Steve Gray's Homepage - Types of Karaoke

What is Karaoke?

Karaoke, translates literally as Empty Orchestra, or basically the song minus the singer... You become the singer. There are many forms of Karaoke but it comes down to two basics; The Audio, or song, and the lyrics. As you can imagine, there are many ways to produce audio and as many ways to display lyrics. The way they are combined determines the type of karaoke experience you will get.

Recent advancements in compressed audio and the internet are producing more choices...

Types of Karaoke

These are some of the Karaoke options that are available, and which of my software supports it...

In the chart below "Audio" refers to the source of the audio when played via the player. "Lyrics" is how/where the words are stored.

AUDIO	LYRICS	NAME	PLAYER
CD+G Disc	CD+G Subcode	CD+G Karaoke	None
CD+G Disc	CDG File	-	SJGPlay
CD+G Disc	Text File	-	SJGPlay (CD+G is treated as a normal CDDA disc)
CDDA Disc	Text File	-	SJGPlay
KAR File	Midi	Karaoke Midi	SJGPlay
WAV File	Text File	-	SJGPlay, Mimic
MP3 File	Text File	-	SJGPlay, Mimic
Midi File	Text File	-	SJGPlay, Mimic
VideoCD	VideoCD	Karaoke CD	SJGPlay, Mimic
MP3 File	CDG File	MP3+G	SJGPlay, WinCDG
WAV File	CDG File	-	SJGPlay, WinCDG (future release)
WMA/ASF File	CDG File	-	SJGPlay, WinCDG (future release)
DVD	DVD	DVD Karaoke	None
LaserDisc	LaserDisc	Laser Karaoke	None

KEY:

CDDA disc - Standard Audio CD - audio only, subcode is empty.
CD+G disc - A standard CDDA disc, subcode contains graphics data to produce Lyrics.
CD+G subcode- Directly from the CD subcode area.
CDG file - A file containing the extracted contents of the subcode area of a CD+G disc.
Text Lyrics - Plain text with readable synchronization information. Lyrics are entered by the USER.
Midi - Standard MIDI specification. A MIDI file may include text/lyrics "events".
KAR - A MIDI file renamed to KAR

Making Karaoke Files

CDDA disc - Contains no lyrics at all (except maybe some CD+Text discs)
CD+G disc - Creating these is very costly (US$7,600).
BIN file - A file containing the RAW CDDA or CD+G data. Created with CDRWin from GoldenHawk.
CDG file - Created with a combination of CDRWin and WinCDG. Also "CDDA for DOS" can make these.
KAR/MIDI file - Several program can make these files.
Text File - Created using SJGPlay for windows.

Future Standards?

One of the most popular forms of Karaoke standards is CD+G. CD+G discs are an extension of the standard CDDA red-book format. The problem is that you require a dedicated CD+G player to play these. The discs are expensive and some are very hard to replace if damaged. With the popularity of MP3 audio it was just a matter of time before the "audio" part of CD+G discs was converted to MP3 and the "graphics" part was extracted, and they were both combined to create "MP3+G". WinCDG was the first program to do this back in 1998 but was limited. Today WinCDG when combined with today's fast machines is capable of recreating the Karaoke experience using only your computer. No expensive CD+G players to buy or irreplacable discs to damage. A typical hard drive can store litterally thousands of Karaoke songs.

Who knows what the future will bring?...

Steve.

Last updated: Sept 9/2000, 7:00pm