Karaoke Forums

I have seen some MIDI disks that can hold thousands of songs and can be used in some karaoke DVD/VCD players:

IView 2000K -- 2 MIDI discs contains more than 49,000 MIDI songs
Malata MDVD 6668 -- 2 discs that holds 30,000 songs

These are not internal hard drives. But what are these? Can these disc be played in other karaoke players or computers; and what are the requirements/formats?

Thanks, Ed

There are plenty of players out there that will play midi, but be aware the quality of Midi generally sucks. Midi is not a musical track. It is a set of instructions that tell an interpreter how to reproduce the music using it's own internal instrument synthesizers. The number and instruments will vary by track and the quality of the instruments is completely dependent on the device that is playing the track. There are also a lot of limitations inherent to midi that can affect the quality of the final product.

Because these files are just a set of instructions, they don't take up nearly as much room as a digital audio track. This is why you can get so many on a single disc. However, if you plan to do anything serious as far as Karaoke, midi is generally avoided due to the lack of quallity reproduction.

_________________
DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

However if the track was done well...
Playback from a good sound module can be awesome.
Midi tracks played on a computers midi sound like stated... Sucks.
My Alanis Myles - Black velvet midi track sounds better than SC's version.

MIDI tracks are good for home use or practice, free MIDI karaoke players are widely available online, like VanBosco's player (www.vanbosco.com).

I got started with home karaoke about 6 years ago with MIDI players like this, but they are *generally* not commercial quality. Fun to play around with at home though!

The midi sound comes from these player sounds a lot better than playing on the computer. Midi are sets of instructions and most people might tell you it doesn't sound as good because most people play them on the computer with default Microsoft synthesis. Think about it. Even mp3 as be bad if the instrument they use to play doesn't sound as good because some of them also use electronic keyboard to make sound. So, if you have a midi module that can produce the same sound as the keyboard. You will have the same quality and maybe even better since mp3 is a lossly compression.

The problem with such discs is that the royalties are in general not paid to the artists, because the royalty rates do not care how good a job is done on creating the backing track.

Because most commercial karaoke manus pay for the royalties, the cost of actually hireing musicians to make the tracks can actually be less than the legal aspects. Therefore quality can tend to be much higher.