The
low-down on Karaoke Songs - the best and the
worst!
The question I get asked most
often with regard to karaoke songs is whether
or not it is possible to get music by the
orginal artist. Due to licensing and copyright
issues the simple answer is no.... BUT you will
find some disc producers who go to great
lengths to reproduce a sound so close to the
original that it is almost impossible to tell
the difference. You will also find others who
produce a one dimensional synthesised version
and believe it or not there is usually not much
difference in the price. As well as a choice of
karaoke song quality you also have a choice of
disc format.
Don't forget
to open the Karaoke
Glossary if
there's any term you are unsure of.
Karaoke Song
Discs
There must be
hundreds of producers of karaoke songs. The
problem is you don't really know what you are
getting unless you can listen to a sample
before you buy. Are you going to get a full
orchestral version recorded by real musicians
or something that reminds you of a mobile phone
ring tone (BEFORE they went polyphonic!)? If
you cannot get a sample before you buy you
could use StreamKaraoke.com
and hear (and sing along
to!) the whole song.
There are a
number of main disc manufacturers and
information on them can be found by
CLICKING HERE TO FIND OUT MORE
ABOUT WHICH KARAOKE DISC PRODUCER IS RIGHT FOR
YOU
Customised Karaoke
discs
Another issue
I am often asked about is where you can buy
customised karaoke discs. You will often find
that the song you want is on a disc with
another 11 songs that are of absolutely no
interest to you. There are now a number of
suppliers who will do this. Instead of buying a
12 song disc with maybe just 1 or 2 songs you
like, you can select which songs you would like
on your very own customised cdg and you pay per
song. So instead of buying a cdg for $35 US(18
GB) and using 2 songs, you could buy a
customised disc of 12 of your favourite songs
for about $5 US (2.50 GB) per song. You
obviously pay more for a customised disc but
save about 80% of the cost of each useable
song. A great customised cdg service is offered
by mycdg.com. they will
even customise a Sound Choice, Sunfly or
Chartbuster disc for you so you can be sure
of track quality. CLICK
HERE for
details.
Choosing a Disc
Format
Clearly the
capabilities of your disc player will be the
main influence on the type of disc to buy. It's
no use buying karaoke dvd's if your machine
won't play them!But what if your machine plays
2 or more formats? Which format is best? There
really is no definitive answer to this - all
formats have good points and the odd
drawback.
CDG or cd+g
discs
Still the
daddy of karaoke discs and by far the most
widely available format. A cdg is basically an
ordinary music cd without lead vocals but with
an extra graphics code written onto the
subchannel of the disc in order to produce the
on screen lyrics. That's why the music can be
played on any cd player but you need a cdg
player to get the lyrics. As the most widely
available format you are bound to find a
version of a particular song which is to your
liking. Furthermore, as far as I know cdg is
the only format for customised karaoke discs.
There are though a couple of downsides to
cdg's. Because of the size of each file, you
can only fit a maximum of about 12 songs on
each disc and some only have 6-8. This makes
storage and transport of all your discs a bit
of a problem and it means ejecting and
inserting a disc pretty much everytime you sing
a different song.
Neo+g
discs
The very
latest format, similar to CDG but capable of
storing up to 2000 songs on a single disc and
giving the ability to search through the song
list on screen. A NEO+g player is required and
currently there are few on the
market.
scdg
One answer to
this has been the development of scdg (the s
stands for super). This allows thousands of
tracks to be put on the one disc - sounds
great? Well yeah but no but yeah. Again there
are a couple of drawbacks. Firstly, as this
format is in the very early stages, very few
machines have scdg compatibility and secondly
what happens if you damage, scratch or lose
your one and only scdg disc. (You could of
course try making a backup as described here
but I am not sure that the cdg ripping software
out there is capable of copying scdg's yet.) My
advice would be to wait a while and see how the
scdg concept develops before jumping
in.
mp3+gTM
The explosion
of music on the internet resulted in thousands
of mp3 download sites, giving people immediate
access to millions of song tracks. It made
sense then that a karaoke version of mp3 would
follow. Hence we have mp3+gTM (you
guessed it, g stands for graphics). As mp3 is
to music cd's, so mp3+gTM is to
cdg's. So it is now possible to download
thousands of karaoke songs from the internet.
Even better you will find that there are now
quite a few players on the market which will
play both mp3+g and cdg which means karaoke
using mp3+gTM does not have to be
confined to your pc.
dvd and vcd
Now that
nearly everyone has a dvd player, it made sense
to develop karaoke songs utilising the dvd
format. This also allows film sequences as well
as lyrics to appear on screen. Again this
format is in the early stages, especially in
the use if DivX technology so the choice of
songs is limited but as this improves karaoke
on dvd will I believe fight with NEO+g to
overtake the CDG as the main type of
karaoke media.
midi
Midi files
are computer or synthesiser generated tracks
which can be played either on your pc, a midi
player or a midi compatible
keyboard/synthesiser. For a discussion about
midi karaoke and links to midi
downloads
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