New Song Book Software - KSB Pro

mwester · Post by **mwester** » Sun Feb 11, 2007 4:37 pm

Hi Everyone!

If I'm stepping out of bounds posting this here, someone let me know and I'll won't do it again.

I've spent the last couple of years developing a new karaoke song book program. It was released for a two week period about a year ago to gather feedback. I plan to release it again this week as the official release of the ready product. You can check it out and download the demo version here... www.ksbpro.com.

I've been reading some of the different posts in this forum and from what I gather, a fair number of you seem to be professional KJ's. I could really use some of your feedback! Just reading your comments has given me new insights into the needs of the KJ professional.

From a post I read earlier, I've already decided to add an additonal song book report that optimizes space for KJs that have such massive song collections. I didn't realize some of these karaoke systems had 20k+ songs. I'd be really interested to know what you folks see as the best layout for really large song books (ie: two column, three column, tiny print, etc.) and how the data from a machine like this can be acquired to add to the song book for printing.

I guess this post is to announce the debut of KSB Pro and asking for any feedback you might have to offer. If your feedback is positive, that'll make me feel better about all the work I've done.

If it's bad, well, that'll make KSB Pro better in the long run.

Again, thanks in advance for any feedback. KSB Pro will be going live as is, but as with any new software product, I'll be releasing a free update to address any issues in a month or so.

letitrip · Post by **letitrip** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 12:40 am

I think the key is flexibility. I've tried a number of different programs and all seem to only create one or select few formats. A template based system that can create whatever format I want would be ideal. The other key is making sure that it can produce the book in popular formats such as PDF, Word (.DOC), Excel, and others so that it can easily be generated, saved to a file, and taken to a professional printshop for printing. I've come across a couple songbook generators that create a good book but then only support direct printing or their only export optios lose all the formatting (like exporting to text or comma delimited). Finally data input is important. The ability to take information from a database, csv, etc is always key. Being able to support custom formats for importing data would be a gigantic plus so that I don't have to reformat my data to match your program.

I'll have to take a look at what you've created and see if it would fit our needs.

mwester · Post by **mwester** » Wed Feb 14, 2007 11:42 am

On Monday I made some some last minute changes to the KSBP program and uploaded them to the website. I have just now downloaded this setup program and installed it on a new machine only to discover that the Print Preview is no longer displaying anything. It seems to be working fine in full screen mode but the standard print preview is blank.

If you have downloaded the program and are experiencing this problem, please download and re-install it again tomorrow (2/25/07). I will fix and re-upload the setup tonight.

I've decided to postpone the "official, advertised" release of KSB Pro until Monday, 2/26/07, so any feedback anyone provides will be greatly appreciated and suggestions might even make it into the official release.

If you have suggestions or "wish list" features, let me know! There's already several new features planned, so I'm looking for good ideas to add to the list.

Thanks again for your comments!

mwester · Post by **mwester** » Sun Feb 18, 2007 9:14 pm

Just wanted to mention that the issue I addressed above seems to have happened only on one machine. I couldn't get the problem to repeat on any others. If anyone here has decided to try the demo I'd like to know if you experience the same problem.

From reading other posts here I decided to add the "dotted line, contents style" to the reports. I've also optimized the line spacing of the reports to maximize the number of songs per page. I also improved the layout of the Print form and fixed some issues with the way the Print Preview refreshes. I think the reports look better now too.

I recommend downloading again if you have already downloaded it.

mwester · Post by **mwester** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 5:05 pm

I had hoped to get some feedback here but... I haven't seen a whole lot so far...

I do appreciate the comments from kingsofkaraoke. Most of what was mentioned, KSB Pro already does. The big wish list item is a "template based" report system. That's coming... The initial steps for adding report templates and a full-featured, user report editor are already underway. It will be a while before this feature is available though. Additional report formats, MP3 support and some new style features are also coming.

KSB Pro is now officialy for sale on eBay only. Just search for "KSBP" to find it.

Feedback is still welcome so if anyone has coments or requests, I'd love to hear them.

letitrip · Post by **letitrip** » Wed Feb 28, 2007 9:40 pm

Well for grins I downloaded a copy of the demo to try it out. Unfortunately it would do me no good at all. The fact that everything is driven off CD information doesn't fit for us. We buy much of our music online from CAVS and Tricerasoft as individual songs. So I don't know what CD's there from and I've got a lengthy list to load. So unfortunately I can't give you much feedback beyond that since this program isn't the type of song book software we need.

mwester · Post by **mwester** » Fri Apr 06, 2007 4:08 pm

I decided to revisit this topic to mention that one my KSBP customers wanted to know if she could import her list of 12215 songs that she had in the Sax & Dotty software into KSBP.

Well, she exported the file to a CSV file and sent it to me. I imported it in to MS Access and re-shaped it to fit the KSBP format. I defaulted the CD Title to "Songs On Hard Drive 1" and the Category to "Various Artists" since her data did not have this information.

I also discovered that about half of her data was "trashy", ie: missing ID number, names and authors mixed up, duplicat records, ect. I ended up seperating the good from the bad and then exporting both to seperate CSV files. I imported the good data (about 6000 songs) into KSBP and created a PDF song book to send back to her. This whole process took less than a half hour.

I then sent back to this customer, the two csv files and the PDF. She'll need to clean up her data but was delighted at how easy it was to create the song book. So was I.

I'm not sure why KSBP wouldn't work for any kind of song book data even if you needed to create a single CD title with 20,000 songs in it.

letitrip · Post by **letitrip** » Sun Apr 08, 2007 1:30 am

Well certainly if there was a way to import song name, song title and song number from a CSV it would work for me. I have all my songs in an Access Database already and that is how I currently create my song books. I intentionally have duplicates included (different singers like different versions of the same songs) but can export to any format access supports so if there was a way to import that data (maybe I missed it) the software would be more helpful to me.