Karaoke Forums

But what if you don't know -- or the person doesn't know -- the exact title of the song? That happens all the time.

I can put in whit love and get pretty close. When you have search as you type, you get to that point and you have about 5 songs to choose from.

If you took someone used to Compuhost and put them on Hoster's search, they would be screaming in seconds. I have trained all my guys now so that they know that often the most effective way is to type part of the last or first name of the artist and one word from the song title. That way it doesn't matter if the song is I'll Always Love You or even misspelled on your rip.

It's not to say you can't do it with Hoster. Of course you can. But it is the equivalent of using a penknife to sharpen a pencil compared to an auto-stopping electric pencil sharpener.

One of my guys is a terrible speller. I mean plain awful. He would have an incredible amount of difficulty with Hoster. With compuhost, he has learned the fragment search I taught him and rarely has trouble anymore.

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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.

You must be referring to a very, very old version and someone running it who couldn't find the "enter" key for their life.
I am running ver 2.2 which is probably 4 years old now and it does have SAYT as an option...tho I don't use it. All I do is enter in the serch box the disc ID and there is the song...literally in less than a second. Type in the singers name and hit Enter...the song is now in the queue.
I know Compuhost is a wonderful program and you and others promote the heck out of it and rightfully so, but making incorrect statements about other software products won't go unchallenged...hope you understand.

Edit: And the searching you are talking about in the post above "whit love" works in Sax N Dotty too.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

I am glad that it works. And I was not aware that it did SAYT. But no, it wasn't an enter problem. It was a lag from ENTER to display, of more than a second.

I guess these are old versions I am seeing then. But every time I see it in operation, it looks painful. And the display is always difficult to read, with the file name taking up way too much space leaving much too little space for artist and title.

I know that probably could be changed by the user. But again, software is about intelligent defaults. I have not seen those with Sax and Dottys.


Yes it does, I know that. It is just very slow on the installations I have seen.

And what is up with that key changer thing? Why do they want you to drag it with no visible display (except the one that changes as you drag it)?

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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.

Mcky, You really ought to look at the latest version of Sax n Dottys.

None of what you say is correct.

It is as fast as humans can type and the results are not confusing at all.

I'm with RLC on this and I can't fault it.

[quote="mckyj57And the display is always difficult to read, with the file name taking up way too much space leaving much too little space for artist and title.[/quote]
It is all in how the songs are impotrted in the first place. On my screen it shows as "Singers Name" "Song Title" "Artist" "Key" (no file name or path whatsoever)
It is the default according to the import selection.


As slow or fast as you can type.


True you drag left or right but the key change shows as you drag it-simple drag & drop.
The time lapse issue you may have seen was more than likely caused by songs being located on a external hard drive of questionable quality. I did have a 1 second time lapse when I was using a 5400 rom external drive to store my songs on.come on it was only 1 second. but none the less, I, like you, did not like it so I went back to keeping songs on my internal HD. Now it is instantaneous.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

I used S&D for a year or two It was better than Cavs player. The reason I switched to Roxbox was the convienence of two players with different auto fade options and the speed with which I could change playlists. It suits my multi formatted shows.


If you have media player download this unzip and play. It is slowed way down for clarity but shows some features actual time is 2-3 seconds.

serch

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No host seems to know how to or wants to use it. If they use the dropdown of Compuhost and the button of Hoster they seem to have no problem with it. One thing that Hoster does best is key change, though Compuhost does a pretty good job too.

In addition, the hookup of Pacemaker to Sax and Dotty's is not reliable. I have seen it broken a lot of times. If I request a key change from an S&D-based host, I just expect it to be bollixed up. I avoid it now the moment I see that program. Inevitably we have a restart or other screwup.

Bottom line for me is that I have seen lots of broken Sax and Dotty's installations. Not true for Compuhost (or Hoster within its limitations).

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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.

I will give you this much, I too have seen way too many shows using Sax N Dotty's and not really understanding how the program works. (I think most of these are hired hosts and not the owner of the equipment and music.) And I have to scratch my head and wonder why-it is not a complex program!

The instabillity of Pacemaker and S N D according to you, well we have visited that topic before in other posts. I know what you are talking about, I know what causes it, and I did at one time (before I figured out what was causing it) experiance it myself. It does not happen to me anymore.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

Karen K said:


Not Really. Their $39 "songverter" program will convert all your tracks to mp3+g and do it in a batch mode. You can keep your original kma files too.

This gives you an option of trying something different even if you simply converted a few hundred to run a demo program.

What cracks me up is that they would even offer a program that would take their proprietary format and convert it to something else... it's like saying; "if you don't like our program, we'll help you switch."

All in all however, Hoster does what it's supposed to do... at least the version that I have which is a few years old. From what I've heard, they are having HUGE problems with their latest versions however.

Does the MTU songverter really work converting .KMA to CD+G?

I tried to convert some .KMA files with Powerkaraoke's burner software which claims it can do it, but it didn't work. I doubt that they consider this feature of their software to be a priority and probably won't bother to fix it. I imagine it burns .KMA files just fine or converts to .KMA just fine although I didn't try that either.

