He had over 14,000 songs. At first, I thought he would be a nice candidate for SPIN to investigate, but it turns out he has all originals. He told me later that he spent $40,000 on his collection so far.

It didn't look like he had the rare Megavox CDGs, so I put in a song request and gave him mine to use. But, he told me he had it ... he then referred me to his "new releases" book. OMG! The new releases book was almost as big as the first one I went through.

I honestly think he has every CDG ever made. He had songs I thought were unavailable for Karaoke like "Russians", "Ditty Boy" and a ton of others. There were only 6 singers in rotation the whole night so I had a blast.

I'm assuming the guy is independently wealthy or something and just enjoys Karaoke to the max. Maybe if KJ's applied their tips to new songs they could do the same... but, I don't think it would be enough. You'd have to buy like 15 CDGs a week just to keep up. And, I thought I was obsessive!

How did Larri do it?

Of course, a lot of the songs are repeats. But, even then I was surprised at how many versions were available for certain songs that I thought only SC made.

I'm not trying to slam KJs that post doubles or have large selections,( I'm sure some do have 19,000 without doubles ) but I agree with Bose people will find something from your selection.

If not, they don't really want to sing.

I am always getting compliments on what great selection I have, and it makes me happy to think I only buy between 2 to 6 discs in a month.

Be environmentally friendly, save a tree, don't post doubles.

Take your data file, import in into Microsoft Access. Then, you can run custom reports off the data. You can build a query that will eliminate duplicates easily and automatically. Of course, this is just for yuks and giggles to get a count... you wouldn't want to do this to fix up your books, since you might remove the Sound Choice version by accident!

So, how do you get around the duplicate song theory? Some people will argue that one song sounds better than other: one might be slower, one with better lyrics, one more musically correct, one more exciting, one with better background singers, etc.

What this guy did was he had a code next to the song, so you could look up the brand yourself. But, for those who ask which version is better, it's hard to say. It's still subjective. I know what I'd tell them, but some KJ's just don't know.

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The K-Wolf,
Daron

If you're booked 5 nights a week @150.00/night then... you'll have to work 266 nights just to pay for the discs; no food, gas money, equipment, books, insurance etc...

if you allocate half of your income to discs then it stretches to 533 nights, or about a year and a half to pay for the discs and your yearly income is $19,950 BEFORE all expenses.

Have to agree with bose on this one, huge libraries don't make business sense. Albeit, their fun to look through and no fun to carry around.

Naw! Not for me. I don't want to "own every song ever" because I don't get much call for "The Mills Brothers." I'll just stick to "songs that people want to sing."

I use Excel for my books and I took out all the dups by sorting by artist. Yes it took a while but it more that made up for it when singers quit asking which one to sing.

jwianecki--I couldn't speculate on other's form of disc storage, but, personally, we use Pro-Sleeves and an Odyssey storage case...in fact, we're starting to grow out of our current 20" long 14" deep case and are awaiting the arrival for our new 48" long 20" deep monster! (holds 1200 discs in sleeves)

cliff--Frankly, the primary "red flag" TO ME would be multiple systems with like songs. I say this NOT to fuel the ire of those with multiples, BUT, because I myself considered the copying of my library for multiple systems (as well as archival purposes) UNTIL I learned of SPIN. Put the brakes on that eyedeer!

I would like to be up to 10,000 by the end of the year.

Dale

Thanks
J

I usually get my sleeves from Fry's Electronics. They come 15 to a pack for $4.99 (or somethin like that!). You can also order them from Pro Sound and Stage Lighting( www.pssl.com ), but it looks like they only sell them by the peice (.39 cents, I believe). They're made by Case Logic and, YES, they gotta sleeve in back to put another CD or a back cover of a CD with song listings (I do the same thing that you do!! LoL) Also, theres a slender sleeve at the top to slide in a CD spine label (the 15 pack comes with blank spines and a little "stick" to slide it in). Hope that helps!

Back in the old days (before I knew what I was doing), I would help my KJ friends create their song books. I too used MSAccess and set it up so I could only have 1 artist, then the artist would be linked to several songs. This made it handy so I didn't have to keep typing in the whole artist name.

