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Karma Gotcha!

Discuss CD+G's, VCD's, song book creators, and any other karaoke related software.
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vbevans
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Karma Gotcha!

Post by vbevans »

:cry: Purchased Compuhost this spring and had issues with it all summer. (Not intuitive to use and instability problems in Windows 7 my biggest complaints) So after some research and reading in this forum decided to give Karma a try. Trial version limited to 3 songs in playlist and is therefore impossible to get a real feel for the program. Purchased the program and hit the first snag. All my fill tunes mp3's had to follow the same naming convention in order to use them properly with the program. OK, needed to be done anyway. Three or four days later was able to construct my first playlist and try the program out. Here's the problem, the filler player seems to randomly misread the mp3 when it loads and assigns a longer play time than the actual file. When the end of the file is encountered but the program thinks there's still more, the player just stops. No moving on to the next song, just dead air until you manually start the next song. Latshaw's tech support's answer to the problem? "Sounds like corrupt mp3's." Gee, thanks guys! However, they worked fine on Compuhost and before that on the $35 wonder Virtual DJ Studio. Reencoding the supposedly corrupt mp3 doesn't change a thing. Sometimes a file works, sometimes not. Purchase at your own risk.


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wiseguy
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Post by wiseguy »

This is why I'll stick with JustKaraoke. Hundreds of karaoke shows without a single issue.
mnementh
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Post by mnementh »

Sorry wiseguy but Latshaw is quite correct, Re the "corrupt" MP3's.

This is actually much more commonplace than you might expect and is caused by MP3's being recorded at Variable Bit Rates (VBR).

This article gives an explanation and mentions a small freeware program called VBRfix that can sort out 90% of the issues.

http://www.renanmarks.net/en/blog/how-f ... wrong-time

This, by the way, ONLY seems to be an issue with background music. It seems ALL MP3+G files are recorded with steady bit rate.

As to the naming convention, I don't see why the OP has an issue as Karma's search capability doesn't care how you name the file, it will still find it by partial name search.

As he didn't say HOW he oouldn't "use them properly", I can't really give him any assistance.

As for Justkaraoke, while I'll agree it is pretty good and would be my 3rd choice after Karma then PCDJ, I find the interface to be very fiddly and the simple niggle that I can't get the program to go full screen (not the singer window), irritates me beyond rational belief.

As far as I'm concerned, Karma is "head and shoulders" above anything else on the market.

I just showed five different karaoke software packages to a dedicated disc user and technophobe who is thinking about going computer and he picked Karma immediately as the most user friendly option.

Sandy.
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wiseguy
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Post by wiseguy »

JustKaraoke does not have a problem playing VBR mp3 files and the main program screen is now sizable including full screen. Of course it can only be opinion but to me JustKaraoke is much more user friendly than Karma. I taught my eight year old niece how to operate it in under an hour.
mnementh
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Post by mnementh »

I taught a technophobe to use Karma in less than 5 minutes!!! :mrgreen:

Sandy.
P.S. I'll try a couple of VBR encoded files in Karma to see if the version I use has any issues.
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wiseguy
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Post by wiseguy »

mnementh wrote:I taught a technophobe to use Karma in less than 5 minutes!!! :mrgreen:
Was the technophobe 8 years old? :)
vbevans
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Post by vbevans »

Sandy,

Thanks for the assist. I'll give VBRFix a try. In my opinion it would have been nice if Latshaw tech support had offered direction instead of just blowing me off. Well, they got their money so why bother with support.

As for the "proper use" issue, you are quite right. The search function does find what your looking for regardless of file name convention. However, if you want song titles under the "Titles" Header and artist names under the "Artist" header in the lists, your file names must match a specific convention. Not blaming Latshaw for my misnamed files as I said, needed to be corrected anyway. I guess what I was really getting at is I couldn't use the standard format playlists I already had, and I didn't want to create the new proprietary playlists without correcting the filenames.

As an aside to anyone following this thread, I had been using Compuhost. When I contacted their tech support with a problem they responded with their best guess of what the problem was (which wasn't the fault of their software) AND suggested an appropriate workaround. Now that's what I call good support.
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wiseguy
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Post by wiseguy »

You're not the first person in this forum to complain about the Latshaw customer support.
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