Karaoke Forums

What is the concensus on which SW program is best for laptop use? I currently have JustKaraoke 1.0 and I find there are issues with not being able to replay a song...it gives a bad zip file error. I went to the site and they said to unzip all the files, but to me that does not seem like a good solution. It's like some dll is holding onto the file not releasing when song is done or stopped, therefore not allowing a re-open.

Anyway, does anyone have a real solution for this, or can you recommend other SW that may not be as troublesome?

Thanks for any guidance.

Chris

I use, and a lot of people here use, Compuhost. Expensive? A bit, but worth it. I have tried MTU Hoster, JustKaraoke, Siglos Pro, and some Winamp-based things. Compuhost is reliable and feature-packed. Great for running a show with regulars. Great package. Great advertising and communication features.

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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.

If you're looking for a program with "all" of the options, it's Compuhost. The most expensive, I think so. Worth the expense, definately. Options include: filler tunes, audio bits, video bits, promo trailer. Works well with CDGRIP for ripping CDG's, also is great with Fastracks Songbook creator, (sold seperately). As I said, the most expensive, but (to me) it's worth it.


Rosario

Check out Karma from Latshaw it's easy to use and has a lot of bells ans whistles without the large price.

you can d/l the demo for free

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I like everyone when I first meet them. If you don't like me that's not my problem it's YOURS!
A stranger is a friend you haven't met yet

I guess it all depends on what you want out of the software.

If you want something to pretty much run a whole show, keep track of singer rotation, do on screen prompting of the next singer, stuff like that.. it sounds like CompuHost would be the way to go.

I, on the other hand, tend to be a little more old school. I stick to a 'loose' rotation.. if the current line up is:

1. Bob - Elvis - Kentucky Rain
2. Sam - Disturbed - Down with the Sickness
3. Carl - Roy Orbison - You Got It

I'll bump Carl up one and group the two closer related songs together in the interest of helping the night flow a bit better.

If I played more venues with large house video systems, i'd be more interested in a product that did adverts and things like that between singers.

I play a mix of Karaoke and DJ. I find plugins for WinAmp to be kind of clunky. I like something quick and easy to use, that plays zipped files, and lets me quickly search either my MP3 or my CDG collection, and seamlessly switch between karaoke and DJ tracks.

I also wanted something that had a cosmetically appealing user interface, and didn't require high end hardware to function properly.

CompuHost looks kind of clunky.. like something written in Virtual C ten years ago.

For me, i'm pretty happy with Virtual DJ.

Works great for my particular needs.. i'd migrated from TriceraSoft's Swift Elite after having spent a good deal of money on their products for over 5 years.

Quick searching and filtering between DJ and Karaoke tracks, and it runs well on even bottom rung by todays standards 6 year old hardware. (Pentium 4 or equivalent.)

But it's not cheap. I think from their website it's $299.

I bought mine from a fellow DJ who bought it and couldn't stand it, so he sold it to me for $150.

If i'd of had to pay full retail for it.. I might have looked closer at PCDJ 'Karaoki' Pack.

This question has been debated to death on this forum. The best software for you depends on how you run your show. Do you have direct contact with each singer or do you call names and run the equipment? Do you drink while you're working? Do you want a kiosk? How important is the key changer? Bumper music? Half DJ Half KJ? Lighting control? etc. etc. etc.

Download all the demos and see which one works best for you.

As to your current problem. The files are probably being unzipped to a temporary directory. The old unzipped file is not being deleted before the new one tries to unzip and the OS thinks the files shouldn't be over written. This would cause the error that you described. Try deleting the files manually before you play the same song twice in a row.

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Okay, who took my pants?

This suggestion always puzzles me, particularly when made by someone experienced.

I don't believe you can figure out what a program does in its entirety, including reliability and fitness of purpose, by testing demos. Even if you spend hours with each one. There is more to a program than the initial blush. And you can't gauge reliability, fragility, and many other issues that impact operations.

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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 guess everyone has his and her style. It was your style that made me get into karaoke in the first place. I knew I could do it better. A rotation is just that a rotation. It is meant to be followed so that no one sings more than another.

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

The demo will tell you if the software is going to work on your machine at all. It will tell you if the features you need most were a priority in the mind of the developers.

My needs are: A kiosk, automatic rotation, and I can still run the software when I'm drunk.

