Karaoke Forums

To bradsinger- you are on the right track with your understanding but there is a major point worth noting, and that is that we are not embedding lyrics or timing codes or anything for that matter into the audio. Version 1.0 of Beethoven auto-wipes the lyrics which are input from the user and can even overcome certain types of errors in the lyrics file. Beethoven then sends its output to a 3rd party software application (Karaoke Lyrics Editor) and does render a .lrc file which is then be exported to a .cdg file. The heart of the Beethoven software engine lies within the intelligent auto-wiping and lyrics assist features. This is what took the bulk of time in designing these two features. The rest of the stuff such as eliminating the 3rd party access and making it look prettier will be much easier going forward but the auto-wiping was quite an undertaking. Version 2.0 which we hope to release with our next monthly disc, will be self-contained and will not employ the use of 3rd party software, hence there will be no .lrc file in future versions.

As far as the legal implications are concerned, I can offer nothing other than my opinion. Of course we consulted with our attorneys as to what the risks might be prior to engaging in the project, and we felt comfortable enough with the possibilities to proceed. Are there risks? Sure, there are always risks when it comes to intellectual property whether you’ve licensed the product or not. I can attest to that first hand, there’s nothing altruistic about these lawsuits. More importantly however, because of the litigious nature of the music business, it would serve to no advantage to go on public record other than to provide ammo to a potential litigator. As far as Stellar being the first “casualty” in the karaoke business, I would argue that the whole karaoke industry was a victim of ABCO v. Stellar.

As far as the “obscure” music to which you referred, we were targeting a specific audience, but that had resulted from emergent publishing issues. There was a lack of willingness on the part of some publishers to work us. In one case at least it was due to pending litigation, in other cases the reasons were either financial or due to unfavorable terms.

Your understanding of our marketing efforts while not spot on, is very close. I don’t know that I would actually characterize what we are attempting to do as a “go around”, rather than simply a different approach, but who cares about semantics. And as far as those “gray areas” they are always present. It’s the nature of the beast and like I’ve told other would be producers, if you don’t have the stomach for dealing with a multi-million dollar lawsuit, then don’t even think about getting in the business. It’s a fact that sooner or later a process server will be knocking on your door with a very fat package filled with legal documents and such.

To jclaydon– The only determining factor as to what songs we will release is whether or not it will sell. There are a ton of songs that I would like to release but I’m afraid that if we released songs based on my taste in music we probably would have long ago been out of business. I do think it is a good idea however to post some sort of a request board on our website.

Regarding Beethoven, that is the one task that we thought was a huge barrier to people creating their own tracks. That is the heart of what Beethoven does. You will not be required to “wipe” the lyrics. In fact there is no option in the program to do so.

To Lonman - The final result will be both an .lrc and a .cdg file. Future versions however will be eliminating the .lrc.

To BruceFan4Life - The 10 minute lyrics authoring might be difficult for users who haven’t heard the song or haven’t developed the software skills that would enable them to do so. The people authoring our tracks are the same people that are involved in creating the music to one degree or another. They pretty much do wipe the lyrics in one pass. There was a time when I did a lot of the authoring myself and once I got used to the idea of wiping by the word instead of by the syllable, then it was usually one pass for me as well.

Regarding your response to mightywiz with respect to several of your false assumptions, I’ll repeat what I stated to you in a previous post, there is a marked difference between your perception of things and the reality of things. While I don’t have intimate knowledge of Sound Choice’s licensing operations, I do know some of the players. It’s really not my place to defend their licensing practices, but I can tell you without hesitation that you do not have a clue as to the realities of licensing or its complexities. Heck you don’t even understand the distinction between “trade dress” and "trademark" let alone some of the other complex and nonsensical issues that producers have to deal with. To be dismissive of PHM’s licensing operations (or Sound Choice’s for that matter) as being illegal or inappropriate as your post implies without even a rudimentary knowledge of the facts but based on what you THINK are the facts is pointless.

