Protecting your music library from "thieves".

[Jamie Simpson]

Ok first,

Love the Hoster Program on my laptop (my review is coming).

My next concern is this.........

I run a multi-system dj company (only 1 karaoke show).

There are going to be multiple hands on my new hoster system. How do I "lock them out" of being able to bring in their own external hard drive and copy my music.

I am thinking worst case scenerio here. Even though I have GREAT EMPLOYEES, let;s face it we live in a digital age of FREE MUSIC where every kid has 100 gigs of pirated songs.

I don't want someone to just be able to come in and within 1 hour have all 600+ of my cdgs already ripped.

Is there something that i can i do in Windows XP Pro to lock people out?

Are there USB port locks so that someone can't even hook up a USB drive and copy and paste them over?

MTU...what are your thought?

Thanks

Jamie SImpson
Houserockers DJ

[nreel]

Since you are running only ONE Karaoke Show, I would suggest, the simplest of solutions would be, to use an External Hard Drive, exclusively, to store your KMA files on and to ONLY allow ONE of your most trusted employees to have access, and would be the ONLY Employee to Host a Karaoke Show on your behalf.

At any rate, if you give unsupervised access of your KMA files to the same employee, it will be easier to prove damages than it would be if all employees had unsupervised access to your KMA files.

After moving the KMA's to an External Hard Drive, be sure to reset, in your "Songs Source Folders," which is located in your "Build Songs Database," the new Drive and Folder Path (Delete the old Path) and Rebuild the Database so that Hoster knows where to find your KMA files.

Food for thought,

Norm

[Azkaraoke4]

Hi Jaime, Listen I don't know if this will help or not. I havn't tried this program yet however I will as soon as I need to. I was watching the screen savers on tech tv and they showed this free registry tweak or hack if you will. If you go to the web site thescreensavers.com I'm sure you can find it. It's actually not even a download I don't believe. Anyway it shows you how to go into the registry and make the hard drive disappear! I mean it's there for all intents and purposes, however if you go to find it in any of the normal ways like through my computer or what ever, it won't be there. Hoster should access the drive just like normal cause all the paths remain the same to all the files, but you just won't see whatever drive visually. Now if your Kj were to be smart enough to plug their hard drive in and go to dos, or the run menu and type something like copy c:\ bla bla bla then it would access and copy, the key is that they can't see the drive and drag and drop and stuff like that. Anyway I think for what you are looking for this would do the trick!
Good Luck,
John

[kj n texas]

Just a thought,

You may look into a file or folder encryption program to protect your .kma files. I have used encryption programs with good results on other data. I have not used encryption with a folder or files with the .kma extention but I feel that it should work.

Typically, an encryption program would block access to anyone to the .kma files without the correct password. Even if the files were copied, the files would be useless without the password.

Good Luck,

kj n texas