Karaoke Forums

I am thinking of purchasing Microstudio and Hoster from MTU. On their website they list recognized drives under each product. Can I assume that if you have a drive listed in their Microstudio columns then you will also have a drive compatible with Hoster? Or is it the other way around.

If your drive is listed in there recognized drive compatability list, then you are good to go.

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Well I guess my confused. There are many drives for the Hoster program but not all of them are listed under the heading Microstudio. For instance the Microstudio listing does not include the Plextor 716UF. Am I missing something?

All their programs will work with the drives listed in their compatability list, they wouldn't make one program work with one & not the other - bad business.  The site might not be updated.  The 716uf does work with Microstudio & Hoster.

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Perfect. That is what I needed to know. As always thanks for the info.

Just to be positive myself, here is a thread from mtu forum regarding compatability.

http://forum.mtu.com/showthread.php?t=7 ... ight=716uf

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This is more of a tech software followup and "out of curiosity" question I guess. I downloaded the trial Microstudio onto one of my computers. I didn't have my 716UF attached. The program reports that my computer does not have any compatible drives for karaoke. However, when I download a trial copy of Power CD+G Burner it will rip and burn with the computers existing drives.

I have the Plextor 716uf and can tell you it works with Hoster, but not with my older version of microstudio (not sure why). In researching this very subject I found a lot has to do with who made the product. Some of Plextor's products all made by other manufactors and from what read dont always include a key part that allows hoster to recognize it. If you buy it directly from plextor if it says its CDG read/write hoster will recognize it.

Yes I have read that on their forum. But what I am curious about is why does Microstudio only recognize certain manufacturers of drives in order to rip and burn? With Power CD+G it would appear that you can accomplish this task with any drive. As I stated before I am asking just to gain some knowledge. I will ultimately be going the MTU product solution based upon previous discussions and recommendations. But it does seem odd to me that this task can be done with a $30.00 software only solution.

Mainly because they only program for drives that will yield good results.  Which a few years back was only a handful of drives.  Also they need to encode the software with the drivers from manufacturers.  Their newer programs are being re-encoded with new standards that most cd drives will work - some still will work better than others.
Some of the other programs already jumped on that bandwagon, doesn't mean you'll get perfect copies out of them.  I have a couple of drives that work good with CD Clone, but Win CDG from Goldenhawk & CDG Ripper from Tricerasoft won't recognize the drives to be able to read cdg - so it's not just MTU.  Oddly enough these drives will work with Hoster.

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Well as my father would always tell me if you want the facts get from the horses mouth. You should email MTU support directly to find out why there program is setup the way it is. Like i mentioned before plextor indicated to me during the production of their units they configure it so MTU products recognize it. They also said that some of their units are manufactor by other company's (with plextors permission) and they do not always configure it to where an MTU product will recognize it. Again, if you buy directly from plextor or through MTU it will work with their programs. Why they do it the way they do it? Couldn't tell ya but more than likely the horse can.

Hoster has recently had the disk i/o interface replaced with one that will read most drives.

Microstudio has not had this change yet, and from what I understand, It is being revamped with the new interface now. Yes, Microstudio has a limited number of drives it will work on at present.

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I recognize that I am not stating something that you pros don't already know. But for us newbies here is what I can state from first hand experience. I spent the past few days making backups of about 100 CDG's using Power CD+G Burner. I was able to do this using the R/W drives that came in the 3 computers that I have networked. None of these drives were in the MTU list and in fact they seem to be generic label drives. Then I was able to burn to my laptop these CDG's using Audiograbber. I did not have one CDG that failed either of these tasks on the first try. Also, only about 10% of my CDG's required me to enter manually the CDG Disk, Title, Artist info because Audiograbber had it in their database. I was able to easily copy to clipboard and paste this data to Excel for the songbook. Cost for this effort $29.95 for Power CD+G Burner and $35.00 for blank Sony CD's and jewel cases.

As mentioned in an earlier post, we do have a new I/O interface in Hoster that works with many newer, more specifically "non-Plextor" drives as well as the old ones.

The 716UF does work with Microstudio and has for a year or more. You must have picked up an old version of the demo. It needs to be at least version 2.612 or newer. The latest currently is 2.613.

This should take care of the drive not working, however, if you are still having trouble please pm or post it here. You can find the latest demo version of Microstudio at: http://download.mtu.com/mstudiodemosetup.exe

DougC

Not too happy with MTU right now.

Forget about contacting them, they don't reply.

be careful on posting facts... they threatened to sue a former member here for slander when they quoted their story of their purchase of Hoster, and how upset they were at the customer service. He eventually had to retract his own words... or face their reprisals!!

I am sorry to hear that you feel this way. You can try to contact me with your problem and I can make sure your problem gets the attention it deserves.

You can email me through the sales email from the link below.
http://mtu.com/support/contact-mtu.htm

Best Regards.
DougC

[quote="knightshow @ Tue Aug 01, 2006 8:05 pm"]be careful on posting facts... they threatened to sue a former member here for slander when they quoted their story of their purchase of Hoster, and how upset they were at the customer service. He eventually had to retract his own words... or face their reprisals!![/quote]

Ridiculous! Slander maybe, but fact????? Look at both sides before you make such an asinine assumption.

Calm down dougc. Don't get so defensive.

Here is what happened to my with Microstudio. I had to reinstall my OS because Microsoft system restore didn't actually restore my system after recovering from a violent attack by a nasty little virus. Then I decided I would try to see if my laptop would be a good alternative for reading CD+Gs, so I uninstalled it from my PC and installed it on the laptop. It worked but the laptop was too slow to make it practical. I then uninstalled it from my laptop and put it back on my PC. I just upgraded my OS to XP from WIN2k after wiping my hard drive so it was actually a full install. When I went to reinstall Microstudio, it told me that I had reached the maximum number of times it could be installed. I'm out $40 because I didn't remember seeing that anywhere.

I sent an email to support but got no response of any kind. I will send another but it won't help as I have worn out my welcome with MTU. I don't see why it is necessary to limit the software to three installs since it can't be installed on more than one machine at a time anyway.

Some kind of response would have been really appreciated. I will try again but I know it won't go any better this time. I'm not putting any blame on MTU. It's not your fault that I screwed-up.

It just occurred to me that the email might have been lost. I didn't send it from their website, I sent it from my email client to the email address that the software said to send it to. Since my regular email server was not working right, DNS transfer kind of stuff, I used another email account. My email might have been tossed because it was not recognized.

I have a weird idea of customer service. I went from restaurant management straight into tech support for a company that everyone has heard of. I still offered the same service that I learned in restaurants. I got a lot of commendations for that. After a few years of tech support I quit because we techies had gotten a reputation because of just a few who didn't belong with the customers.

I don't want to group MTU in with that bunch. Money is hard to come by these days. People get a little sensitive when their money is messed with, you may have noticed this.

I will admit to being a PBCAC. I need to find out if it's too late to do anything about it. I am a paying customer and a human being. If MTU can't help me I at least want to know that so I can move on.