Karaoke Tool Box

Going Digital (part 2)

In the last issue we discussed building your digital dream machine PC. You installed Windows XP, a multi-channel sound card like the Maya 44, one Gigabyte of memory, a huge hard drive, and a CDG compatible CD-RW like the Plextor 40/12/40a.

Now you need to get all that wonderful music onto your hard drive. A single CD may contain up to 700 Megabytes so simply copying it will end up filling your hard drive very quickly. What you need to do is reduce the file size by compressing it. If you installed WinCDG Pro ( www.tricerasoft.com ) like we discussed in previous issues, you have that capability built into the program. Here is how to use that feature:

Extracting Song Files

Open the WinCDG program and click on the small arrow in the upper left corner. This will open the 'Menu' dialog box. From there, choose 'KMF Creator Lite'. Now you are presented with 3 'Tabs'. The first is 'From CD'. This is where you will create compressed karaoke files from your original CD, but first, we need to do some 'Setup' which is the third Tab. Click on 'Setup'.
Setup

Under 'CD Extraction', make sure your CD-RW drive is selected. For users with more than one drive, select the drive that is CD+G compatible, like the Plextor 40/12/40A. The 'Mode' should be 'MMC Standard'. Then, on the next line under 'MP3 Options', select 'Blade' as the MP3 Encoder. Set the sample rate at 44100 and the bit rate at 128.

Under 'Paths / File Options', you need to select a directory for your new song files. You must also select a temporary directory as a 'working' directory for scratch files. This directory will not hold anything unless an operation is aborted. I would suggest creating a directory called 'Convert' and a subdirectory called 'Temp'. Click the small box to the right of the path name dialog box to select the appropriate directory.

From CD

On the first tab 'From CD', select 'Read CD'. Make sure you have your CD in the drive first. To extract all the songs on the disk, click the box that says 'All'. Next you need to decide if you want to use the open standard 'MP3+G' or WinCDG Pro's proprietary standard 'KMF'.

MP3+G format actually creates two separate files for each song. One file is the MP3 file (music file), and the other is a CDG file (graphics file). There are advantages to this format since you can easily repair damaged graphic files, or corrupted music files independently. With KMF, these files are combined, so if there is a problem, the entire file must be replaced. KMF also reduces the overall size of each song file by around 20% over MP3+G. For the sake of this exercise we're going to select KMF.

You do not have to select 'Create M3U' or 'Add to Playlist'. Now you need to decide the name for your collection. You can type in 'MC1001-' for 'My Collection' Disk 1 and when the files are extracted, the tracks will advance numerically i.e. MC1001-01 etc. (don't forget to add the '-' dash in 'MC1001-').

Click on 'Start' then sit back and relax while the rest of the work is done for you. After the extraction is complete, go to your 'Convert' directory and rename the files so they include the Disk number, Artist, and then Song Title. For example, a properly formatted file name would be 'MC1001-01 ­ Beatles, The ­ Strawberry Fields Forever'. This is the universally accepted method for creating and identifying karaoke song files.

Going Digital should be a priority for you. Time stands still for no man, so hop on the technology bus now. It's one helluva ride!

We will be discussing 'Wireless Karaoke' in the next edition.

Until then you can always e-mail me at info@croaky.org

See ya then!

Ken Wilson
Croaky Entertainment
www.croaky.org

info: johnny@sandiegoscene.com
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