[swaseysd]

Since I am a programmer by day, I've done a bit of manipulating of the MTU Songs Database and have converted that Access database to Microsoft SQL Server.

Like many of you, I have duplicate versions of the same song by the same artist and manufacturer. However, my songbook only lists song titles and artists, no disk numbers or manufacturer names, etc. I've been hosting karaoke shows long enough to know which versions are the better versions and unless a singer asks for a specific brand, I generally play the version I know to be the best. In most cases, that will either be CB, SC or DK but there are occasions when the not-so-popular brands do in fact have a better version that I personally like to sing, e.g. I personally prefer Why Me Lord - Kris Kristofferson by All Hits Karaoke much better than the CB version.

After I import my songs into the Hoster Access database, I immediately migrate it to my SQL Server database and I do all my data manipulation in SQL Server. I wrote several stored procedures to do a variety of things, to include tracking and eliminating duplicates and songs with bad graphics. I wrote a small .NET program that will do the same thing that Hoster 4.0 will do insofar as tagging duplicate songs, but my program also asks if I want to delete the song from the database as well as from disk. For songs with bad graphics or sound, I write the brand/title/artist out to a text file so that I can get try extracting it from the CD again or otherwise obtain a new copy of it. I am not keeping more than one copy of the same brand/song/artist combination on disk. I keep the Hoster Access database synchronized with my SQL Server database using SQL Server Integration Service (SSIS).

I hope to eventually get to the point where I have absolutely no duplicate brand/title/artist combination and no songs with bad graphics or sound in my collection. It'll take a while but I'll get there.

Good Time Karaoke