Hoster does work, and I like it and use it (v3.3) for a practice player. The one-big-list approach is nice for that.

For hosting, I far prefer Compuhost on many levels. I tried the new (4.x) version of Hoster, and found it's rotation handling and marquee to be very klunky compared to Compuhost. And in general, I find their user interfaces to be inconsistent and archaic. They are liable to make a big and non-reconfigurable change in controls and methodology at any time. After 4 upgrades of Compuhost, the interface hasn't changed at all. Any additions were just that, and not total re-shoots like MTU always seems to do.

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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.

stogie said:
It will convert KMA to BIN which is a binary file to burn to disc as cd+g.

mckyJ57 said:

I don't really care about any rotation handling. I prefer to do that myself since there is a lot of adjusting going on during the night.

I also prefer the "list of singers" between songs as opposed to a scrolling marquee.

Did I mention the songbook export feature is really sweet? I wonder where they got that?

These debates about hosting software are never much different than the ones about microphones, or speakers or amps.....Everyone believes that what they use is or are the best. Everyone wants to believe that they have made wise choices and they will defend them to the "death". I've had a KJ tell me that there must be something wrong with my CDR disc because it wouldn't play on his, and I quote, "TOP OF THE LINE GEMINI" SET UP. TOP OF THE LINE & GEMINI shouldn't EVER belong in the same sentence, in my opinion, but this guy thought his stuff was TOP NOTCH. I have taken my discs to dozens of karaoke shows and this was the first time one of my discs didn't get recognized by a player. The only other issue I've had was with a few RSQ players that some KJ's used that would leave a lot of debris on the screen when playing my discs but the same disc would play perfectly at other venues. These KJ's would always say that there was something wrong with my discs because they always maintain their karaoke machines and clean them on a regular basis. They must be cleaning the outside of the case instead of the laser lens but they still defend their machine at every turn. I've even had a KJ defend his 4 VOCO PRO wireless mic system as well. I thought they were terrible so I chose to use the wired mic. He said he forgot his windscreens that night and said that they sound much better with the germinator wind screens. It doesn't matter what it is, the owner thinks that they're great and wants to feel that they made a very good decision to buy them.

If it's broke, it's broke. When I started I certainly didn't start with "top of the line", and yes I thought Gemini and Vocopro made good stuff. That was the impression I got.

I know better now.

Through experience and observation I've learned. KJ's who cling to foolish delusions about their equipment are just fooling themselves, and won't last long if they don't recognize their defcientcies.

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Good music, good friends, howling good times!

Then if you haven't ordered your Shure wireless yet, consider getting the SM58 head instead of the PG58.

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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.

Cute. However, I'm confident that in this case, I'm not the delusional one.

Actually, I'm going with both. Two of the wireless, and two of the wired. Singer may choose what they prefer.

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Good music, good friends, howling good times!

See what I mean?

Question about the discs that you say have played poorly on some of these RSQ machines --- Were they full compilation discs? What I mean is, did you use close to the full 74 minutes of space that you're permitted to, or was there at least 10 - 15 minutes of free space left on your disc? The reason I ask is because when I first started to burn my own personal compilations from my library (to bring with me to other shows), I was putting as many songs as possible onto each disc (which was somewhere between 17 - 20 songs). I was using almost a full 74 minutes of time on the disc. When I played them on my JVC player (at home), they played perfectly, but when they were played on an RSQ machine (which is still the same player), the lyrics would garble. I couldn't understand why that was happening, because I knew that the KJ's machine were fine (they only garbled the lyrics with my discs and nobody else's). Then, one KJ looked at my disc and asked me how much time was I using on each disc, and I told him. He told me that that was the reason my discs were doing that... because it was compressing the 74 minutes, and had no space left. This KJ told me to try burning the discs again, but to leave at least 10 minutes of free space on them. I did this, and the next week, my discs played perfectly.

Went to a show last night where the KJ was using either a JVC or an RSQ player. The first couple of songs that I sang from my discs played fine but then I handed him a different disc and his machine wouldn't play it. This particular disc does have 19 songs on it but I gave him a different disc with only 6 songs on it and it had the same problem. This KJ has a second machine in his system that I believe is a DVD type player and it played both discs without a problem. I'm beginning to believe that it might have something to do with the speed at which the discs were burned. I was having a problem with my Yamaha burner for a while so I was using a PLEXTOR burner whose slowest burn speed was 4X as opposed to the 1X speed of the Yamaha burner. I believe some of these older RSQ/JVC karaoke machines have a hard time reading discs that are burned at higher than 1X speed. I'm not positive but that is what I'm leaning towards. I took my Yamaha burner apart and cleaned the laser lens and it seems to be burning discs again without bad spots in the graphics so I can burn any newer discs at the 1X speed again. The only other thing I could think of is that I have made some home made tracks and maybe these JVC type machines don't agree with the way these CDG tracks are produced, but they seem to play everywhere else on every other type of karaoke player.