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+g

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+g (you guessed it, g stands for graphics). As mp3 is to music cd's, so mp3+g 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+ 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