It’s this kind of dialog that gives cause to me not wanting to get involved in legal and licensing matters. Nothing good ever comes of it and it only promotes the kind of “what goes around comes around” bullshit that gets proliferated all over these message boards. If you’re going to spread this kind of insulting innuendo you should know the facts before you do so.

As I’ve stated many times, my favorite quote is from Mark Twain who said that “It ain’t the things that we don’t know that gets us in trouble, but the things that we know for sure that just ain’t so”.

To Cueball – Initially the Beethoven software will only be sold through Stellar, at least until we can get most of the bugs out of the software. Too much of a Customer/Tech support issue to expect our normal distribution chain to deal with. The RYOK will be made available through our normal distribution chain.

To rickgood – No that is not what the software does. There are applications that can do what you suggest, but to be clear, you can’t remove “trade dress” from a product where “trade dress” does not exist. What you could do however is to remove any trademarks or wordmarks from the work. Before you do so however, I would highly recommend that you check with your attorney if you have any concerns of infringement.

at $80 i'm going to pass, and for these reasons:

when other companies are already offering the same songs you put out and they are finished works with graphics.

$80, that's 4 - $20 all star 45 song cards - 180 songs

and say I bought 80 songs from phm at 10 min a song to add lyrics "if I was proficient at it", that's over 13hrs I don't have to spend time syncing lyrics.

and I bet your backing tracks are going to be around $3-$4 a track

so I bet a lot of hosts are not going to jump on the "ryok" band wagon.

I think your cutting your throat in the karaoke industry.

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It's all good!

Obviously it would have to be a song that you believe would sell. My point is that you don't HAVE to limit yourself to monthly new music releases. There are a lot of karaoke host that believe that 90% of the new music that is put out today is complete crap anyway. On the other hand, there is a virtual plethora of backcatalog of songs that one could release, that would probably sell EXTREMELY well.

Even if you released a request disc once a year based on thousands of submissions, I would be more likely to buy that kind of a product. I have never had an issue with the quality of the tracks after all.

just my two cents, for what it's worth

-James

Thanks for the continued responses to the queries. All I need now is a little Steppenwolf blasting in the background and the images of Peter Fonda roaring down the highway on his Harley with middle finger proudly displayed to all the publishers who currently collect sync licenses for karaoke tracks! Basically that's what you are saying... If I can't play the game with you or you want me to pay too much, I will use my wits to figure a way around your entire scheme and "stick it to the man"! I am back in the rebellious 60's baby! Roll Your Own - gotta love that... will be interesting to see how it works and the reaction to it....

To mightywiz - I don't think you've read the entire post so to reiterate I said that the MSRP for Beethoven is $79.95 but that we are giving it a way for FREE so your $80 example does not apply.

As far as the rest of your reasoning, I think your reasoning is fair. I've already said that this product is NOT for everyone. If you'd prefer not to expend any time on customizing your own OSL, if you're content with the sound quality, fixed format, and if things like resale value (you can't resell a download) are of no concern to you then it would not make sense for you to purchase a RYOK product.

If the concept of having multiple versions of a track i.e. "Explicit" version, "Censored" (clean) version, or possibly a version in Spanish, French or other language, then RYOK will probably not appeal to you. If the idea of having different versions of a duet, i.e. one for a male only vocalist, one for a female only vocalist and one for an actual duet, then again RYOK will probably not appeal to you.

Frankly, I don't quite understand why you find 13 hours to customize 80 tracks to be so unappealing. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that if I were a KJ and had the opportunity to customize my library without even giving it a second thought. It might take me over a year to do so, but you can bet that I would customize my entire library. Then again, it might be just because I can be a bit anal at times, but there's no doubt in my mind that every single detail in my show would be addressed from the equipment to the library, the presentation, etc.

