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How To Back Up Your Karaoke CDG Discs


It's a good idea to backup your CDG disc collection. They are expensive to replace and some discontinued discs may be very difficult or impossible to find. Many people wisely use copies of their discs while storing the originals safely away. There are two ways to backup your collection.

Create Duplicate Copies

It's a common misconception that CDG discs contain video. CDG is not a video format and your CDG discs will be copied to CD-R media. While even the cheapest CD-R may work, you will produce better results and more durable discs if you use high quality media.

There was a time when you would need a "special" burner to copy CDG discs. You might have read where you must have a Plextor or a certain model of Sony burner. This is no longer the case. The new generation of CDG burning software allows you to use almost any modern CD/DVD burner.

A program like Microstudio or Power CD+G Burner 2 is designed for the purpose of copying CDG discs and makes this as simple as importing the songs from the CDG disc to your hard drive and then burning the songs to a blank CD-R. You can make an exact duplicate of a CDG disc in just a few minutes. The biggest downside to this method is that you are left with a lot of discs to store.

Power CD+G Burner 2

Compressed Format

This is my preferred method by far. You can shrink the size of your CD+G disc song tracks considerably while not sacraficing audio and visual quality. This is done by "ripping" the song tracks from CD+G discs to the compressed MP3+G format. You can then store the songs on DVD-R discs or preferrably an external hard drive. MP3+G song tracks can be played with virtually any software karaoke player or used to create CD+G discs.

You'll want to rip the song tracks to at least 192 kbps to assure that the audio is CD quality. Microstudio or Power CD+G Burner 2 will do everthing mentioned here.

Article by Richard Wise.