Karaoke Forums

The LOML, LOML+, and OML licenses--including the license you linked--all contain restrictions to private, non-commercial use by the end user.



And he is absolutely 100% wrong on that point, as a matter of black-letter law.

However, a good-faith purchaser might be able to eliminate some liability by claiming to be an "innocent" infringer. That does not completely eliminate liability, but it does reduce it significantly.

since we're touching on this innocent infringer topic; how guilty is someone who makes some homemade karaoke tracks from backing tracks from, let's say, Karaokeversion or I-tunes? Who would be the entity that would target him as a source of income for making tracks that are never sold and only sung by the person who made them. Some KJs on the board seem to think that they could find themselves in a bunch of trouble for playing a home made karaoke track during their show. What is your professional opinion on the possibilities of a KJ getting sued if one of their singers brought in a homemade karaoke track and sang it at their show? Who would be the plaintiff if any, in a case of this nature and who would be the defendant? Would it be the KJ or the person who brought in the homemade track, or both? Could it possibly be worth their time and effort to keep a few home made tracks out of a bar or restaurant? Just wonderin'. I've never had a KJ deny me using a homemade track except for one and his reason for refusing to play it was that he thought there could be a virus on the disc and it would cause his laptop to crash. Other than that guy, who had a HUGE library of songs that usually screams out "Pirate" no other KJ that had the capability to play a karaoke disc has ever told me that he wouldn't play any homemade track that I had made.

Here's another interesting question for you. Would Sound Choice be interested in buying all of my homemade tracks and then license them as their own if they were ever to get back into the karaoke producing business again? All the musical work would already be done. They would just have to do some paper work. Then maybe all of those KJs that can't play discs might buy them and add them to their system?

Bruce, are they full scores including strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion as many bands record with all these instruments for studio work.

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You can be strange but not a stranger

Yes most of them have the full band playing the song with background singers as well. At karaoke version you can buy the track in a customizable format. It allows you to take out any instruments or vocals that you want to remove. This allows you to make an acoustic version of a song , if you wish, by cutting out everything but the acoustic guitars and the banjo and or the violin. You can make one song in ten different ways if you want to.

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I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

And those tracks are very popular for solo performers Most of their custom tracks are perfectly mixed for live performances as opposed to the SC tracks that are poorly mixed and have too much of that karaoke sounding...

They must have changed their position in the last year.

They are now connected to Selectatrack through their software as well.
He made the comment (something to the effect) they have enough home users that use the PCDJ that the Karaoke Locker is geared more for them.

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LIKE Lonman on Facebook - Lonman Productions Karaoke & my main site via my profile!

With the exception of the possibility of a Cease & Desist ( and of course financial liability if it is ignored), we disagree.

I DO agree that there may be SOME liability to the disc based host, however my point was that a disc based host has LESS exposure than a media shifted or download host- by a long shot.

The point is that a business owner should LIMIT liability to the very least exposure possible.

Again, I do not, did not, and will not say that ANY host- disc based or not- is 100% safe from any liability.

As for Cue's quotes taken from my posts, I guess I should have added "most" to each and every sentence in that regard, though I thought it was understood....

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"No Contests, No Divas, Just A Good Time!"

" Disc based and loving it..."

As a Karma user, I can tell you you're wrong about 3 of your 4 "con" assertions. All the scroll bars work. If you were talking the "scroller" (which is not called a scroll bar. Scroll bars are those things that let you scroll through a list), it does work. It can show the singers queued songs titles in the next singers display as well but you simply have to turn that option on in the settings. The scroller will show the current song playing, but if you were talking about wanting the queued songs to display on the scroller next to the singer's name like on the NSD, no it will not do that, but I have to agree with the decision not to enable that as it would take far too long for someone to read the entire scroller in a large rotation if each singer displayed also showed the song they were singing. It's better to only display that on the next singers display between performances. It can be also set to only show singers who have songs queued up but again you have to turn it on in the settings (this feature is fairly new so I don't blame you for not knowing that one). The only one you're correct about is that it doesn't have the ability to show a custom background behind the cdg lyrics while a song is playing, and to that I say this. Really? While a singer is singing, the singer is concentrating on the words, and some people in the crowd may also be looking at the lyrics, but while the song is playing, do you honestly think people are trying to look through the lyrics to figure out what the picture behind it is? People come to drink, sing, and have a good time. If there's a person in the crowd who is actually disappointed that there wasn't a pretty picture behind the lyrics during a song, that's one very nerdy anti-social person who is NOT going to make or break your show and certainly isn't making any judgment about whether or not to come to your next show based on such a trivial matter. Latshaw has explained that it could be implemented, but tests showed that depending on the picture chosen, it can actually make it difficult to read depending on the contrast between the color of the lyrics and the colors in the background picture. CDG manufacturers design all of their lyric screens with a good combination of foreground and background colors with thought placed on readability. Karma will display a custom picture between songs or during DJ music, and the next singers display can actually be set to have a transparent background so the picture you choose can be seen behind the words on the next singers display. The reason this is allowed is because you can set a color for the words on the next singers display so there will never be an issue of changing contrast, since unlike the CDGs, these words will never change color.

Needless to say, I disagree with your assessment. Karma is extremely rock solid and very well designed just like all of Latshaw's products.

On a side note, regardless of whatever app you choose, I really think you should take the time to unzip all your files. They don't save that much HD space because the MP3s are already compressed. It adds about a second to the load time of songs because they all have to be unzipped before playing. It slows down file maintenance and any renaming program for the same reason. Zip files have a far higher chance of corruption than unzipped files. Depending on where the file was acquired, it could have different zip compression schemes that aren't supported by all programs. I could go on and on, but basically the reasons for unzipping far outweigh the old single reason for zipping in the first place. Zipping MP3+Gs together was invented for making downloads easier. That's it. Leaving them that way on your HD is pointless, time consuming, and asking for problems.

