Karaoke Forums

This is one reason I am switching to Compuhost when I set up my next laptop for karaoke. It has the ability to save song counts, and to save singer's songs for use on subsequent nights.

I am a programmer, and I tried to open up a dialog with MTU about writing Perl tools to work with their stuff. For example, I wrote a tool which allows you to create a spreadsheet from the KMA files, and then edit the titles in the spreadsheet and batch update all of the KMA files. I tried to get them to tell me the format of their .lst files so that I could write a tool to create them based on as web form (for a user-input kiosk), but they didn't respond. Basically, I was offering to write tools to make their stuff better and they were not at all receptive. That is their right, but the lack of progress on their software is clear to me. To a programmer, the way their user interface is all over the map makes it obvious that they don't have a software library they are building on, they just stitch together new pieces of code every time.

The completeness of Compuhost is outstanding compared to Hoster. I like the basic screen in Hoster a lot, and I like their key changer and sound. But Compuhost sounds good too, and it has so much more than Hoster. I believe they will very soon have a web-based kiosk capability, and if I start using their stuff I suspect they might be receptive to working with me to create web-based tools that allow hosts to have singers search and input songs prior to arriving for the show.

This internet kiosk idea sounds like a good one.  Could you expand on that a little?

I have been looking at CompUHost lately as it has some neat features but I'm unsure of their customer support. I currently use MTU and know that I can get my problems or questions supported. They all have their pluses and minuses, wading through them can be tough as everyone has different needs.

They do have some pretty cool features, I like the idea of being able to send a graphic - ie Happy Birthday, Anniversary, Star Is Born, etc..to the singer/audience screen.  Also being able to have a history of what was sung each night.  I do prefer the kma format over standard mp3 based systems which the sound quality is important to me.

They do have some pretty cool features, I like the idea of being able to send a graphic - ie Happy Birthday, Anniversary, Star Is Born, etc..to the singer/audience screen.  Also being able to have a history of what was sung each night.  I do prefer the kma format over standard mp3 based systems which the sound quality is important to me.

Not a valid argument. KMA is actually based on the "WMA" file format, preset and NOT configurable at 192 bitrate. CompuHost fully supports the "WMA+G" format, except you can designate a much higher bitrate, all the way up to 320, actually resulting in a BETTER audio quality than KMA. The only reason MTU created the KMA format is to keep users bound to Hoster, without the ability to move to other hosting products. I see that they have recently introduced a file format converter, probably as a result of user pressure, however for MTU users that have ripped an extensive library to KMA, this may still be an exhausting task.

tbreen