Karaoke Forums

Hi folks, I just found this huge Karaoke forums, I seriously need help here.
First and formost, my english is not perfect, but i'll do my best!

I work for an Interactive Multimedia company in Montréal, And we develop all kind of interactive games like "who wants to be a millionaire", "Deal or no deal" and "Power of ten".. anyways, I'd like to go into the karaoke direction.

Of course, I could run a few karaoke songs and make a game out of it. But it's not what we need. It needs to be quick, and most importantly 200 to 300 person in a ball room has to play it at the same time.

So here's my Idea. kinda like "Don't forget the lyrics"... But with the whole room playing the game. What I want to do is to start a karaoke file, so all the people in the room can follow the music and the lyrics on the big screen. Then, at some point The lyrics are blanked and then I stop the music.

*** Right after that we show up an interactive question with four choices of anwser, and they vote during a musical countdown with interactive keypad.. but that part of the game is already mastered.

Basicly what I want to do.. Is to edit some CDG files, I want to blank some words in the song without creating a damn karaoke file from scratch. ( my karaoke data base is mp3+cdg files.. so if you know a good editor for that type of files it would be neat ! )

Secondly, i'd like to know what's the best karaoke player. What I really need is to edit backgrounds and fonts. full screen display is really important too. And a key on the keyboard to stop the karaoke at anytime time would be great.

so if anybody can help me out, I would appreciate alot, since i'm a newbie in karaoke.

thx

Mat

In MP3+CDG the music and graphics files are read independently.  All you need to do is cut off the the CDG file where you want.  The information is read in 24 byte packets at a rate of 3.333... ms per packet.  Then you can display your game information.

Need someone to write the code?  I work cheap.

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Okay, who took my pants?

well, not sure if I understand what you are telling...

Is there any CGD editor . like a software or something, That could let me just change a few words with "----------------".

That's all I need.

I'm sorry, I assumed that you were in the software development end of your company.

I don't have software that would do exactly what you need at the moment.  You might try the folks at www.powerkaraoke.com as they might.  

The problem with changing the words in a CDG file is that CDG is a graphics file ranther than text.  What I mean is that it deals with pixels and not fonts.  What makes it even more difficult is that most of the time the the next pixel change is based on the current pixel state.  So, if you edit the current pixel state the rest of the file is useless.  The sort of editor you describe would be difficult to make but not impossible.

On the other hand if you just needed to blank the screen at a certain point you can simply shorten the CDG file.

If you need custom software to do the job I would be happy to undertake the project.  I have already written quite a bit of karaoke software and would not be starting from scratch so that you could expect a fairly fast turnaround.

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Okay, who took my pants?

winamp 5.0 has a graphics editor where you can have text on msgs... not like the cdg window, but a line below it, etc...

For what you want to do, I'd recommend karaoke builder studio or dart... to make your own specific karaoke graphics.

Sounds like a LOT of work... with little gratification.

Maybe if you only did a couple a night, you might be able to do enough of the songs during the week to be able to justify your time.