Karaoke Forums

Hello,

I just discovered this forum as I'm trying to help my Dad convert his Karaokee business from old school discs to digitial. He's been in business around 10 years and has a huge collection.

He bought brend new equipment, consiting of a new machine, a portal hard-drive and etc.

He wants to put all of his music from the discs, and put it on the external hard drive he just bought. His new machine will read from the hard drive and that's not a problem at all.

The problem is taking his disc's, and putting them on an external hard-drive with both the music and the words on the screen for people to sing to.

I know how to put them on the drive, but I don't know how to convert them to a format that will work. I believe we need to put them into a CD-G file, or into an .AVI for MPEG-4. But when I rip the cd to the external it won't give me the option, I can only rip as MP3 or WAV... and obviously those files will only play music and not video.

Basically how can I rip them to a drive, and have them be in a format that the new player can read from the external hard-drive.

I would be very grateful if anyone can provide any help, I've really enjoyed this community and look forward to taking part in it![/img]

PowerKaroake.com -- Power CDG Burner/Ripper

www.kjtools.com -- CDGrip (free)

For a hosting program, CompuHost is the best on the market in my opinion:

http://www.kjtools.com/CompuHost.html

Costs money but is well worth 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.

I agree. Spend the money on the PowerKaraoke ripper. It will save you a lot of headaches in the end.

As for going from disks to digital...CDs are digital.

A computer based karaoke program usually works with two files at the same time, MP3 for the music and CDG for the graphics. These files are not present on the CD but are produced by the ripper. The graphics information is contained in the timing byte of the CD. This byte was and still is used to tell the CD Drive how fast the CD is spinning. The first bit of this byte is used for timing, the second is reserved for something that I can't remember and the last six contain the graphics information. Because the whole byte is not used this information is sometimes called "subcode" mostly I think to make it sound more mysterious. Some drives will discard this information after it is used and so are pretty much useless for karaoke, although that mostly pertains to older drives.

As for hosting programs... that's mostly a matter of personal style. Some use Winamp as a player and are a little harder to set up than the stand alone's such as Compuhost. On the other hand they are cheaper (some free) than the stand-alones as a rule. Apparently, Winamp sometimes has a problem with key changes. Some KJ's get asked for more key changes than others. It was a rare thing for me.

I think most folks here would advise you to download all the demo programs you can find and see which one is going to work best for you. They will also tell you to search this site for information because the subject has been talked to death.

Welcome to the forum.

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Okay, who took my pants?

MTU Hoster is another option in which the program itself is also a ripper that will not only play the songs but create a songbook plus allow for customer discs to be played duirng a show without having to rip the disc to your library.
Again, just another option.

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

It sounds like he's trying to convert his disks to a DivX (AVI) file. Some of the machines with usb ports will support that format (V2Go 100 for example), as it's basicly a video file. PowerKaraoke has a program that will rip the disks directly to that format.

The problem I've found with going that route is that accessing the files through the player is not very user friendly. You have to know exactly what file number has been assigned to the file or be prepared to do a lot of scrolling and that will take forever. I've got the program and have played with it and to be honest he'd be better off converting to MP3+G and running off a computer with a regular hosting program.

There are a couple of products on the market that have varying degrees of functionality just make sure you have the following features:

1. Auto naming for disks being ripped. You should find a product that allows you to identify the disk number and it auto populates the song name and artist naming the ripped files appropriately.
2. Has an update service to keep the disk database current for new Karaoke releases
3. Enables easy songbook creation with removal of duplicates

I use Compuhost for the hosting and CDGrip with Fast Tracks to rip disks and create songbooks. I am certain there are other products out there for your use. Just make sure all you have to do is put the disk in the drive, select the correct disk name and hit the "Start" start button. Everything else should be done automagically.

I second (or third) the PowerKaraoke ripper. Simple, inexpensive and works well.

Both powerkaraoke and cdgrip are good programs. Cdgrip is a little better with naming the songs correctly with the help of Fast Tracks. If you go Compuhost you can vreate your books using your compuhost database in Fast Tracks as they are from the same company as is CDGrip.

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

All the advice you have been given is extremely good, but one thing is missing-----you must make sure that the CD player/writer you are using can read cdg's. Not all of them can. A good Plextor unit is my recomendation and PowerKaraoke for the program.

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Keep on Keeping On! It's never too late and you're never too old!!!!!

Actually this is a little out of date, I think. Most DVD writers nowadays work with PowerKaraoke and the other modern ripping programs, and some Plextor units don't do CDG. I would not look for Plextor any more.

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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.

mckyj57 is right about the drives. In fact some of the best CD+G writer/readers are made by LiteOn now. Stock Dell & Compaq (HP) writers are also compatable with PowerKaraoke as well.

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

This is true. I tried my laptop for this at first but couldn't read the lyrics. However, the world won't explode. You won't screw anything up, it just won't work and you will have to use a different drive.

I guess I should say, you just won't get the lyrics.