[admin]

Originally posted by is14fun
1st: When I edit the lyrics after I have placed the sweep, does the changes to the lyrics page affect the timing of the sweep. Or in other words, must I make all changes to the lyrics before I tap in the sweep? (add page breaks etc). That's what happened to my last song, I added some page breaks and lost the timing on the sweep. Removing the changes did not restore the timing.

ADMIN ANSWER: changing pages or any amount outside a line will cause all sync past that point to be wrong. Keep your sweep edits to within a line. Consider retapping the lyrics. I assure you that each time you retap, you will do a better job. A 3 minute song takes... 3 minutes to retap. Think about it, if you spend 30 minutes trying to edit the sync, you could have retapped it 10 times... actually more if you terminate if you KNOW you goofed part way through. MTU has been a leader in editing for 35 years... word processing first, then audio editing, now Karaoke lyrics editing. I assure you, retapping multiple times will give you a better job, then do slight editing on the remaing few "non-perfect" areas.

REMEMBER... better is the bane of good enough!!!

2nd: I am having trouble at the end of a song. The highlighting seems to stop before it reaches the end of the lyrics. My guess is I have confussed the program by changing the start and end on these words and caused an overlap betwen words. Therefore, I need to know more about the adjust arrows.

ADMIN ANSWER: Please take some time and read the manual on the Edit Screen, and the < and > tools. They are very powerful, and must be understood to use at the "demading" level you are asking for.

AN IMPORTANT POINT: When you select multiple words to adjust together... they all adjust together. If you need to adjust one word, only select that word.

When you advance a underlined word, does it move the end of the word also or does it stretch the word. If it advances the whole word, does it move all the words on that line? So If the whole line is slow, must I advance each word (begininng & ending) on that line or will advancing the first word do it?

I have two suggestings to MTU:

1. We should be able to retap the sweep at any point in a song. Now, If we make a mistake, we must redo the whole song. That's a real pain partically if the mistak is at the end.

ADMIN ANSWER: Ahhh... yes that is your desire, and we understand. We spent $24,000 last year trying to add this in, and show adjustment gaps between adjusted words (answer to yor question #2 below), and PREVENTING conditions where you might accidentally try to overlap the sweep of adjacent words. We had to totally rewrite the graphics display code (the most complex of it all) and added incredible power to it. And the result was... it got so complex that we can't fix all the bugs in the code now! Further, the market for such a demanding product, at current market prices, simpy won't ever pay back the investment. KHPro 4.103 is a very excellent tradeoff of costs-benefits-performance-ease of use. It is a stable product that does an excellent job for its price. Our Karaoke Pro Workstation was $14,000 three years ago. At $90, it takes a WHOLE LOT of sales to pay back a $24,000 development - with more to be spent!!!

Also keep in mind... Rule #1 of Product Development... more features makes it harder to use. If we finished KPro 1.025 and released it, the added complexity would make it much harder to use for the majority of those who want to create their own CDG songs. That means we have higher demands on our support, requring more staff... and thus it must sell for a higher price. Those are hard and fast rules of product development I have learned the hard way, over the past 35 years and 130 products developed for microcomputer hardware and software.

2. It would be helpful to be able to see the time sweep of each word. That would give you a visual indicater for adjusting words and make it easier to duplicate timing on repeted lyrics. It would also show if you have overlapping timing between words. I think that is what my problem currently is. As a lot of lyrics are repeted, it would be great to be able to copy and paste the timing on these lyrics so they would always be the same.

ADMIN ANSWER: See my answer above. We created a database of the lyric words and their sweep start and stop timing for each word, or partial word. It would allow copy/paste. However, again... it is so complex now that we can't afford to fix all the remaining bugs at todays market price.

No one wishes more than I that my dream KPro ... worked on for 4 years, would be released. One day we expect to.
Bob