Last Weekend’s Weddings

Posted in: Blog by admin on August 7, 2007

There were two different styles of weddings this weekend.

This weekend was a very pleasant change of pace!  On Friday I performed at a wedding dance at the Ramada Inn in Fargo.  The groom and his whole family were from Hawaii.  It was a wonderful change of pace to play some Hawaiian and Reggae music.  Some DJs say that you play the same standard songs at every wedding dance.  Not True!  While some favorites may always be requested, I love to mix it up with what the crowd asks for.

They had a very cool tradition.  The bride put money in the bouquet when she tossed it.  They were a very lovely family and I know they will do well….ahh the romance, that’s what I love about weddings.  There was one very funny thing that happened.  The matron of honor was giving her toast.  She thanked the groom’s family for traveling so far (5,000 miles) to be at their wedding.  She then also noted that they called the United States the mainland.   She then mentioned that it was their first trip to the United States.   I had to chuckle…and kind of wanted to ask some silly question like “Does anyone have a Hawaiian dollar bill?”

On Saturday Sarah was the DJ for the wedding at the Teamsters.  At this wedding the bride and her family was Hispanic.  Sarah said she had just a great time playing Latino music and mixing it up with the other standards. She had a smile on her face and great satisfaction to say that the dance floor was full all night long.  I kind of wanted to do that wedding too, but hey I gotta let my employees go to work too!

We have some very exciting news coming up!  We are now offering a new service!  Check in for my next blog to find out!

What is MP3+G?

Posted in: Karaoke by admin on August 6, 2007

MP3+G is a relatively new karaoke format that uses the compressed digital audio format of MP3 with the standard graphic format of traditional CDG. It features all the benefits and drawbacks of standard MP3′s while retaining the graphical “glory” of CDG’s. This article is designed to be a fairly technical primer of what goes into making and MP3+G as well as what makes a CD and a CD+G disc.

First we should give some background information on what makes a CDG different from a standard compact disc. A standard compact disc is something like an old vinyl record. Like vinyl records which stored music in a groove that had “bumpy walls” to wiggle the needle, the music on a CD is stored in a line of pits and troughs (representing the ones and zeros of a digital signal) that “wiggle” the laser used to read the data. Unlike a vinyl record which spirals from the outside in, data on a CD spirals from the inside out.

Another key difference between a standard compact disc and a vinyl record is that the “data” on a record is one continuous “line”, whereas the data on a compact disc is broken into segments known as “Sectors”. A standard CD player playing at 1x (150 kbps) reads 75 sectors per second. Each sector is divided into 2448 bytes. 2352 bytes of the data are devoted to music, and the other 96 are divided into 4 data packets of 24 bytes each. 8 bytes of this 24 byte packet rate overhead (meaning they do useful technical things like data parity for error checking). The remaining 16 bytes in the packet are then broken into their constituent bits (8 bits to the byte), and these bits are further divided into “sub-channels” which are labeled P through W. This means there are sixteen bits of subchannel information in each 24byte data packet.

This is where a CDG starts diverging from a standard CD. The P and Q subchannels are used by most CD players for timing information so that the CD player knows where it is on the disc, how much time is left on the disc, how much time is left on this track, etc. The R-W subchannels are unused by standard CDs (although players supporting the CD-Text standard read a block of information at the beginning of the disc which gets stored in these R-W subchannels). However, a CDG uses these subcode channels to store the graphical information component that gets turned into the lyrics on a karaoke singers screen. Since there are only 6 bits of information used to carry the graphics and because there are only 16 bytes per packet, 4 packets per sector, and 75 sectors per second, this works out to 3.6K (28,800 bytes) per second. This is not a lot of information!

Now, as most of us know, MP3 works by reading the standard audio data and compressing it using various techniques like only keeping the differences between the left and right audio channels and getting rid of frequencies which are typically beyond the average human’s hearing range. At a sufficiently high encoding rate, MP3 audio is nearly indistinguishable from an audio CD (which is itself a lossy compression format). In a crowded bar, the two are even more indistinguishable.

