I'm planning to open a small Asian karaoke lounge in the US and am seeking your guidance on the software side.
Must-have features:
Fast search by artiste, composer, movie, year, song title and other fields (user-defined?)
Play all audio/video formats with pitch and tempo control (real-time)
Adjustable EQ with effects for delay, reverb, etc.
Queues and singer rotation/management with next-up, time, user profiles, history, etc.
Switch between filler background music and tracks quickly
Let me add lyrics to mp3s and create synchronized video tracks (with customized backdrop screens).
Desirable:
Play audio/video tracks from the cloud (youtube, etc). Allow these to be indexed in the database for search
Multiple displays (maybe this is a hardware-based solution like a video splitter?)
Cross-fading of songs.
Add and synchronize lyrics by just singing over the track (that would be very cool)
Different language options for the displayed lyrics (English, Chinese, Arabic, etc)
Double as a decent (not fancy!) DJ system to play dance tracks
Web-based song selection so singers can choose from home before coming to the venue
There are probably other essential and desirable features I'm overlooking. Any help would be much appreciated.
Cheers,
Joe
Request for s/w advice (newbie)
Re: Request for s/w advice (newbie)
You are a dreamer. Just for starters, you are going run into all kinds of copyright infringement problems by trying to create your own karaoke song tracks and using YouTube videos in a professional setting.
Re: Request for s/w advice (newbie)
Ditto on wiseguys reply.
Re: Request for s/w advice (newbie)
I plan to pay the ASCAP and other copyright dues. Doesn't this solve the problem?
Re: Request for s/w advice (newbie)
There is more than ASCAP, BMI and the other Performers Rights Agencies that are involved. You have to get sync rights as well. Several Professional karaoke manufacturers are no longer in business because they chose not to obtain those sync rights before producing their tracks. one even tried to make the end user responsible for those rights by coming out with their Roll Your Own karaoke, they provided the background music along with a guide vocal version and packaged a software that allowed the end user to create the CD+G files. Thank God their Karaoke Creating Software was crappy at best or I would have had made some of the songs. The end product didn't swipe the bottom line on the screen fully making any song you created unusable in a professional setting without looking like the song were homemade.
Re: Request for s/w advice (newbie)
The cost of the legalities you would have to conform to makes creating your own karaoke song tracks for commercial use infeasible. This is why we have just a few companies releasing new karaoke songs.