As for reliability and fragility.... A computer program is a binary machine it works or it doesn't. Reliability and fragility are recent concerns spawned by giant web browsers impersonatiing operating systems, scripts, MSIL, OOP, and a bunch of other letters found in alphabet soup. The deveopers product is not unreliabe but the enviroment in which it's working is. Therefore, failure is unforseeable. So you might as well get the app. you like best. (IMHO)

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Okay, who took my pants?

I completely disagree. A developer operates a program in the way he intends. A user often operates it in a completely different fashion. Programs can be reliable in the hands of a developer and utterly fragile and unsuitable in the hands of a user.

This is why I believe basing your decision on 1) recommendations of others and 2) backing that up with selecting a short list to demo yourself is the way most people should go. That way they spend time where it makes sense instead of wasting it on programs that may be completely unsuitable.

Sometimes the user simply won't understand some of the issues. For instance, the inherent unreliability of Winamp controllers. While they can of course operate well, they are vulnerable to many factors that don't impact standalone programs. This results in fragility, no matter how well programmed.

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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.

Certainly you are entitled to your opinion and I agree with you on many points. As the author of a Winamp based hoster however, if the interface was unreliable I think someone would have complained about it to me. Lord knows they complained about everything else. I haven't looked at the Winamp interface in many years and I stopped supporting my hoster a long time ago so this may be a new problem.

As for being fragile... If you use it once and it works, don't change anything or do anything different, it will work again.

Does Commpuhost support kiosks and drunkeness? How would I know unless I tried it or at least looked at it?

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Okay, who took my pants?

The key changer is fragile, and there are probably other things that are as well. The API for Pacemaker doesn't allow querying for current state, so you have no idea whether the key change took.


And that is a heck of a way to run a railroad. No updating or installing new programs, sure you can freeze something in time. But that is not realistic for most people.


I didn't say don't look at it. I said don't use that as your only criteria, and I said don't waste your time looking at everything. I would have a starting point, and rely on others real-world experience with serviceability to give you that starting point.

One of my big problems with MTU hoster is the backwards search facility, straight out of the 1970s. Searching for a Randy Travis song found in *every* collection, I had a KJ tell me he didn't have it. Type "Forever and ever" and you won't find it. Type "Forever amen" in to its box, and you won't find anything. "Ever amen" didn't get it. You had to hit some part of the exact string "forever & ever, amen". Apparently some people think that is just fine. I think it is a showstopper for me. I would never buy it again until they fix that and one or two other things I think are just stupid. You might not be able to figure something like that out right away, like I didn't by trying different things.

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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.

Cappa, I think you are right.



Sounds like you need to repair your software.

See I don't think Hoster is that bad at all, never had a problem finding a song. But then I am not than picky about the search. Everything else does just as I need, very simple to use, looks good to me on the host screen, key changer sounds much better than some of the others plus fully self contatined with the ripper, player, songbook maker built in. Also plays cdg's on the fly and vidoes as well. For me it does more than i'll ever need or use most likely. I actually just started using the singer history feature recently which is something I never thoughht i'd use.

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The usual way people deal with that is just to search for "Travis". But then you end up paging through scads of songs, and sometimes they miss the song. I watch it all the time. Maybe some people go away scratching their head thinking "I guess they don't have Forever and Ever Amen". But I am a bit more persistent.

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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're making stuff up...

Pacemaker works through standard win32. All you have to do is find the pacemaker window and read the values of the sliders and other controls. They even give examples of how to do this in the pacemaker example app.

I have to agree that pacemaker is a piece of garbage. It's one of the reasons I went away from winamp based software for karaoke. I still use winamp for djing. That's all it's good for. He's not making stuff up. Pacemaker bites. You can't change the key in the middle of the song without it taking up to a full second or two to change the key. None of the standalone softwares have this limitation.

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

I certainly believe you, though I looked at those examples and didn't see anything like that three years ago.

Then why don't the apps I have seen, in particular Sax & Dottie's, do it? Does AutoKDJ do it and flag the absence of Pacemaker?

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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.

Danny,

I wasn't arguing about the quality of pacemaker, Personally I find that pacemaker below 2 steps sounds like farts, but again that has nothing to do with mcky's statement about there being no way to query the pacemaker window.

Just fud and fairy tales.

There was one other keychanger we added support for, but I can't remember which one off hand. I don't know if it's any better or worse than pacemaker.

Mickey,

Reading window states is a VERY common practice in win32 programming. Almost any program has an "API" as long as the window names and controls can be read and written to.

There's a nice window spy program in autohotkey

http://www.autohotkey.com/

With that you can find out what the name of each window/control, etc. If you read through some of the COM examples they give on their forums, you'll have a better idea of how it works.