If a lot of hosts are not going to jump on the RYOK band wagon as you've suggested then we'll know soon enough, and if such is the case we'll reassess from there. As far as cutting our own throat, let's hope that we still have a throat to cut by then.

Back in the day, Mr. Harrington made a point of saying that Sound Choice karaoke tracks had a distinctive look to them that made them easily distinguishable from any other karaoke tracks. He claimed that the fonts and colors used by Sound Choice was their TRADE DRESS. He clained that even if the Sound Choice logos were removed; a KJ could still be sued because of this "TRADE DRESS". If that's not the case; all well and good. I try to base my opinions on what is reported by Sound Choice and their legal representatives. Garbge In Garbage Out, I guess is the order of the day. I'll refrain from casting any aspersions your way. I have serious doubts about the success of your Beethoven Project but I wish you well with it. I would still put my karaoke tracks up against anything ever made by Pop Hits Monthly; especially on tracks like "ABSOLUTELY" by Nine Days. How did you guys manage to swipe only the top half of a line anyway?

To BruceFan4Live - in order for a company to claim a "Trade Dress" infringement it would first have to prove that their "dress" was extremely distinctive and universally recognizable by anyone looking at the product. It would mean that I wouldn't be able to use the same color scheme and fonts to author my discs. For example if you opened a coffee or doughnut shop and used the same color scheme, fonts and layout, as Dunkin' Donuts you might be found to be infringing on Dunkin' Donuts' trade dress. There are so many variables to this that I could go on an on as to why I don't believe there could be grounds for claiming a trade dress infringement, but here I go getting into legal areas in which I wanted to avoid so I'm going to leave it at that.

Oh yes I'm sure that you've taken the extra time to perfect the screens in your authoring work for which I commend you for. As far as the line wiping half way, I can't say that I remember that having happened or why, but that was a very long time ago and I believe that was authored on a Futureware tool which had limited options. It was by all means the fastest too even to this day. It was a hardware/software solution that only allowed 4 lines per screen. There was a hardware breakout box with 4 huge horizontal sliders dedicated to each line of text on the screen. You basically moved the slider from left to right to wipe the line of lyrics and then moved down to the next slider to wipe the next line. It was a very fast and efficient way of wiping the text but it would on occasion leave you with some uncontrollable artifacts,. Perhaps this song was done using this tool.

I ALSO DOUBTED THAT SOUND CHOICE COULD LAY CLAIM TO A WIDELY USED FONT AND WIDELY USED COLORS BUT IT WAS JUST ANOTHER ONE OF THEIR TACTICS TO TRY TO SCARE PEOPLE INTO NOT EVEN TRYING IT. The song that I mentioned stuck out for me because it was a song that I used to sing alot when it first came out. It was a long time ago and long before I had any software that would allow me to edit it to my liking. It was a relatively fast song so I thought that was the reason for the odd looking graphics because they squeezed 8 lines of lyrics onto each page. I guess when you have to bang out 30 or more tracks each month, time becomes more important than accuracy. That would explain why there are so many lyrical and spelling errors in almost all brands of karaoke discs. In regard to RYOK, will there be a spot on your web site to copy and paste the "CORRECT" lyrics of the songs that you sell or will the customer have to find them for himself?

Songs good to me, how do we get Beethoven?

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Karaoke that just sounds better!

CompuHost | KJ Media Pro | Karaoke Kiosk | Bose L1 Model II system | B2 bass | ToneMatch audio engine | Shure VHF SM58 wireless mics | Countryman E6 Earset with Shure UHF wireless beltpack

at least v1?

