• What is Karaoke?
• What is a KMF File?
• What is MP+G/MP3+G^® and MM+G?
• What is CDG (CD+G/CD+Graphics)?
• What is a Skin?
• What is a Media File?
• What is a Video/Movie File?
• What is a File Association?
• What is TriceraSoft thinking for future development?

What is Karaoke?

Karaoke Overview

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.

These are some of the Karaoke formats that are available.

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.

KEY:

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?... TriceraSoft knows...

KMF (Karaoke Media File) is a Proprietary TriceraSoft secure format. It is a combination of Audio and Lyrics. The audio can be almost any format but is generally compressed using MP3 or WMA. The lyrics can be compressed CD+G graphics or some other form like text. A KMF file contains song information such as title, artist, publisher etc. KMF files are registered for personal use only.

When Playing a KMF File a separate Karaoke window is displayed that can be moved, sized or stretched to any proportion or made full-screen with the mouse.

Note: TriceraSoft products are the only products authorized to play the KMF format.

MP+G/MP3+G^® is simply the combination of MP3 technology and CD+G standard graphics. By extracting the audio and graphical data from the CD, both can be played together on a suitably equiped computer with TriceraSoft Software. Also the audio can be compressed into MP3 format thus saving 90% of the space of a conventional CD+G song. MM+G is a future extension of MP+G/MP3+G^® that will encompass future technologies.

CDG, or CD+Graphics, is a standard that was defined to take advantage of the extra unused space on a regular CD audio disc. This area is used to hold graphical data, in the form of pictures and text and special instructions to display that data synchronized to the audio playback. Because of the limitation of computer technology at the time the standard was designed the graphics are limited to a resolution of 300x216 in 16 colors (from a total of 4096 colors).

CD+G discs require a dedicated CD+G player in order to display the graphics. Standard home stereo players will play the audio fine, but without the graphics. Most CD+G discs are designed for Karaoke purposes however a few mainstream CD's have used CD+G to enhance the listening experience by including animated images, pictures, lyrics or group bios to the disc.

Most computer systems are unable to play CD+G discs because most common CD-ROM drives are unable to read the graphics data area. As such, the KMF format was created. This file format was designed to take advantage of the latest audio compression techniques, as well as compressing the CD+G data and combining them into a single file that most computer system can play. Although today our products can read CD+G Discs with the help of a CD+G Compatible drive and an ASPI layer installed. They will also play any Audio+G media file format (MP3+G^® is most popular)

A Skin is simply the graphics and elements that make up the user interface (GUI) of an application. Skins are used to enhance the look of the program compared to standard windows applications. WinCDG supports skins with:

• Buttons, Text, and Elements of any size or placement
• Sliders for controlling playback or volume
• Graphic or Text-based digits
• Windows with multiple non-rectangular areas (Regions)
• Windows with transparent areas
• Links to other skins or web pages
• Support for GIF, JPEG and BMP bitmap files
• Import functions

A Media File is one that uses multimedia resources such as Video and Audio. WinCDG supports most standard Windows formats (identified by a unique file extension). Please refer to the "Supported Media Formats" section for more info.

A Video/Movie File is a Media File that displays moving images and sound. Video/Movie Files in WinCDG are played through Microsoft Media Player using a separate window that opens automatically when a movie is played. The position and size of this window can be adjusted.

A File Association is a Windows feature that "associates" files of a particular type to a specific application. This means that when you double-click a file the proper program is launched and that file loaded or played automatically. WinCDG can associate specific media types in order to play back automatically when they are double clicked. WinCDG will add the file to the playlist.

TriceraSoft aims to develop new forms of Karaoke beyond the combination of audio file + lyric file. The KMF format is only the tip of the iceberg and TriceraSoft will strive to meet the needs of our customers. Please visit our support page and fill out our comments and feedback form.