Karaoke Forums

Vocopro may have gotten a bad rep from being subpar in the past. I know they were trying hard to come back from bad publicity. I don't doubt at least some of there products have been made better. It is just hard to come back from bad experiences for a lot of us.

I use Cavs machines and have 2 models I'd swear by. Of course I don't use their music or disc trays.
A lot of people don't like Cavs, but I think it is what you use them for that makes the difference. If you use their SCDG discs I think they bite. Their cheaper tray players are crap too. All I'm saying here is some machines made by a brand name may be good while others aren't, so they tend to get a bad rep.

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Getting back to the first topic... Ipod Karaoke.

Yes something like that is the "future" for the low end of karaoke. Certainly Ipod capacity is growing fast and you can run Karaoke off of an Ipod and run it into any speaker/monitor system with little effort and a cheap $50 part.

On the other hand the serious Karaoke Jockeys will always have a much more substantial setup.

I don't see how it is going to be practical to put all of the features that the KJ wants into an Ipod., for example one may need to change the volume, pitch or key of a song for the performer, as well as have a playlist ready to go etc.



All of this may be possible with an Ipod and several additional "parts" but it is more likely that the serious KJ would want a laptop to have more control. It is possible to get good sound out of an Ipod, and many DJ are now using it in some clubs, and it is not possible to tell the difference in a dance club. But with Karaoke a bit more adjustment is sometimes needed. With an Ipod it is just more difficult.

So yes for the non serious Karaoke bar the IPod systems will do. Ditto for the home setting. But for a bar that wants to attract serious singers (and not just drunks who sing) a more substantial setup is needed.

I see disk based karaoke as being a dead end, it is just too difficult to attempt to manage the several hundred CDs that are expected by Karaoke singers these days (who have been spoiled by the computer karaoke and CAVS systems). Keeping 100s of disks scratch/dirt free in a bar, especially when they are being used regularly almost necessitates obsessive compulsive behavior on disk handling to keep them in good condition. Even the good KJs with disks often have at least a song or two that goes "bad" on each night.

On the other hand hard drives have fallen to very cheap. 1000GB drives are now under $300. At such costs ripping to mp3s at anything but very high bitrates is no longer required. A 1TB drive can hold 20,000 songs without any compression to MP3s at all (.Wav +CDG). I figure by the time I buy up to 20,000 songs legally, the standard external hard drive will be several TB.

My major annoyance with computer based karaoke (as a KJ) is that to do it with legally bought disks takes HOURS to rip each cd into the computer. If you are doing this with your own cds expect to spend a couple hundred hours or more on the first 5k songs.  

The biggest danger that I see that may come as a result of computer karaoke is the loss of attention to quality. People are getting more and more songs often of very low quality, just to get the 20,000-50,000 songlist. Odds are when such KJs send their low quality songs through subpar systems, any singer may sound bad. In such a situation, developing a reputation as a good KJ is going to be harder. It used to be one could judge how serious a KJ was by how many disks they had. Now that is meaning less and less with illegal downloads, now often the biggest songlist list goes to the worst KJ setup.

Well said Fred!!!

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