Karaoke Forums

Short of buying an expensive program (like PowerKaraoke), does anyone know of a way to make my own mcg or cdg files? Or even BIN - because I know I could convert it to mcg.

Thanks.

I've never heard of mcg. What is that?

Actually in this case Jerry, that's not helpful, I didn't see the right answer in any of the top results. MCG is the CAVS proprietary graphics file format. It's been so long since I looked at all that stuff I can't even remember what I had found that worked for converting those. I think CAVS had a utility at one time, it might even have been free.

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

Must be where I am.
My top result is:

http://www.filesuffix.com/extension/mcg.html

Wierd, I got some link about PC Viewer 6 files. Anyway, I did take a quick look and CAVS Decoder CDG is what you'd need to make the conversion and they charge $30 for it.

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

We are working on MCG and SuperCDG decoder (it will probably a plug-in for Power CD+G Burner), hope to have it ready in January. It will take MCG or Super CD+G discs and save as MP3+G or ZIP.

PowerKaraoke - I checked out your program last night. I found it easy to use, but what I didn't like about it was the quality of the video. If I use your file in a bar and use big screen TVs, it would probably look terrible.

I checked out a program called karafun - definitely thought this was great, but it didn't allow the creation of .mcg or .cdg files.

Finally, I checked out KaraokeBuilder Studio. Much like your program, poor video quality.

What I am trying to do is create ONE .cdg or .mcg file with my business logo, karaoke information, etc etc etc. Then, I want to duplicate this file 20,000 times to use as a backdrop for my DJ music stored on my CAVS players. Right now, I am using "Hotel California" as my .mcg file for these songs - but use an A/B switch to turn off the video feed to the other TVs when playing DJ music. Since the bars almost all use big screens, the quality of the video is very important! And, that is my biggest problem thus far.

.cdg are graphic files, and not video files. you may be looking at the wrong tool.

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I can neither confirm nor deny ever having or knowing anything about nothing.... mrscott

I understand what they are. I was using the programs I mentioned to make "slides" - One with my logo and company information, one with bar specials, one with karaoke instructions, etc etc etc. It worked just fine - with the exception that the quality of the video was not good enough to expand to a big screen TV.

You're probably running into a limitation of the CDG and MCG specifications themselves. rather than the software. Neither provide particularly great graphics capabilities. The CDG graphics spec is limited to 16 colors and a screen resolution of 300x216. The spec is also limited to only roughly 28kbps (even the lowest quality music tracks have bit rates of 32 or 64 kbps). That is extremely limiting as far as video quality. MCG, as I understand it (not widely publicized since it is CAVS proprietary format), is pretty much on par with CDG for purposes of backward compatibility.

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

Are these slides you wish to make something you could make in a program such as "Paint" and save as a high quality bmp or jpg file and then you could use any number of slide presentation programs to run them out to the tvs while your DJ music is playing or even underneath your karaoke graphics window such that it would reappear when the karaoke graphics window exits. This is something I do, just not sure if it would fit to your needs or not.

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Music speaks to the heart in ways words cannot express.

The problem is he's trying to do it on a CAVS player not on a computer. If the OP were using a computer I'd suggest the same along with using Windows 7 which allows you to specify multiple images to be run as a slideshow for your background desktop image.

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DJ Tony
Let It Rip Karaoke

I understand you were using Karaoke CD+G Creator? You may want to optimize the images before using them in our software and you will get relatively good results. Use graphic editor like Photoshop or Gimp to create images with these steps:

1. Load your image
2. Resize it to 288 x 192
3. Reduce color depth to 4 bit. Use indexed, dithered color reduction
4. Save as BMP
5. Use this BMP in Karaoke CD+G Creator

Using images with smaller color range will work better (monochrome or B/W images require less color space).