Karaoke Forums

Welcome Tom. If you run your business and treat us hosts/customers the way you are leading us to believe, you are the leader in the industry. Your viewpoint on "certification" and "audits" is refreshing. I will not pay for an audit. I have many PHM discs. I was buying every one that came out on a monthly basis but as brought up earlier in this thread, I found very few of the songs were mainstream hits and therefore unlikely to get sung. I stopped buying them over a year ago. I especially liked buying your MP3s as I didn't have to rip those.

Looking forward to the quality of your selection improving.

My question, I bought the KJMP from Chartbuster. I loved the concept and that is how I would like to purchase all of my songs. What is the chance that Stellar will hook up with Digitrax and get PHM songs on the hard drive?

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

Removed by me, and re-posted further down.

Thanks for your input, and we're always interested in gathering input and suggestions with regard to the lyrics authoring amongst other things. CD+G as you know is a tricky animal and everything seems to present some type of an trade off. We've wrestled with this for many years and we are actually on our fifth authoring tool and still aren't satisfied with the results. Some tools are better at certain things than others and switching between tools for different projects is not a particularly good idea so we end up settling on one tool in particular and try to stay within its limitations.

I wish I could speak more intelligently about it but frankly this is an area that I'm not so technically savvy at. I do know that things like song tempo, font size, font outlines, etc. have a major impact on the integrity of the lyrics display but also know that there are a number of other things as well that come into play. I can tell you that we do have discussions on this from time to time but to be honest it doesn't always sit at the top of our priority list. However, any suggestions are welcomed and will be reviewed. Anything that we can do to improve our products especially in light of weaker titles will be implemented.

I don't think that is all your fault. Music has really gone down hill over the last couple of years. Really what has come out that is worth listening to let alone sing?

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

As stated in a previous comment, any improvements that we can make to our products will be implemented. BTW, I happen to agree with you on the older PHM swipes. I thought they were much easier on the eyes as well. I will look into returning to using that tool. We do still have it but I can't recall why we no longer used it.

As far as Pop Hits Today/Country Hits Today, etc. wow, talk about going back a few years to a time I wish I could forget. Stellar did threaten to sue Pop Hits/Country Hits Today and reached a settlement prior to us having filed a suit. The settlement was fairly significant and as with most settlements of this nature there was a NDA so I'm not at liberty to discuss the details of ownership but I think you have put two and two together quite nicely and I'll leave it at that. Stellar produced audio products for a number of companies including, All Hits (the original ones), Mega Hits, Dangerous and others that I can't recall at the moment. Some of these tracks were done as "work for hires" while others were licensed to other labels.

We actually have just recently been discussing harvesting our entire library. We are looking into the possibility of offering something similar to the custom mix feature in Karaoke Version. It's something we've been working on for several years. These tracks will more than likely be offered as "audio only" but the OSL will sync up perfectly with the original karaoke releases.

Thanks for the kind words, and your past support. I look forward to regaining your patronage as we are working very hard to improve our selection. As far as hooking up with Digitrax, we've already laid the foundation and there is a strong likelihood that something like that could happen in the not too distant future. There are a few things unique to our circumstances that is putting a kink in the project, but I expect that will be ironed out before too long.

Just for the record, I would also support ANY company that was willing/able to be a part of the KJMP drive concept

Just to help set the stage going forward, there aren't many questions to which I would take offense. However, I have little if any tolerance for name calling, backhanded insults, emotional rants, and questions designed to "sandbag" individuals. I really don't mind tough questions.

So to get to your question . . . and to begin with, the CAP program is not a certification program. Another misconception about the program is that Stellar gives permission to "use" the songs on the hard drive, CD ROM, or whatever material object on which the songs are stored. Nothing could be further from the truth. As you have so keenly pointed out, many of the titles listed on these devices are no longer under license and therefore we can not sell these products even if we wanted to.

Technically speaking the "payment" received for a CAP is actually a settlement for infringing on our intellectual property and is stated as such. It is NOT a purchase of songs, discs, etc. The CAP is not transferable and any content embedded on the storage device has no resale value whatsoever. The only thing a CAP does is prevent a lawsuit from being filed against an admitted infringer by allowing the infringer to settle rather than be sued.

There have been occasions where the infringements were so egregious that we refused to offer a CAP and intend to proceed with a law suit. By contrast, there have been a few infringers that had so little infringed content that we told them to either remove them songs from their drive and in some cases directed them to resellers that could replace the content with legitimate discs.

I hope that clears this up. As with anything, nothing is perfect and we have received our share of criticism for the program, both for it being too expensive because there is no content provided for the settlement amount, and criticism from the opposite side who say that it's letting infringers off too easy. We've really tried to find a happy medium knowing that we won't be able to please everyone but we think we've found that happy medium, and also to do what is fair to us also.