But what of the “G” component in MP3+G? Well, it is simply all of those bits from the R-W subchannels. Applications like Audiograbber, which can rip CD+G discs, simply create a file containing those R-W subcodes and place them in a file with a .CDG extension. So in reality, there is no such thing as an MP3+G file. Instead there is the MP3 file and a corresponding CDG file. The application used for playing back the MP3+G simply knows to play the MP3 normally while also reading from a CDG file with the same name as the MP3 file. That’s why its so important that you name your files carefully!

An unfortunate side effect of the standard ripping process is that the CDG file is often several megabytes in size. This tends to waste a lot of space on computer hard drives. For example, if your song is approximately 6MB, the corresponding CDG file will often be 3 or 4 megabytes in size. If each song takes up 10MB, and standard 200GB drive (which really isn’t 200GB) can only hold 20,000 songs. While this is an impressive collection, many KJs have far more than 20,000 karaoke songs. Fortunately, the CDG file is highly compressible using the standard ZIP format and often compresses down to about 90% of its original size without any loss in graphics quality (because ZIP is a lossless compression format). This means that our 10MB song (6MB for the MP3 and 4MB for the CDG) can be compressed to approximately 6 or 7 megabytes. Now our standard 200GB hard drive can hold between 28,000 and 33,000 songs. As an added bonus, you can put both the CDG and MP3 files into the same ZIP file, thus giving you only one file to manage instead of two separate files to manage. It is this resulting ZIP file that is most commonly referred to as an MP3+G or MP3G.

And that’s it in a nutshell. In this article you learned what makes up a CD, a CD+G, and finally an MP3+G file. Many great resources exist on the web for those wanting to get even more technical.

If you are new to MP3+G or are a KJ looking to convert existing CD+G’s to MP3+G, we highly recommend Audiograbber and our freeware component called “MP3+G to ZIP”. MP3+G to ZIP combines the MP3 and CDG files output by Audiograbber into one nice ZIP file automatically. To play back these MP3+G’s on your computer, check out WinCDG Pro.

The White House in Kragnes, How to Get Your .DJ Domain Name, and Some Interesting Traffic Stats

Posted in: Blog by admin on August 1, 2007

If you hadn’t noticed, our redesigned website went live on July 25th. Since that time we’ve been able to analyze our traffic stats and discovered something we find shocking: We get over 1000 visitors a day! Even though it’s only been a week, we’ve noticed some patterns that we’d like to address:

For those who visit our site looking for the White House in Kragnes: It isn’t called the White House any more. We’re not very familiar with all the details, but about a year ago, the White House at Kragnes was sold and renamed “A Friend’s House” (very catchy name by the way). I don’t think it is open any more. If you know otherwise, please let us know! We’d like to add you to our directory of Fargo Moorhead Wedding Vendors.

We’ve also discovered quite a few people (presumably fellow Disc Jockeys) are trying to find out how they can get a domain name with the .DJ extension instead of the standard .COM, .INFO, or .BIZ. When we first set up the site, we had to search long and hard to find out how to do it ourselves, so we’ll clue the rest of you disc jockeys in: Go to http://www.dj/ The domain name is registered with the country of Djibouti.

OK, now that we have that out of the way, back to those 1000 visitors a day. One of the really spiffy features we have is geographic stats that show us where our visitors are from. Don’t worry, it doesn’t give use your name or address or anything like that, nor is it very accurate, but it does show us what city your ISP is in. Of course most of our traffic comes from North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota, but it amazes us to find people from such exotic places like Kenya, Thailand, Lebanon, and Argentina were browsing our site too. What a global village we live in! We would be remiss to not give a shout out to our visitors from: Bismarck, Ellendale, Jamestown, Devils Lake, Park River, Grand Forks, West Fargo, Fargo, Moorhead, Dilworth, Halstad, Erskine, Barnesville, Perham, Detroit Lakes, Schroeder, Melrose, St. Cloud, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Eden Prairie, Brunsville, Rochester, Sioux Falls, and last but not least Wall. Whew!

Finally, we’d like to tell you to keep an eye out for some forth coming enhancements. We’re working on an online booking system so that you can check our availability online, book a specific DJ, and pay the deposit online as well. We’ll also be improving our dance planners so they integrate with the rest of the site and especially the Music Database Search. There’s a few other surprises in store too, but we can’t tip our hand just yet.