Karaoke Forums

I'm surprized the CAVs CDG SP was not mentioned.
I plays MP3+G and the CAVs format. It is a very easy to use player and it works well. It is also MUCH lower cost than Hoster (which I have also tried..and own).
MTU does offer good support however, everytime I need to access a song...CAVs is always my first choice (I also have Tierrasoft Mimic and Swift..they would be my second choices)..the HOSTER has the songbook feature which is nice.
I am looking now at a beta version of a program called PL-Director that can use CAVs and Windows Media PLayer to play songs..it works with Microsoft EXCEL songbooks and allows the KJ to keep track in a spreadsheet the singer, the rotation and round, the song and the song number...the KJ can enter either the song number or the song title...it looks it up in the songbook and plays the songs automatically with programmable delays and a splash screen the shows the audience who the singer/song is and who are the next sceduled singers are. It is pretty neat.

What you might not be aware of is that the previous version of S&D relied upon a well known authentication mechanism to remove the time limitation (trial). As the product gained popularity it was of course cracked and that 'crack' posted to the internet. When your software that charge very little for is suddenly available to anyone for free it's likely to make you unhappy. Likely as a result of the crack posting there were changes made and the post below (quoted from S&D's website):

"If you have installed any version of Sax & Dottys Show Hoster before this release, we recommend that you upgrade to version V2.1.34 immediately. Please be aware that a reimport of tracks will be needed after install and also a re-registration. Please see the downloads page."

Remember, this is speculation on my part, but I see updates often after a 'crack' becomes available for software. Given the low price for S&D it's a shame that anyone would resort to stealing the software. I'm still reviewing different pieces of software and hardware that would be best for my application and stumbed on the crack for S&D's previous release.

BTW, I do pay for my software and music... I do network/computer security work for a living and knowledge of the 'darkside' is a necessity...

The main reason I evolved to S&D it works with zip files and for the first time in 2 or 3 years my books reflect exactly what I've actually got. When new songs are added the data base is rebuilt and the export to excel is automaticaly updated. However I would be real happy with a Winamp plugin that would work with zipped files...

A couple of weeks ago a kj buddy called about 8:10 and said one of his eons is bad can I borrow one real quick? Mine were in storage but I did have a jbl 10 handy. We hooked it up and it popped just like a bad speaker would. Lannie was running Cavs Sp player and I know that it takes more system resources esp with slide show. So i shifted over to Winamp and the pops and drop outs decreased to almost nothing. Next day I went back down did a disc cleanup defragged and a few other things and was back to normal. He uses winamp now mainly because of the 2 screen feature..

I'm currently using Sax & Dotty's Karaoke Show Hoster, but none of the available packages do what I want (or aren't worth their price tag), so I'm writing my own.

As for the arguement between MP3 or WMA, most people in a noisy bar will never notice the difference. MP3 happens to be the defacto standard even though WMA is technically superior. Of course Betamax was technically superior to VHS too, but Sony didn't have the market cap (or monopoly if you chose) of Microsoft to push it as far into the mainstream as WMA has. My opinion is that so long as it does what you want and need its ok.