I really don't think that you would have to go back to a previos authoring software. I just happen to think that the person that is making your CDG files has not familiarized himself with the software that he is using right now. By the looks of things; it looks like your karaoke creator is using Karaoke Builder Studio and has left everything at whatever the factory defaults are. I use the same program and from my experience using it; the green background with white letters that change to yellow is the way the program is set up at the start with a size 13 font. I also believe that the full page display is also the default setting. It takes very little time at all to set up a template with different colors and a larger font and the line by line style of displaying and swiping the lyrics.. Just a few mouse clicks and your product could be so much more singer friendly. If your guy, who makes your graphics files could send me one of the KBP files from one of the songs that he has created recently; I could make th echanges and send it right back to him so he could see what we are talking about. There times when the song is very fast that you need to use a smaller font but there are also some other ways to get around that issue. You can get more lines per page so the lines at the bottom of the page would display better if they are not at the top of the next screen. I'd be more than happy to show you the difference between using a font size of 13 versus a font size of 15 or 16. It really would take very little time at all to change a few things in the software to make your tracks more user friendly.

This is great news as I am a good client to Karaoke-Version, these custom tracks are great for solo performer like me that wishes to remove an instrument to make room for a musician friend that wants to join me... I have made that suggestion to SC but they are no longer into karaoke or music but more into the suing business The lyrics are not important for this, just a good quality track

We no longer use KBS. We are currently using Power Karaoke. As far as the green screens, that particular background color was the color that we started using very early on based on a not-so-scientific-in-house study designed to determine what background colors were easiest on the eyes.

I'm pretty sure that the folks authoring the lyrics displays are very adept at the software but hell I'll pass by your comments to them anyway. I'm sure they'll appreciate your offer and wouldn't hesitate to take you up on it.

Welcome!

As I am sure you already know, several of your competitors CEO's have also made attempts to hang out here & hopefully form a relationship with their customers. Unfortunately they all ended up being run off by the "rabid dog pack".

I sincerely hope you are not. Again, welcome, thanks for your products & good luck!

Bazza

Wow, that would be awesome! Please tell me I won't have to have a separate hard drive from the one I already purchased? I would have to have one for every manu, with hard drives connected to my laptop!

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

Yes I am aware of the previous unsuccessful attempts by other companies to establish a rapport with forum members. I have no delusions as to that not being a possibility with me as well, but I thought it might be worth taking a chance. Maybe something of value has resulted from my peers having been on here before me. Maybe enough people have taken from the experience and learned from it, and just maybe after all is said and done, it might have been better to have kept an open dialogue with those companies with all of its pleasantries and not so pleasantries, than to have no dialogue at all. Of course each person will come to their own conclusions in that regard.

Welcome Tom, I hope that you are treated with kindness and respect here on the forums
I look forward to your products rising back to the premier level I remember and miss

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"Integrity is choosing your thoughts, words and actions based on your principles and values rather than for your personal gain."
Unknown
"if a man has integrity, nothing else matters, If a man has no integrity, nothing else matters."
Lee McGuffey

Still interested in the answer.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

To the best of my knowledge the KJMP was from Chartbuster and not Digitrax. It is a proprietary system and I know of no plans to load tracks from other companies on that drive nor am I aware of any plans that Digitrax will continue to support that format.

There would appear to be some extreme legal challenges in allowing tracks from other producers on the drive. I don't want to speak out of turn here because I'm not all that familiar with the drive and/or what's on it, but my understanding is that the entire Chartbuster catalog is embedded in the drive. If that is the case then licensing all of the tracks on this drive was an amazing feat in itself, but to license tracks from other producers would be a task of enormous proportion.

Of course nothing is impossible, but at the end of the day, legal matters aside and at the risk of stating the obvious, it has to make financial sense for both the producer and the distributor for something like that to become a reality.

Keep in mind that it was a joint effort between Compuhost (Invicion) and Chartbuster, when Chartbuster released new music on CDGs, they would also add them to the drive and one would only need to go online long enough to download to the drive. Then those songs would be available for unlocking by using credits. I don't know why other manus couldn't be added to that system. Great way to slow down piracy, every song I have bought has the id number on the splash screen for the song.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

KJMP was a system developed by Compuhost and they own it. CB just licensed the library to them. The Idea was really a great one allowing a legal way for KJ's to purchase using "prepaid tolkens" songs on a as needed basis. It would be wonderful if more manus would allow use in this manner even if the "tolken cost" was not uniform. Since compuhost had ways to double check that the system was not being hacked or abused it made it safer than CDG's/MP3's by far. I personally would have purchased the product and used it if compuhost was not required (they do not support my converted LD files and will not create a patch) And I love my MTU hoster for running shows. Compuhost has stated that they are looking to add other manufacture's libraries when they relaunch. It may be in your best interest to open up dialog with them to see if it would be a good option for you

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"Integrity is choosing your thoughts, words and actions based on your principles and values rather than for your personal gain."
Unknown
"if a man has integrity, nothing else matters, If a man has no integrity, nothing else matters."
Lee McGuffey