Anyway, I entered them line by line. Luckily, I type about 120 WPM, so it wasn't that painful.

However, since then I've ran across a few others ways to make the data entry part faster. First off, there's a program called "Karaoke Song List Creator" that has a lot of SC discs in its database. Just click on the CDGs you want to get a report on, and it'll make a text file that you can import into Access. The only problem is that it's not fully updated... but, it does have a lot in its database. That'll get you started - you'd have to fill in the holes manually. The program is free to download off the internet. I believe there was a link to it posted here once - let me know if you want it. It's a handy tool to search for a song too (if you're looking to buy CDGs). It has a lot of rare CDGs in its database.

My friend gave me 100 mix-and-match CDGs and wanted me to make a book for him. I made a nice-looking book in about 4 hours. For this, I used a combination of web sites to bring up the CDG's song titles and tracks. Then, I selected the text from the web page and pasted it into a Word document. I did this for all the CDGs. Then, I went back to Word and did a lot of macros to get them all in a standard format. I then imported that into Access and manipulated it to match my previously-defined format.

Finally, SC is working on a downloadable digicat. I'm hoping it'll be available soon. It should have all the brick info. I have a previous database of all SC songs... it's about a year old though, and I'm not sure it has track information.

When I started in the biz I had more songs than some of the shows I went to. And I carried them in until over 120 discs. I couldn't figure out how to carry more. My hubby supported my habbit and now I do

I do not like the disc books, althought my second set has them. My SoundChoice Spotlights are still in jewel boxes. Most of the rest of the CD+G are in Univenture(.com) sleeves (I highly recomend them. Mine are in colors, but they no longer make the colors). I have a few (JVCs & Nutech) in Caselogic sleeves but I don't like how open they are. My DKs are in flip cases, takes up too much room for anything else. I have 9 Cases for my CD+Gs.

My Pioneer Lasers (1-50) are in a flip case and then I have two LP cases for the other lasersdisc.

My database is in Spigot - The thought of what I would need to do to change that, boggles my brain.

My (main) songlists are listed on my site.

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Larri's Karaoke

****

This is the same Digicat we have had for years. With this you will be able create your songbooks, etc. The same features that were in the previous Digicat.

The digicat will be available for download soon. It will be in a self extracting EXE file. You will also have to download the database with it. The database will be updated,hopefully, every new release week. There are a few problems we have ran into that has slowed the release date of the digicat. But is coming soon.

- Rodney

****

Grateful,
Yeah, sounds like a reliable source to me too! I was not able to get anywhere when I tried to find out about getting that type of info. I called the Customer Service desk and they reffered me to the search engine (boy, was that a long time on hold for nothing!)
Hopefully they will come through soon on the Digicat. I will have to ask my KJ if she knows anything about it. She told me that she only gets a paper printout with her bricks and did not think that there was anything else available. She is not too PC savvy, so I am not sure we are completely on the same page when I quiz her about it. She will be excited to know that there is hope though. Neither of us type 120 wpm!!! I may be 50!!!
Fortunately my job does not test me on that.

Now, the only problems I see are:

A) It's all in uppercase. You would need to convert it to upper/lower (use MSWord to do this easily).

B) There are no track numbers listed. No biggie... you'd have to go through and type in just the track numbers.

Hope that helps. Let me know if I can help you in any of this.

Adding the Sound Choice data was easy... I just did a copy/paste from disk listings on the website into Excel. Some minor proof reading and clean up and it's beautiful. BUT...

Anyone making a book from a current database for a Foundation collection bought PRIOR to 1997 (or so)...I noticed that we have a Rightous (sp) Brothers song that doesn't appear in the d-base! I BELIEVE it was "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling", but we also have "Unchained Melody" on foundation, too. We noticed this error after receiving RBTL and discovering that we had MOST of those songs on SC! I also recall BC saying that Right. Bros. were licensing no-no's, so, be sure to check out when their Foundation was purchased.