So you wanna be a karaoke host? (Part 3: Formats for karaoke tunes)

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A popular question in Yahoo Answers is this: "How can I remove the vocals from this song?" I think the hope is that you can send an mp3 file through a magic piece of software and the vocals will go away, leaving just the instrumental parts. Cool. I wish it would work.

Sometimes this could work. Sometimes, when the studio mixes a track, they will put some instruments and the vocal in one channel, and some other instruments and the vocal in the other channel. By subtracting one from the other, you should get just the instrumentals. It would be great if they did that all the time. I don't think it's all that common.

Another way that the vocals could be removed - kinda - is by using "sophisticated mathematical algorithms". Neural networks. Wavelets. Fourier transforms. As an applied mathematician, I have learned that if it's easy for a person to do, it's hard for a computer. It's pretty easy for a human to isolate the vocals in a song. Computers have a lot of trouble with that. 

So how do they create karaoke songs, Mr. Smarty-pants Math Dude Revelator?

One way they could do it is to remix the original tracks. Rather than add Lady Gaga into the mix, they could just leave her out. They could, but the studios aren't particularly interested in that. Karaoke is such a tiny market. And the distribution channels are different. And the original recording artists would get a cut.

So, studio musicians are hired by karaoke studios to re-create the instrumental parts of a song. For a very good karaoke studio, this is a laborious process, listening over and over to get every rift and nuance correct. For other karaoke studios, this could be some guy picking out the melody on a synthesizer.

Next, the words are typed in and sequenced with the music. The computer then knows when to display the words and when to highlight them. The music and the words are then assembled onto a CD+G format disc.

CD+G? What's that? 
I'm glad you asked. When the format for a CD was decided upon, there was a small amount of space left on the disk. Someone came up with the idea that it might be useful to stuff some low resolution graphics in that extra space. This extension to the standard CD format was called CD+G for "compact disk plus graphics". Later, someone hit on this as an ideal format for karaoke.

If you put a CD+G disk into a standard CD player, it will play just like a regular CD, only without the vocals. Naturally, the graphics part will not show up. If you play that same CD on your computer using Windows Media Player or iTunes or WinAmp, you still won't see the graphics. You need a special program to display the graphics as the music is being played. Three examples of such programs are: Siglos, RoxBox, and Karma, but I talked about these in the previous post.

A few years back, if you wanted to be a KJ, you would buy a special CD+G player. This would connect to your audio equipment and to a TV and you would be all set. Well... except that you would need the CD+G disks. And probably a lot of them. Several hundred maybe? That can be a lot of CDs to schlep around, and a lot of CDs to sort through when looking for a song.

Just like regular DJs, KJs are making the transition from CD players to computers. Enter the mp3+G format. As I mentioned before, karaoke CDs are just like regular CDs in terms of the music. Naturally, you can rip the music to an mp3 file just like a standard CD. Karaoke ripping programs will do this normal rip, but will also create a second file for the graphics that is hidden on the CD+G disk. These graphic are stored in a file with a .cdg extension.

So, if you rip your karaoke CD with Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", you will find two files: "Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit.mp3", and "Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit.cdg".

The two files, the .mp3 and the .cdg, will likely be about the same size. As for disk space, I figger about 200 songs per gigabyte for karaoke. 

Where do I find these karaoke tunes?
I have two favorite sites to buy karaoke tunes: karaoke.com and buy karaoke downloads. Here is a more complete list of where to look.

The first site sells mostly CDs, although they have downloads now as well. The cost of karaoke CDs is similar to the price of regular CDs. You can find cheap cheap CDs for a few bucks. I have paid $30 for a single CD. Their prices for downloads are currently 99 cents a song, generally.

The second site sells individual downloads for anywhere from 99 cents to two bucks, with a 20% discount after you buy five songs. They claim they have 20,000 songs, but there are a lot of songs not available. I go to karaoke.com when I can't find it at buy karaoke downloads.

The second website is great for me during a gig. If the venue has wireless, and someone asks for a song I don't have, I can often download it and have it right there. I don't know if patrons are impressed by this, but they sure should be.

Those are my two favorite sites. Here are a few others: Loud Karaoke, Ace Karaoke, and Tricerasoft. Since I have not dealt much with them, I can't recommend them.

How many songs do I need?
In order to be considered a big shot KJ, how many songs do you need? My experience has been that no matter how many songs you have, there will be people disappointed that you don't have their favorite song. My opinion - you need a few thousand songs at least.

For my first big gig, I had 3,844 songs. (Math geeks will immediately recognize this number as 62 squared.) In that first year, I was buying CDs every week. Now, I am at something over 8,200 songs, and I have slowed down the frantic buying.

At the other extreme, I visited two bars in New Orleans that offered karaoke. Each of the bars had a list of songs that was two pages long. Huh? I don't get it. Bourbon Street is not the main street of Karaokeville.

Ripping
Important point here for the KJ wannabe. This is gonna take a bunch of time. When you order a stack of CDs from karaoke.com, and they arrive in the mail, you could use them directly in your laptop. But you are gonna wanna rip them to your hard drive. Each one. One at a time.

And by the way, if you use the standard rip and burn software to copy a CD+G file, all you will get is the audio part. You will need to get a CD+G rip program. Although you can get a program from any of the companies that sell karaoke hosting programs, I would recommend Siglos' Power CD+G Burner, for $39. (Warning: I had a bad experience with a piece of freeware that was not worth what I paid for it!)

Other formats
The wonderful thing about standards is there are so many to choose from. The mp3/cdg format is not the only game in town, but it does seem to be the most popular.

Another format that I have seen is .bin, which seeks to overcome one of the disadvantages to the mp3/.cdg format. The problem is that the .cdg portion is not compressed. Given the size of disks today, this is not a big disadvantage. The benefit of leveraging the standard format has far outweighed the disadvantage of the extra file size.

Another interesting format is the midi format. This is the format that is used to communicate to midi keyboards. Basically, some of the karaoke host programs have adopted the standard midi format as one way to compose and play karaoke songs.

Like I said, this is interesting. It has the advantage of leveraging all the software that is available to compose midi files. There is a big disadvantage, however. When you play back a midi file, it sounds like, well, like a midi file.

There is one additional format for karaoke files that I consider just a bit more interesting, the mp4 format. This is standard for encoding video information. But, a karaoke song is really just a video, right? The audio track is the music and the video part is the words.

Here is where it gets interesting. Siglos sells a program called "Power CD+G to iPod Converter". For $39, you can have a program that will translate all your karaoke files into a video format that you can play on your iPod.

Hmmmm.....   Karaoke on the go?  I do gigs at retirement centers where I don't lead karaoke, I just sing. I used to carry along my laptop, a set of small speakers, and a table. With this, I don't need the laptop. Cool.

Just in case you want to feed the iPod display to your TV, all you really need is a cable. I found an iPod to TV cable on Amazon for about $9. One side of the cable plugs into your iPod, the other side has three RCA plugs for S-video. (S-video is an input that you will find on most TVs.) One of the RCA plugs is for the video, one for the right channel and one for the left. You will need to tell your iPod to send this TV output. Go to video settings on your iPod and make sure TV output is enabled.

Copyright (c) 2010, John Seymour