Spun off from Virtual DJ Users Questions & Answers
The best Karaoke software I have used by far is ‘Karma’ from Latshaw Systems who also develops other useful utilities:
http://www.latshawsystems.com/Products.aspx
Full support is available however, you get to communicate with the developer who is very obnoxious and talk to you like you are <<—>> if you don’t get something straight away which is very likely as with typical support staff they never read the full content of your question so you have to ask again.
It is worth putting up with this <<—>> attitude as the software is truly great.
Edit: Forum-Admin changed an << idiomatic / colloquial expression>> that may be questionable for some readers – please see our Terms of Service link at the bottom of every page.
Karma looks good but I didn’t see how to change key and tempo for a track?
Pitch control is at the top of the Screen right next to the player controls labelled ‘Pitch’, click on the ’ ’ or ‘-’ buttons to increase or decrease the key.
To the left of that is the ‘cdgT’ button which adjusts the tempo of the CDG lyrics for times when they are out of sync with the music (very useful).
The great thing about Karma is that you can set the Pitch (Key Change) for each song in advance when adding it to the playlist, that way you don’t forget to change the key when the singer comes to perform. You can also create Singer files with their songs loaded and it will even sort out rotation of singers for you with screen notifications for next singer etc. All of these features can be abled/disabled and ammended live at any time, brilliant.
As far as I can recall there is no control for adjusting the Tempo (bpm) of the track. If this is essential for you there is a Support facility that allows you to suggest it as an update, most features that have been suggested by users in the past have been incorporated into the program.
I believe you can download and use the program in Demo mode before buying, there is just a limit to the number of music tracks you can load into it.
I was wrong … just checked out the manual and there is a control for Tempo (bpm) of the song.
Excert from the manual (from an older version of the software):
Secondary Controls
Karma’s secondary controls are called “secondary” because these are controls that you should not need during the normal operation of your karaoke show, but rather things you might setup before your show. To view the secondary controls, simply click the “secondary controls” bar at the bottom of the screen. Clicking it again will close it back up.
< > - Adjusts the height of the secondary control panel to one of three different heights.
New Show - Simple function of clearing both rotation and playlists in preparation for a new show. Karma automatically saves current show information throughout your show in case you suddenly lose power, so that the next time Karma loads each time, you’ll see any leftover signers or songs.
Tempo - Sets the tempo for the currently loaded song. The default value is zero. The values are between 50 (top) and -50 (bottom), and are a relative percent to the normal speed, so a setting of 50 will play the song 50% faster and visa versa. Tempo is automatically reset to zero for all new songs loaded into the player. To set the value to zero, simply click the “tempo” title bar above the slider. Note that changing the tempo will simply increase or decrease the speed of the song clock, but won’t actually reflect the true amount of time passed or remaining since the song clock is based on position within the song.
The software updates are free and you get automatic notification when they are available.
Nice software. Great sound.
Trying trial version. Not sure if it retains your song list where you can see it even after the songs are finished?
Also not sure how to save a playlist.
Yes it does retain the playlist and you can save them. You can also save profile/playlists for each singer so it’s ready for next time.
Thanks Eric’sson. I used the karaoke program from www.powerkaraoke.com as well. It is also very good with the large number of settings and I was attracted by the sound quality of a final CD G track.
Sorry for hijacking this old thread, other than powerkaraoke.com, are there any other karaoke software that's decent as well? In need of a few decent karaoke software for comparison for my school project. Thanks.