Build a Karaoke Music Library

To be a professional karaoke host you must have a substantial library of popular songs in various genres. Your music collection will almost certainly become your biggest karaoke system investment. It will take some strategizing on your part to build your song library while minimizing duplicate song titles.

Duplicate song titles, by typical definition, are songs with the same title and same artist. There are many songs that have been done by various artists in their individual styles. In these instances the same song in the style of a different artist would not be considered a duplicate. For example, the song "Knocking On Heaven's Door" is quite different in the style of Guns N' Roses as compared to Bob Dylan's version.

The CD+G karaoke format is far and away the most popular and offers many more song titles than any other. The compressed version of this format, MP3+G, is supported by all karaoke hosting applications. For these reasons you should focus on building your song library from this format alone.

Beware of hard drives preloaded with MP3+G song files. What you are going to get are a bunch of duplicate song titles. Often these songs are of poor audio quality because of the low bitrate of their MP3 files. Depending on when the hard drives were loaded, the song selection may have not been updated for years.

CD+G discs are becoming increasingly hard to find. The songs they once contained are now only found as MP3+G files. The problem is that nobody is selling the vast majority of the songs that were on the now defunct CD+G discs. These songs now reside in personal collections. The best way to find and download these songs is with the MP3+G Download Guide.

Article by Richard Wise.