Karaoke Forums

Hey all.... been a while. Haven't been jamming much but went to a party last night and had to flip through a lot of the same tried selection...

Are there places online where you can buy songs individually and have them burned to a CDG?

OR

Do you need a special burner or blank CD to make a CDG?

Thanks in advanace

Yes:

http://chartbusterkaraoke.com/
http://selectatrack.com/


No, but you need a program:

http://www.powerkaraoke.com/src/prod_powercdgburner.php

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Cool... I ended up fining SelectATrack... which prompts another question:

What drives the prices on these songs. I put a 14 song CD together and the price rang up to $43.

Is it because more often than not people are buying these songs/CDs for a business and will recoup the expense in one night?

As someone who does this casually and not for profit that seems like a pretty big price tag.

Is it safe to say there's really no other option if I want to get specific songs?

It's because you get the specific songs you want, rather than buying 14 different discs just to get the one song you wanted on each. Compare the cost of that to your $43 CDG. Is it worth it now?


Yes.

Fair enough.

As far as Power CD-G burner... I think I downloaded a trial version of it and I wasn't able to get the CDs to play on my friend's machine. There's no special kind of disk you're supposed to use for this?

You just need to use regular CD-Rs. Make sure that you are using regular CD-R discs and not CD-RWs. You may have burned at a high speed. I find burning at a lower (or even lowest) decreases the risk of coasters. You may also need to change a setting or two. Try switching between disc-at-once and session-at-once burning modes or switching between Internal and CDRDao burning mode.
Sometimes you may need to change the brand of CD-R. Try using audio-dedicated CDs. TDK discs are usually the best. Burners and karaoke players can be picky!

I use Goldenhawk or (sometimes) CloneCD for burning CDGs.

And, 2 other sites to check out for custom CDGs:
SBIKaraoke.com and SingtotheWorld.com

I burn my CDGs at 4X speed (which is the 2nd slowest setting). I have found that at higher speeds, my discs won't play on other players.

Power CDG and MTU Microstudio work with alot more computer drives - DVD reader/writers are the best bet usually.
If the final burned disc don't play on the friends machine (assuming you know it needs to be a cdg player hooked to a video monitor - just a question, do not get offended, you'd be surprised how many people do not know this), then it's possible the drive you used to burn it is not compatible, or the file you burned was not an mp3g.

The Goldenhawk software mentioned above has to use a CDG compatible drive. CD Clone mentioned above does not do custom discs, only full copies of exisiting discs.

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

Father...I just do karaoke for fun, but it has turned into a pretty expensive habit . I went to MTU and ordered a USB CDG burner from them. My DVD burner just doesn't do the job near as well, but that was just my personal preference - not sure if it was necessary. I am also using Power CDG as software...the discs burn just fine in my karaoke machine. As for a site for buying karaoke tracks, I go to buykaraokedownloads dot com. Many songs are 99 cents to $1.49. They have a pretty decent selection, plus if you buy 5 songs or more, you get a 20% discount - in other words you only pay for 4 and get the 5th free (buy 10, pay for 8, etc.). I usually just buy a prepaid $20.00 card and work off that - the same discounts apply. I've been dealing with them for over 3 years and am pretty happy. I still go to Select a track or SBI now and then because they do have some songs that the other site doesn't, but most likely you'll find plenty at BKD. Hope this helps some!

All of the files I have that I want to burn to a CD are .CDG and then a separate .MP3 file. That's how you burn them, right? Do you put both files to the CD or just the CDG file?

I think when I did it earlier using the trial software it only showed the .cdg files to pick from and when I played them back they actually opened in iTunes and played... although the tags were way strange. They were all medical terms or departments. Very weird.

Yes, you just pick the cdg files and it will automatically pick up the mp3 portion as well. Not sure what's up with the tags, though. I generally just erase all the tags because I can't stand incorrect, mis-spelled, etc tags. Winamp just reads the file name and that's how I like it.

It (Power CDG) should just pick up the CDG file & automatically pick up the music file on it's own (provided they are named exactly the same as the cdg file). The program should only see the cdg file anyway.
So at this point if you are doing all that correctly - and the friends cdg player can read burned discs (some do not), i'd say your burner is most likely not cdg compatible.

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

I don't think you understand. Powerkaraoke reads those files and then burns the equivalent of a CD track (a binary file) with some special subcoding for the graphics.


You weren't burning a CDG. That indicates you burned them onto a filesystem like a CD-ROM. That is different, and not how you create a CDG disk which plays in a CD player and/or a karaoke player.

_________________
[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Powerkaroke has a converter in it's program. If you are having issues creatinga cdg disc from MP3+G files(CDG + MP3) try converting them to .bin and then burn the .bin files. Also pick the lowest burn speed your writer will allow.

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I have the Power CDG burner destination files set to .bin - I've always converted my mp3 + cdg files to .bin and have never had any problems.

The truth is, there are only a few CD drives, and only one commonly-available brand of media that will actually work for writing a real CD+G disk that can be read by a CDG player, and yes, you do have to use a special program to burn them; otherwise, they will just burn the .bin file to the disk, which does not make a .CDG. Usually you have to puchase the karaoke creator software separately from the CDG burning software.

However, since I haven't noticed anyone else here who agrees with me on the subject, I won't say anything further about it, except that I envy those of you who somehow avoided the frustration that I went through to learn how to create a .CDG...in particular, one that plays without leaving tiles and pieces of unwiped letters on the screen.

-denise

What you say was true about 5 years ago. It is not that way any more.

_________________
[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.