How to play Karaoke CDG files

[wendybradley2]

Hello everyone

I've downloaded some sunfly karaoke CDG files but cannot get them to play displaying the graphics, only the music. Can anyone tell me what I should be doing to see the graphics please?

Thanks

[kluelos]

You need specialized karaoke software in order to view the graphics.

Look here for the dirty details.

Or look here for some free software.

Which you could have easily found for yourself with a simple search on Google ....

[wendybradley2]

Thanks for your help.

Incidentally, I've done lots of 'simple' Google searches and there seems to be lots of different programs out there that do the conversions. Knowing how to use the software is another story. I've downloaded the sunfly files and each song is split into two files (yes, I've researched this). I'm struggling to feed the files into the software so that it becomes one zip mp3+g file at the other end. I don't want to play it on my pc, I want to load up an SD card.

Thanks again

[kluelos]

SD cards don't support the whole notion of a sub-channel, so you won't ever be able to play the material as CD+G from the card itself. You *could* play it as an mp3+g on a computer, but you sort-of indicated that wasn't what you wanted.

You should then understand that there's no such animal as a single mp3+g file. It's two files with the same name, one is the mp3 file, the other's the cdg file with the lyrics. (Many video players deal with movie subtitles in much the same way, a separate .srt file with the same name.)

It's trivial to zip those two together into a single archive. However, this is a matter of using WinZip. There's nothing special or different about mp3+g, it's just the two files put into the same archive. IOW, bone up on WinZip without worrying about what KIND of files you're ultimately going to be using. Once you "get" zip files and archives generally, it should all fall together for you.

An archive tries to serve four different purposes:

One, the original, from 'way back in the CP/M days before MS-DOS, was to group related files together so that they could be transported as a single entity. Then you'd separate them back into individual files once they got where they were going. This assured that you didn't accidentally forget some important file or other -- because it was all one unit.

Two, came along after the idea of directories and subdirectories appeared (systems like Apple Dos 3.3 didn't support directories at all) and the need to preserve the directory structure -- files in particular places in relation to one another. So now it wasn't just the files, it was the structure, that also went into the archive.

Three, once we took to sending files to and fro via modems at 300 baud, was the need for compression -- to make the file(s) as small as possible prior to transmission, and to restore the file to its full size once it has been received at the other end.

Four, division, came along when we used floppy disks of various sizes to physically transfer files. Since these disks didn't hold very much (360 KB, for instance) a file that was larger than that needed to be chopped up into disk-sized pieces so that you could put each piece onto a disk, take all the disks somewhere else, read them onto a hard disk at your destination, and reassemble the original file.

1. Grouping

2. Structure

3. Compression

4. Division

Sometimes these purposes are served together. Sometimes they're entirely separate, sometimes two of them are important while the other two aren't, etc. If you're transferring files by modem then you want everything compressed as much as possible because it's your transmission time that's at a premium, so compression was overwhelmingly important and we compressed everything even in cases where the others were entirely irrelevant.

Other times it's just convenient to compress the files while you're about it. If you compress them, you fit more stuff onto whatever medium you're using for transfer. This is again relevant when you're trying to fit things onto a disk or memory stick for transport.

OK, so why not just compress everything? Well, because it takes time. It needs an increasingly powerful processor to uncompress again. If you don't always have that then it can take a long time for a less powerful system to uncompress the file. Also, now, we do compress a lot of things. Pictures (jpg's) are compressed. mp3's are already compressed. Video formats like DivX are already compressed.

If you put modern audio or video files into an archive and try to compress the archive, you spend a great deal of time and end up with a file that's not appreciably smaller than its components -- a complete waste of time for you, and also for everyone who needs to uncompress that archive later. For that reason, most archive software allows you some degree of control over how much compression will be used. This ranges from none at all - just don't try to compress anything -- to extreme, squeeze every last byte out of it no matter that will take hours.

You should use the compression that's appropriate to your application, and you should use common sense. If your result is just as big as what you started with, then don't use any compression at all.

Given that you have such diverse purposes for archives like .zip and .rar files, it's easy to get lost or forget which one(s) you're trying to serve.

Compression won't do much for mp3 files. It WILL help with cdg files, quite a bit, but those files are tiny to begin with, so you don't end up saving an appreciable amount of space anyway, and it's probably not worth the effort. You're not going to save enough space to, say, enable you to fit another mp3+g on the stick.

Actual use of an archiver couldn't be simpler. Assuming that I have the files in the structure that I want to preserve (if there is any), I just select the files and directories I want to archive, and drag/drop them onto the archiver. It asks me for a name for the archive, and how much compression to use, what size chunks to divide it into, then it cranks away and pops out an archive file or files with the appropriate extensions.