Karaoke Forums

hi all.
 i am a newbie, and am currently using sax and dottie, which is fine because it plays the music in zip form. my problem is i would also like to record cd's for singers and use them as a demo for promotion. Is there a program i can do this with that will still play the cdg files in zip form like s&d does
Thanks
Dennis

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My heart is steadfast,Oh Lord;
I will sing and make music with all my soul. Psalms 108:1

Sax and Dotties is not the player, it is cxtually WINAMP.

TO do what you are saying, the easiest way, is UNZIP the files you want to use, and play them directly in WINAMP.

aha the simple way is always the best
thanks again
Dennis

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My heart is steadfast,Oh Lord;
I will sing and make music with all my soul. Psalms 108:1

I just pulled my hosting software off the market last week and so I have no personal interest in what anyone does or the software that they use.  However, I am just now putting the finishing touches on the CDG file interpreter for my new hosting software and am painfully aware of how a CDG file works.  I assure you that you may take this as gospel.  If you zip your CDG files you're an idiot.

Currious to know why is that?
I must be a BIG idiot.....

rox box will play your zipped files and record at the same time

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"Be who you are and say what you feel... Because those that matter... Don't mind...And those that mind... Don't matter."

me also

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"Be who you are and say what you feel... Because those that matter... Don't mind...And those that mind... Don't matter."

Right...well... I worded that very badly.  I did not mean to offend anyone, so to those who might have taken offence, I am sorry.

However, computers make mistakes.  They make millions of mistakes a second. Some very clever fellows invented many error correction methods and incorporated them in your computer, but some mistakes still get through.  Everytime you process a file you exponentially increase the chance of error.  If you zip your karaoke files you are processing them an additional step and for what?  An additional 30% of hard drive space.  That may seem like a lot but it's really not.  MP3 files are already as compressed as they get pretty much, you will gain about 8% by zipping them.  This file gets rewritten from zip back to MP3 and then from MP3 to PCM so the sound card knows what to do with it.  You would increase risk of failure for 8% why?
The CDG file on the other hand compresses a lot.  That's because about 75% of it is garbage and the intrerpeter throws it away once it's read.  But lose one of those garbage bytes and the file doesn't play because the command bytes are in the wrong place.  Now the quarter of the file that is left has the graphic information stored in bits (not bytes, bits.  No chance for error correction) and it creates an immage 300 X216 pixels which for most people would be a little blotch up in the corner of your screen if displayed at actual size.  This image is magnified so your singer can see it but that turns a one pixel error into a big nasty rectangle that just sits there.  The rectangular blotch doesn't go away because the most common command in CDG directs that a new color drawn to the screen is dependent on the existing color.  You've all seen that kind of blotch that doesn't go away.
This is an error prone graphis format to begin with.  It was invented by the bright boys and girls at Sony/Phillips as a way to get graphics information onto an audio CD that was already full.  It was not intended for computer based karaoke.

And so, taking the above information into consideration, and knowing that bad graphics will drive away customers and cost you money, and knowing that harddrives these days are huge and cheap.  I have come to conclude that
if you zip your CDG files, you're an idiot.

Ok, I be an idiot....

Yes all the tings you say are true, but the ODDS of it actually screwing up a song/graphics to a point that the "general public" notices has to be astronimical.  I've benn running with ZIPPED MP3+CDG files for 2 years, and the only problems I have had was from bad rips.  I have never had a song "go bad" from zipping/unzipping.

Just my experince, that's all.

Base jumping with and without a parachute is identical except for the eventual and very predictable outcome.  Do you really need the extra little bit of disk space?

No I don't need the extra disc space, but like you said UNZIPPING can casue errors (even though I have never had an error), and therfore going through all my songs, unzipping them, checking to see if they work, is NOT worth my time.  I'll stik with the zipped songs, since I have NEVER had an erro from unzipping files (karaoke or not).

They have to unzip everytime you use one.  Why not unzip them all one last time and solve the problem before you have it?  

"I don't need to change the oil in my car. It's got 30,000 miles on it and works perfectly.  I'm not going to worry about it."

Trust me, I do get where you are comming from, but in reality, what are the odds of a song actually screwing up to the point of it being useless, from unzipping?

If I was scared of "what could hapen"  I would never go outside in fear of being stunk my lightning.

And even if the song did screw up to the point oif no use, just que it in agian, and re-play it.  Now the ODDS of it happening twice in a row have to be a BILLION to one.  Just a guess on the odds.

A billion to one.  And how many instructions per second does your computer process?  A Gigahert is what exactly?  And if the file that is messed up is your unzipper?  My point being, that zipping is a completely unnecessary process that taxes your processor and increases the likelyhood of error particularly in a fragile file format such as CDG.  It is unwise.  
I suspect that the only reason that you did it in the first place was because someone you respected told you to, or you were using S&Ds which really doesn't like anything but zipped files.  What you do with your computer is your business.  But....Geeeeeeeeeze!  To quote my father which I rarely do except for this phrase, "The best way to solve a problem is by not making it in the first place."

I ran S&D for a year or two and Roxbox for about 2 years I have never had a problem with the dynamic procees of unzipping files... But due to my kj library I will not use anything that doesnt process zips..

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I would have to disagree with your assessment here. ZIP is a nonlossy compression. The odds of you losing your data due to bad bit in unzipping is much less than your losing a sector in your hard drive and losing an entire file or even an entire file tree, thus making the OS useless. The odds of a hardware that has moving part breaking has much better chance than something like zip losing a file, which means you would lose the data wether zipped or not. I would worry more about backing up your data than worry about unzipping it.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

Hardware failures are hardware failures, that risk exists with or without zipping.
My original opoint being that CDG is a fragile format and you only have to change one bit to mess the whole thing up. So, if you understood that....


If I understand you correctly, it is more likely to lose a harddrive than to lose a single bit.  The act of processing and rewriting a 2Mb+ file, to that quite suspect hard drive, in a completely unnecessary step, is completely risk free?  By your reasoning, nothing ever happens to your data so there's no point in backing it up so long as that harddrive is working?  Slapping yourself in the face only stings for a minute, but why do it at all?

The problem is that your assumption of single bit failure means the whole thing goes kaput. Most modern compression scheme have means to protect its. They have ECC and check sum algorithm that will correct up to 1 or 2 bit failure within 512 bytes (or 4k bits) of data at least. Some will correct more if the failed bits are next to each other. So, as your calculations goes, for a 2mb file, you can have 256 to 512 bits of data missing, as long as they are not all next to each other, they can be corrected without any error. The chance of something that is going wrong is, as I said, maybe 10 times less likely than losing your entire disk drive. I wouldn't worry aobut it.

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Seize the day and SING!!!

I think we are arguing apples and oranges here.  Yes, zipping is a well thought out compression format.  No, it is not perfectly executed by all computers at all times.
Yes, if one bit is out of whack, the whole thing goes kaput  in the CDG file and the output on the screen is degraded, and it stays degraded because it's a one bit graphic XORed against the previous bit specified in a CLUT.  Subjecting data to unnecessary processing is not unhealthy to it, how exactly?  Zipping karaoke files is unnecessary and therefore stupid, unless you will argue that computers work perfectly.  This extra processing, is really entertaining, and that's why it's a good idea.

I had a nice time singing to 366 people at a dine & dance and my zip files didnt miss a beat

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"Be who you are and say what you feel... Because those that matter... Don't mind...And those that mind... Don't matter."