Karaoke Tool Box 02/03

By Ken Wilson
Croaky Entertainment

In the last issue we looked at Tricerasoft Mimic 2.0, the advanced PC based Karaoke media player. Now that you have the basics for PC based karaoke, you might be thinking of cataloging your music collection into a songbook. This is a great idea even if you are starting off with a small collection. Handling the Karaoke CD's to look up song titles is a sure way to reduce the life of your disks.

CDG's (Karaoke CD's) have music just like a regular music CD, but they also contain a subcode that contains the graphics (words and pictures). This subcode can be easily damaged by fingerprints, sunlight, scratches etc. so the best way to prolong the life of these disks is to avoid over handling them.

Many people use Microsoft Word, or Excel or other text editing programs to create their songbooks. This is fine and offers good control over how your pages are printed; however, getting the information into the book is extremely tedious data entry. I have tried this method myself and quickly lost interest. The book never got finished. So I searched the Internet for an inexpensive alternative. Something designed just for creating Karaoke songbooks. I found three.

Karaoke Song List Creator (www.airwer.com)

For $59.95 this is the most affordable songbook solution that offers free database updates and a nice looking book. It is fairly easy to use and offers nice extras like printing song request slips and exporting to a web page format. However, there are a few things this software does not provide.

I purchased this software initially because of price, but soon found it lacking in several areas. Although the song database updates are free, the software updates cost $29.95 EACH TIME. They went through 3 software updates within months of my initial purchase so I was naturally perturbed. KSLC offers several printing formats but does not allow font substitution. This means you are stuck with their size and style of lettering. Another problem I found with the final printed songbook is the track number appears too far away from the disk number resulting in most song request slips being turned in without the track number. This causes huge problems for the working KJ. You might as well look up every song for every customer yourself. Totally unacceptable.

When creating your book, you are presented with a 'checkbox' style screen where you click the box next to the disk you want to add. This involves scrolling through thousands of disks to find the one you want. If you have over 10 or 20 disks, you had better remember to save your book often, because if something happens like a computer freeze, you just lost all that clicking.

Karaoke Song List Creator might be a good choice for the home user, but lacks the advanced functionality and customer support for anyone wanting a quality song book.

KJ Pro (www.kjpro.com)

Regularly priced at $129.00 this is a very advanced program designed for the Karaoke professional, or the avid home user who wants to create a professional songbook. It is packed with advanced features and offers full program update support at no charge. Song database updates are available for $19.95 for a one time update, a six month subscription for $60.00 or one year for $84.00. The first update is always free when you purchase the program. The website lists a special promotional price of $99.00 for the program at the time of this writing.

Navigating this program was a little difficult and required a high learning curve. Once I figured out the intricacies it got a little easier. The best part of this program is the title/artist lookup feature. I use it to find the disk number of songs I need to purchase. Songs that are frequently requested by singers. With a few clicks you can see all the manufacturers who have that song, and the other songs on their disks. It makes it easier to get the most bang for your buck choosing a disk that has a better song selection instead of one great song on a disk packed with filler.

The songbook itself can be printed in several formats including Artist, Title, One Column, Two Column, etc. but you still have no control over font type or size. KJ Pro offers full import/export functionality including web page HTML exporting so you can list your song book on your website.

This is definitely a step up from KSLC but still lacks the ability to fully customize your songbook.

Music Book Deluxe (www.musicbookdeluxe.com)

At $129.95 this is currently the most expensive of the three, however once you get into the program you will quickly see why. This program is packed full of all the advanced features of the other two books, and quite a few features that no other program offers.

The purchase price includes all software updates which can be applied quickly and easily through the 'flash upgrade' feature contained within the program itself. No downloading patches and running executables. You also get a full three months of song updates free. Updates are issued every two weeks and the entire song database is hand checked for spelling errors and other inconsistencies. Update subscriptions after the initial free three months are available in increments of one month ($19.95), six months ($39.95), and the annual subscription for only $69.95.

MBD has a 'Disk Compare' feature that allows you to select a song, and find out what disks it appears on and what other songs are on that those disks. As I mentioned before, this is an excellent feature to get the most bang for your buck and the Disk Compare feature makes it even easier in this program.

CAVS users and MP3 style users will love the conversion tool allowing you to assign special numbers and still remember the manufacturer code. Disk numbers are always fully customizable and I found that changing the disk numbers was quite easy. MBD has an intuitive feature that anticipates what you are trying to do and will automatically apply these changes for you disk by disk. So if you are renaming an entire series of disks, it remembers and will 'suggest' the next disk in the series along with the changes you made previously. What a time saving feature!

Font sizes and styles are fully customizable and only restricted by the fonts on your system. You can use virtually any font or size. This feature, along with the 25 separate formats like one, two, or three column printing, title, artist, disk, bi-level, disk glossary etc. make this the most advanced, fully featured program out there. It even prints 3 different styles of request slips.

The program itself appears daunting at first, but after spending just a little time with it you will find yourself amazed at it's built in simplicity. You can create, save, export, and import virtually unlimited songbooks and styles. It can even break down your songbook into special categories like Spanish, Children's Songs, Holiday Songs etc, with the advanced print menu.

All these features including online support, video tutorials, user forums and phone in support make this my personal choice for songbook publishing and it gets my highest recommendation. Music Book Deluxe is definitely head and shoulders above the rest.
You can download the free demo at www.musicbookdeluxe.com.

In the next issue, we will look at programs designed for removing vocals from ordinary music CD's and adding your own lyrics to make a custom CD+G. See ya then!

Ken Wilson
Croaky Entertainment
www.croaky.org