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

Your Quote "due to the fact that version 1.0 is not slick looking and rather ugly, clumsy and needs 3rd party software support to complete its mission we are not charging for this version."

did I miss read something, as anyone else I think i'd want the final product not the "ugly, clumsy" version. to me clumsy means hard to operate and buggy!

so I don't think I mis-read anything here.

also I work a full time day job, run karaoke on weekends, have a 6yr old, and a wife. It would be nice to have a life also. and 80 songs at 10min a piece is just not do-able. and
then doing monthly updates.

most of us have families and find it much easier to buy a finish product then have to spend
the time it would take to do them myself.

as for myself I just would rather spend the money and buy a finished track for the same price as your backing track, i'm assuming I guessed right about the price range $2-4 a song cause you didn't comment on that. so why pay the same amount as other manufacturers + money for your "special" software to ad lyrics, when I can get it with
lyrics at he same price already.

I'm just say'n, less work for the same result!

I guess if you were the only game in town then I'd be all over it, but your not.

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It's all good!

I'm looking forward to this. If I can create a song in 10 minutes that look as good as one I created that took about an hour in KBS, then i'm all for it. I seriously doubt you are going to get 80 song requests that anyone is going to need to create, but if you can swipe out 1 or 2 song requests that someone wants in a night in 20 minutes on your own time, that isn't going to impact anyones personal lifestyle vs 2 hours for doing the same 2 songs in a KBS creation!

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To mightywiz -

Perhaps you didn't misread anything. I was referencing your financial analysis of an $80 expenditure that you said you would rather spend on a sound card that would give you 145 songs, and I responded with the fact that the software was free as in $0 not $80 so on that basis alone your analysis was incorrect. How "ugly, clumsy" , etc. plays into the math is beyond my comprehension. If you really didn't misread anything, well then that's a problem of a different sort.

As far as the rest of your comments, you don't need to explain or justify to me or anyone as to why you prefer a finished track. I do take exception however to your marginalization of RYOK to justify your own reasoning for not purchasing them. Evidently you think that constantly referring to RYOK as "backing tracks" carries with it some sort of negative connotation. Well here's a bit of a news flash for you, whether or not they contain OSL they are ALL "backing tracks". The only difference between an audio-only track and a track with OSL is the screen graphics of which in the overall scheme of things takes very little time, skill and cost to create. Nevertheless it is still a "backing track" so please stop trying to blow out the RYOK candle to make yours seem brighter.

The one reason that I have not actively participated in these forums over the years is exactly due to this type of discourteous behavior. Every time I think it is safe to post, it eventually turns into a grudge match or a pissing contest. Is it possible to add a bit of civility to these discussions? I don't mind criticism in the least, in fact I thrive on it and try to use it to my advantage to improve my products. What I don't like are the disparaging remarks and negative innuendo which adds nothing positive to the discussion.

As far as the price range, originally you quoted $3-$4 per track. I must have somehow deleted my response before posting but, the price range is actually $1 per track.

To frede and DannyG2006 - visit our website at http://www.pophitsmonthly.com. Order any RYOK product and you'll get a free copy of Beethoven v1.0.

To Lonman - As you know the most time consuming part of the process is in acquiring the lyrics (fortunately azlyrics.com is actually a legally licensed lyrics website). However, once you have a good lyrics file, the time that it takes to create the time-stamp file in Beethoven and then render the .lrc file and export to .cdg using Karaoke Lyrics Editor is actually only a couple of minutes even in version 1.0. I've actually completed an entire track to include copying the lyrics from a website, pasting them into Beethoven and rendering the .cdg file in under 5 minutes. A lot depends on the quality of the lyrics file. We actually have devised a 5 star rating system for the lyrics whereby a 5 star song can be copied and pasted directly into Beethoven's Lyrics Editor without any editing at all to a 1 star song that is practically unuseable requiring serious editing.

Regarding some of your previous comments, one of the main features that I've always liked about KBS is the dual screen feature. Unfortunately Power Karaoke falls short in the duet area as it is incapable of splitting the screen which is often necessary when overlapping vocals are present in a duet. I'm still on the fence with the stability of Power Karaoke. It could be just my imagination or by coincidence but it seems that we've had more bad disc issues with files made with Power Karaoke than with KBS.