do not use the BA player as I prefer to use a separate DJ player. Not sure what the append playlist is so I guess i've never used it.

Thumb drives aren't very stable for permanent storage, i've already went through several. But yes they could be used instead of the hard drive, but the computer would have to tag them as the same drive letter each time in order for Hoster to recognize them. Workaround for this would be to just rebuild the database at bootup. The flashdrive ability is supposed to be for easy access from a customer flash drive, I don't think they intended anyone to use them for permanent storage - but it could be done.

I use a PC for my main computer so I use internals. Usually faster & I can set them up in a RAID configuration for back up purposes.
My laptop I added a 750gb hard drive for the internal so I can store all my songs without the need for an external.

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thank you very much Lonman

I use my internal drive on my laptop (500gb) I will probabaly back them up to a external drive to leave at home (I don't want to rip 630 some odd discs again) I do use the the backup player pretty handy as it will fade rignt into a filler song between singers. I almost went with the light version but decided to get the full version. I have a seperate book program but will just start using the one included with Hoster. So far I have been very happy with Hoster. I am using it with a Toshiba Laptop win7 Intel i3 with 4gb ram and HDMI output it runs very stable with no issues so far.

I'm in my 4th year using Hoster and probably need to upgrade - I am having what is probably a memory issue - when I play singer's discs, the system will 'skip' at points later in the show until I restart the program. But other than that, very happy with Hoster. Nice to be able to important the rtf into Excel and do the book. Having proprietary form, however, is limiting because in order to use another program, I'd have to re-rip. Not gonna happen.

The newer Hoster allows for mp3g rips to be played & added to the search & songbooks without having to use the kma format.
As far as running another program (why ) you can use their Songverter program to convert all your kma files to mp3g files without re-ripping.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

Let me recommend an external drive. Most new computers have USB 2.0 which is more than fast enough for karaoke, AND newer external hardrives are extremely fast.

The advantage is backup. if your computer takes a dump you just plug the hardrive in the new computer and you're ready to go. i have my library image file, and a picture of my hosting program with singer histories as well.

Just reload my hosting program on the new computer, drop and drag the back up copy into the program folder, and plug in the hardrive. DONE.

I have a second computer ready to go at all times, just in case... .

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Good music, good friends, howling good times!

Thank you all for the replies.

UPDATE:

After looking at all the options, considering my computer situation etc and what I want to do, I went for the dual installation full version of MTU Hoster. I installed it on both my machines and will use the desktop for ripping the songs to an external hard drive that both the desktop and laptop computers will use. The desktop puter is much more comfortable to use for lots of reasons.

Quick observations:

The rip process is really fast

the database isn't nearly as complete as I had hoped it would be

the song entry by hand is clumsy - there should be an import song list function available or at least a simple copy paste

I sure could use a tutorial. I have no idea what several of those features do or how to use them. It's going to be an interesting learning process.

I also have a feeling I'm going to have to do lots of things twice because I don't know what a lot of the features are and I'm doing things the wrong way.

Lonman, maybe you should give me your phone number and set aside a few hours so I can ask you a bazillion questions. You do accept collect calls right?