Karaoke Forums

I too am going to start "de-duping" soon. Here is my plan, tell me what you think. I will list the song and artist only once, but will list each manu that I have for the dupes, leaving out the numbers (SC, DK, CB, etc.). The hosting program I use (JustKaraoke) will pull up all versions of a certain song or artist in the search. The singer will just have to tell me which version, (SC, DK, CB etc) they would like to sing. If they are a regular customer, the program will keep in the singers history the exact version and any changes (key change) in the history for the next time they want to sing the same song. I believe this will eliminate any extra printed pages in the book. However, I will have to type and rename each song manually into something like an Excel or Access to do the lists. I am currently using KJPro, and I don't thing it will to what I want to do. This will take me months I'm sure to complete, but once done, it should making new songbooks and updates much easier and cheaper to do.

Oh boy, have been SOOOO putting off this task. I've even gotten behind with putting new music in my books....bad bad bad. Will do that before the end of the year.

I did the very same thing this summer using KJ File Manager and it was a lot of work but much easier using KJ File Manager. I opened my entire library at once and then using a printout I had marked up could search for a single word in an artists name to bring up all spelling variations and correct them at once. And using Song List Generator you can choose to print out just a single instance of a song and then list the manufacturers after that listing, you choose the preferred vendors and then how many you choose to show, a great feature and makes for a very clean song book.

I "de-dupe" every time we get in new songs. I have a master list on Excel of everthing and when new songs come in I add them in red font. Then I do an alphabetical sort and can quickly scan to find the red songs and see if they are dupes and which version I want to keep in the books. I put an "X" in a seperate column for the rejects. Than I sort by that column and copy the new list minus the rejects to a new file for printing. I have also used that system to see if buying a disc set would be worth it or have too many dupes. But it gets dangerous as the more you mess with the master, the more you risk messing it up.

It isn't foolproof--as mentioned by others, I am still finding mistakes to correct and artists that are spelled differently, etc. I am also doing a major overhaul to see if I can eliminate entire discs like some SGBS that I had to get better versions for. It seems like something that could go quickly but it is taking weeks, none the less.

I am trying to eliminate our karaoke books. I have seen setups with just a keyboard and monitor where singers check to see if their song is available. I have googled this scenerio with no results. It must be a database setup but I have no clue how it is done.

I would really appreciate if someone could give me some info on this song selection method.

thanks
Reezer

I deduped using Latshaw KJ File Manager. I first made a copy of all my songs on a spare HD. Then I loaded all my files into KJ File Manager. Then I removed all but the disc ID from the disc name (SC8302-02 TO SC ). Then I selected all and "moved to new folder". When the files try to transfer and the same song by manufacturer is already in the the "moved to" folder it will leave the file in it's original folder. Then I Select all (of the remaining unmoved files) and move them to an "alternate dupe folder. Keep on doing this process until you eventually you get all the files moved.

Of course this works much more accurately if all your songs and artists are named the same in the first place.

Mrmarog

PS DannyG. I too have a song book for pre-1990 songs for my bars specific target audience.

I do the same as timberlea, and I also check my physical music collection (I still have thousands of records, tapes & CDs), and also wikipedia is a good resource for the correct wording/spelling of artist names and song titles. Time consuming, but worth it to know when people browse my karaoke books my information is almost always correct.



WOAH! Never heard of that issue. I usually type everything manually, but I'll keep this info in the back of my head. Thanks tovmod!

Would love to see that list but if not possible no biggie. Would only use your list to verify who should be in my list.

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

I hear you, my method in Access is similar, and I've butchered my master a few times. I'm now in the habit of, before I open it and do any real editing or book building, of copying it to another drive JUST IN CASE I inadvertently mess something up.


I sort of view all this as sort of an ongoing never-ending process.
I've been thinking about making an effort to identify complete discs I no longer need as well, but am a little hesitant to get rid of any CDGs for fear I might need it if I misplace the disc that made it unnecessary. I also dig how in some of my CDG cases I have or am quite close to having every disc in the series.

I personally don't think I'd ever want to eliminate books or have singers touching any of my computer gear, but toqer has the most impressive setup for doing that I've ever seen. Hit him up on here or check out his website: www.7bamboo.com (I think...)

to use mine he'd have to be running CompuHost, although the website now says they can work it out with just about any hosting program. I'd use mine at the bar but for the request to edit my books. A simple solution is Fast Track's free Viewer. You need to create your books with Fast Tracks though. Fast Tracks PLus will read off the hard drive.

