Karaoke Forums

All things being equal, such as sound quality, swipe, price, etc... which format do y'all find more desireable for the bar scene?

I have CD+G, VCD, and DVD. Of these formats, I prefer CD+G most of the time.

VCD/DVD have campy videos that play in the background and take longer to que up on my players.

SOME DVDs have videos... some are just like cdgs.

And by far, the cdg market is the best!

Ahhh.... the pains of inexperience....

Ok, so the couple DVD's I've used have campy videos in the background... BTW, I usually tell the performer to ignore them...

It's nice to know that there are some out there that don't have the videos.

Just so you know, the DVD's take so long to cue up I actually use another monitor for my personal use to que them up while I have someone singing (I split the video signals from all my sources so I can select one locally and another to the singer).

The bottom line is there are KILLER songs on vcd that are not on cdg or dvd. Anyone in the biz knows what I'm talking about. So use them all. ALL I say.....good night me sleepy.

I prefer cdg to vcd butonly because i know how to make a back up copyof my cdg but even better now is the mp3+g player format/however at gigs i have three players racked up to my amp covering all options.Vcd is cheaper but cdg usually has the latest songs out to date and i stick with proven golden oldies on vcd.

I can't stand the VCD's with the video in the background. It's impossible for me not to feel like a big cheeseball when I'm up there with one playing on the monitors.

FYI - You can copy the VCD's with almost any copy program to standard CDR Media. If you want to do completely on a laptop the .DAT files on the VCD (numbered sequentially) are the video. Copy them to you laptop and rename with MPG replacing the DAT (someplayer will handle the DAT extension, but doing this makes it more likely to work). If the sizes are too large (they don't get any smaller) you can always use Dr. Divx or something similar to resample them to a smaller size on your laptop for playback.

you can also add an additional harddrive to your laptop or pc system... I found a super sweet deal at pcgigs.com on external usb cases... combine that with a regular internal drive (newegg.com and tigerdirect.com are really good places to get good specials all the time), and you have a large hard drive that hooks up to your pc!!

Thanks everyone. All good points. I too agree that CD+G's have better selection and load up faster. However the particular 40 disc set that I'm considering buying is available in both CD+G and VCD format for the same price. I just need to make a decision for this particular set. I'm not too worried about load up time since the time for a new singer to come up would be longer than cue up time anyway. I guess what I'm worried about is whether or not the video would take away from the performance or add to it. This is a Spanish set and I was thinking that the video might give the non-Spanish speakers something more to look at to maybe feel a little more included, if that makes any sense.

I have some VCD's in my collection (Chinese music) and I don't like them. However, it seems that VCD's are the standard in Asia.

Their menus are cumbersome to navigate, not even like a DVD. There are often two or three screens to scroll through, etc.

The videos are neither here nor there...regular karaoke folks raised on
CDG's will find them a bit odd at first, but I was brought up on the old Pioneer laser discs so it was nothing new to me.

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