Anyhow, that's my two cents.

latishaw makes EXCELLENT products there is no doubt about that. I could not function without my copy of kj file manager.

I also would have bought their song book maker if I hadn't already purchased something else before.

but I refuse to purchase Karma because it seems like the kind of program that might actually require support every once and a while, and that is the one area that is SEVERELY lacking.

just my two cents, for what its worth

-James

hope your copy of karaoke file manager doesn't corrupt zips.

aside from that I can't live without their file syncronizer. it's made making a backup drive easy.

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The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I am in my 3rd year of using Karma. To me I is the best application out there.

Compuhost is way to busy for me.
Sax and Dotty's is a kluged together set of applications.
Everything else I have tried just doesn't have a decent interface, didn't work, or gave me fits.

Karma is simple, low overhead, and contrary to one the posts above, I have never required support for it. It even works with Windows 8 just fine. Every host I have hired has picked up Karma in less than an hour.

To be fair though, it is like any other application people use regularly, once you get used to doing things a certain way, everything else seems difficult. I just think I was fortunate to start off with Karma.

There are those that swear by CompuHost while I think it is way too complicated (and expensive).

-Chris


-Chris

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-Chris

There's not 40,000 - more like 34,000. Many songs exist that are duplicates, but are spelled a little differently. I also "downloaded" the KJ Pro database and tested it with my "duplicate song finder software" and 34K is more like it - and mind you, that includes a lot of European Music made only by the likes of Sunfly & Zoom.

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I'm not a cheerleader, but I paid for my pom poms with my own money!

so these pirates that claim to have 250,000 songs have over 200,000 duplicates???? WOW!!!

So they really only need about 10% of the hard drive space that they are using if they were to get rid of all of the duplicates? 100 GB instead of needing a 1TB Hard drive is a big difference. I can't imagine the time it would take to go through a collection of that size to delete all of the duplicate tracks. I guess that's why the pirates don't bother to do it. I was at one guys show who had a laptop set up as his song book and he must have had at least 50 different versions of the song "MY WAY". You could sing a different version each week for a whole year and never sing with the same track twice.

That's correct. I have software to go through and identify duplicate songs, and move them to another folder, if desired. For instance, if you wanted to add another library. The best way to begin doing so is using the duplicate songs from your primary library.

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I'm not a cheerleader, but I paid for my pom poms with my own money!

I am not saying I agree or disagree with what i am about to bring up, just that I think about these kinds of things because this is a business to me.

There is a basic usage issue that comes to mind with what you propose.

If a CDG has 15 Tracks on it, those 15 tracks "technically" are bound to each other because of the original medium on which it was presented. Even though ripping them down allows for a single track to be separated from the rest, it seems to me that violates the spirit of "intended use" as determined by a manufacturer.

So it may not be as simple as breaking out duplicates into different libraries since you would possibly have to break out all of the tracks on a disc to the same library.

-Chris

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-Chris

I interpreted 1:1 as meaning "For every song offered, a hard copy of that song exists". It does not mention splitting, simply that for every (1) song, (1) hard copy exists.

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I'm not a cheerleader, but I paid for my pom poms with my own money!

Just saw this post. You think Compuhost is too busy? Seriously? I think it is very well laid out. List of singers, singer's qued songs, filler music/eq/audio bits, video bits. Those last 4 are some of the tabs. So when you have everything set up, you don't see it all at once. I use a mouse and I can navigate very very quickly from any part of the screen to the other in micro seconds. I can add a singer in five seconds flat, I can add their song in five seconds flat, I can move their songs up and down in a split second. I don't see the thought process behind "too busy".

As far as being expensive, yes it is. I want the best. To me it was the best. No need to look around now, I have money invested in it and it does what I want it to do and as I said, I can move through the screens and tabs very quickly.

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KingBing Entertainment C'mon Up! I have a song for you!!! [font=MS Sans Serif][/font]

Everyone likes what they like.

Karma has no tabs. It is all on one, main screen. The subtle difference being that singer history requires a double-click on a singer. but I don't think displaying the singer's history on the main screen is important during normal operations.

Not that anything less than 5 seconds really matters, but Karma auto-fills as you type a singer name so adding a singer that has been to the show before is 2-3 secs at best. Adding a brand new person takes as long as it takes to type their name correctly.

Adding a song to a singer in Karma is a matter of typing a few key words/letters then drag and drop on to the singer. Something I can do in 2-3 secs in most cases.

Karma has Hot-Key support which allows me to use mouse or keyboard for practically any function.

But one of my favorite aspects of Karma is the speed of the program itself. I can re-index my entire karaoke catalog 3 times or more during an average karaoke song. CompuHost struggles to complete this even once in the same amount of time. Since I often buy songs for people on the fly, it is important for me to be able to download, rename, and add the tracks to my Karma library all while a singer is on stage. In my experience, CompuHost doesn't handle this nearly as efficiently as Karma.

Oh yea.....Karma costs WAY less (I have 4 licenses for Karma @ $99 each vs $149 (on sale) or $179 (reg price) each for CompuHost.

Finally - CompuHost crashes way too often. Just in the process of writing this post and confirming timings, playing a few tracks and fiddling with CompuHost (latest version) it crashed on my 4 times. Karma has crashed on me fewer times than that in 3 years.

-Chris

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-Chris