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

What you seek is the AutoKDJ and the AutoKFE.....
http://autokdj.com/

Also after learning the hard way, ALWAYS, ALWAYS, e-mail your books to yourself and to different e-mail accounts , if you have them.

_________________
You can be strange but not a stranger

I have a copy of our list on a thumb drive, the boyfriend's computer and on our website. The only question now is, what did I do with that little thumb drive?

I just LOVE these thumb drives - so so so useful and dropping in price as I type. I have all my photographs on these now, and a good percentage of our DJing music - don't have to bog down a hard drive with it, computer goes t-up and you've got music. I have had to pay in the past to have a crashed hard drive recovered - it is so worth the investment in a few of the 8gb thumb drives.

Will be picking up more for things like the books, etc. Just makes sense.


(Just spent 3 hours working on book - UGGG, hate books!)

I'm anal.... I have my books created in Microsoft Excel. I have the files saved on My Computer in My Documents. I have the files saved onto Floppy Disks (2 sets). I also have the files e-mailed to myself at my work address.

When I go through the process of making my books in excel based on the file names(initially). I inevitably have to standardize the various band names to group everything together (REM vs R.E.M. etc). Along with all of the spelling issues (many genres of music seem to intentionally spell wrong).

I have an excel file that contains the corrected information for the song book along with the file name. I then reconstruct the "corrected" file name to go with my band and file name conventions. This is not that difficult as it is just a formula of adding the various text strings together in excel with the needed "-" for puncutation so compuhost reads it correctly. I then create a batch file to rename all of the songs to my convention on the hard drive. This makes future editions of the book much easier.

As for problems with fonts, copy and paste as text or selecting everything and changing the font for it all at once is a solution that works.

For my books themselves I sort the songs by lengths of the names of the bands or songs and for the longest song names I change the font sizes or type (to narrow fonts) for the few songs that dont fit into the space I have in the book for printing purposes. (only a few songs but it makes the books look nicer without having double rows for a few songs).


For the books also I make it so that the band name only appears once, and the various songs by the same artist are all grouped together. This helps a bit to reduce the amount of un-needed ink (more a question of ease of readability).

The main purpose to de-dupe a song list is to let the singer find a song without flipping through 50% more pages. The issues of making a standard convention for band names is also as important for the singer to find a song as it is for the removal of dup process.

srnitynow, I de duped mine in the same manner as you. It took me down from 14,000 to 8,000. If all the manus would use the same spelling and same format, it would be easy. I just strolled thru fastTracks looking for dupes and instead of deleting them, I correct them so that all dupes had the artist and song name spelled the same and in the same order. Then once done, I used the dupe eliminator feature and selected what manu I wanted listed first, and if I had a song but it wasn't by that manu it would show my second choice, and all the way thru 8 manus.

After printing out my books, I found some I missed, I corrected them in fastTracks so the next printing of my books will reflect the changes.

Of course I don't consider it a duplicate if it is a different version such as live, by another artist, or w/vocals. I should mention I program fastTracks to NOT show w/vocals but they are still there.

It was very time consuming. Now when I add a new cdg, I check for duplicates one CDG at a time.

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

This is just practical if you aren't up to a bizillion songs yet but when I add songs, dedupe, etc. I also have a column with codes like "H" for Holiday, "D" for Duet, "O" for "Obscene" , "L" for Latin, etc so I can make custom books if I want.

Well, I figured that since I was de-duping, and had to check EVERY song anyhow, that I'd make sure each song "works", not scrambled, etc. then flag the damaged ones. THEN, I figured that for ALL my duets, after the title, I edited, and added (duet), so at any time I can pull up a list of all my duets. I am also going to print out this list, and put it in my book in a section called (you guessed it) duets. I can just export it from Compuhost to Fasttracks, done. I would love to have a section sorted by (genre), but I think that would take me approximately 40 years, sitting here wondering, "now is that song soft rock, or modern contemporary, or ballad. Then on the next song, is that heavy metal, or punk rock, or headbanger. I'm WAAAAAY too analytical to be doing that. So I'll be happy to just have a seperate section for duets.

Rosario
Serenity Now Karaoke