New Features?
 

Hi my name is David Kirby, and I recently bought Hoster and all the other tools. I am a professional singer and use this to set up my playlists using Karaoke tracks as my backing tracks. I also do some DJ and Karaoke. I sometimes do all three, sing a concert, DJ and do Karaoke with the crowd. I have imported a number of music CD's for DJing. I also have setup a number of playlists. I would like to suggest some upgrades which may broaden your user base. Automatically updating playlists causes me problems because I have a number of standard playlists I use. I would find it extremely useful to be able to have multiple active playlists, which kept track of what had been played. You could put some extra buttons in the main window to switch playlist. I could easily use 5 concurrent playlists. I would have 1. Concert Singing playlist 2. Concert Request playlist 3. Karaoke Request Playlist 4. DJ playlist 5. DJ Request playlist. At the moment I have to go through the lengthy process of opening a fresh playlist every time, and then when I go back to the original playlist it's lost track of what I already played or sung. I also have to worry about whether I have messed up a standard playlist or not. This results in far too much dead time in front of a crowd. Another upgrade would be to enhance the song database. You really do need to include the ability to tag to each song your own preferred pitch. I am a tenor and find I am adjusting pitches quite a lot. If I get a request to sing a song in a concert, I have to remember what pitch I normally sing it at, but there's no way to store it on the system. It should also be available for printout also in the songbook. Another consideration for singers out there is the ability to alter the tempo of songs. I sometimes want to sing a song faster or slower because I dont agree with the original recordings tempo. So you could put an extra set of buttons above the pitch for tempo. Say -15%, -10%, -5%, 0 +5%, +10%, +15%. this information should also be stored in the file for each song. I would also like the artist information to be displayed in the playlist, so that I can annnounce it when I am either singing or DJing "heres a great song from the Beatles called Yesterday". I am in general pleased with the product although all the issues above cause way too much dead time....Regards David Kirby

P.S. I was also having some sync problems, but I have since found out that it is due to my Intel onboard graphics chip.

Re: New Features?
 

Tenor,
You can have multiple instances of hoster open at one time, with each set to a different playlist, you can switch, and add or play from them all using the bar at the botom of the screen.

I Use mine like that, I have a playlist for me, one for my wife, and one for customers. I think all this requires is more memory. I run 1.5 gig and have run as many as 5 screens, plus media player and a spreadsheet.