Clone CD supports my player - Microstudio doesn't!

[Gerry Waugh]

Hello

Like many karaoke hosts, I have some regular karaoke singers who have some favourite songs. I decided it would be handy to have a compilation of these frequently used songs for easy access. To this end, I downloaded two pieces of karaoke demo software - CloneCD and MicroStudio. The Clone CD demo made a perfect copy of one whole CD, which was great, but not really what I wanted, but Microstudio insists that my drive (NEC 7700) does not support karaoke, which is plainly inaccurate as it had managed to make a perfectly good copy using CloneCD. Not only that, but when I look at the list of karaoke supported drives on the website, which appears not to have been updated in a year or two, I see NEC 7500 - since logically the 7700 would appear to be a newer version of the 7500, it strikes me that it is the list of drives that is out of date. My drive has been proven to be capable of reading and writing CD-G, but the Microstudio demo does not recognise it. Naturally, this puts me off buying the full version or any other MTU product. I have no desire to change a perfectly working CD writer that has successfully written CDG to another drive just because it is on an out of date list. Is a newer version of the software/list of supported drives available?

[George]

Can't answer your question regarding the supported burners, but if you're referring to the Clone CD once marketed by Elaborate Bytes, it has been removed from the market for some time now.

Here's a quote from their website...

"CloneCD 4
New copyright law drives out CloneCD sheep
Due to the new legal situation we will stop the sales of CloneCD"

It looks like some crack sites may have jumped on it and are pulling the "wool" over some unsuspecting folks like yourself, but beware. Elby won't support it, and the illegal vendor can't.

George

[admin]

Gerry, I can appreciate what you say, but you fail to understand the technology.

CloneCD ONLY makes an entire disc backup using RAW-DAO96 (DAO=Disc At Once) format. It is INCAPABLE of reading individual tracks, or playing tracks from the disc or hard drive. That is the difference with Microstudio, and the reason why Microstudio doesn't CURRENTLY recognize that drive. If all you want is a disc image, CloneCD could do that. If more, Microstudio is required.

Our Microstudio 3.000 will be able to work with drives that do RAW-DA096, and import and assemble individual tracks when it is released.

Thanks for trying MTU. Good luck with your search.

[ddouglass]

Gerry,
Aside from what George is telling you about CloneCD not being supported, the two programs do not function the same way.
Microstudio requires that the drive be capable of playing and recording karaoke songs in the cd+g format and your NEC-7700 is not on that list.
CloneCD doesn't care what format or type the files on a disk are because it just copies everything on the disk as 1s and 0s into a single file called an image file. CloneCD can copy any type of disk including DVD movies and no security programs can prevent this (which is why they stopped producing and supporting the program). CloneCD is great for making your back-up copies of your CDG.

So, to create the custom CDG that you are wanting you will need to get a drive that is supported by MTU for use in Microstudio.

[Gerry Waugh]

Thanks for the responses, but you seem to have misunderstood. I am fully aware that Clone CD only makes full copies not individual tracks. I even stated in my original post "The Clone CD demo made a perfect copy of one whole CD, which was great, but not really what I wanted,". Because I could not get Microstudio demo to work with my drive, and the only responses suggested changing my drive, I continued my search for other software, and have now found a piece of software which successfully allowed me to make compilations from my karaoke discs. Like many hosts, most of my discs have several frequently used songs and many that never get requested. I want backups of these regularly used songs. Power CDG Burner from ************ does exactly that - it is not particularly user friendly, and did take a few failed attempts before I got the settings right, but it does prove to me that it is possible to copy individual CDG tracks using my drive. I now have a piece of software which does what I was interested in Microstudio for. It is all very well saying a future version will support it, but it is not much good to me as I have no idea when that will be released. I may be interested in future, but I am less than confident that I will go for it unless it has considerably superior abilities than what I can get from the software which I have now purchased. I have a perfectly working drive and I am simply not prepared to change my hardware to suit your software, especially when I am not in the US so purchasing a "certified" drive from you would be expensive. I have instead chosen different software to suit my hardware. I would have purchased Microstudio if it had worked with my drive, but it does not, so you may lose other customers between now and release of a version which supports more drives.