Copy CDG Discs to Your Computer

Does this scenario sound familiar? You have a lot of CDG discs and when you perform karaoke you have to constantly load and unload the discs from your karaoke machine. So you wonder how you might copy all the songs from the CDG's to your computer and play them with a software program and not have to mess with the discs anymore. Actually, this is very easy to do but you have to know the right procedure.

You cannot simply copy the songs from the CDG discs to your computer's hard drive. You must have the proper software to "rip" the songs from the discs to the appropriate format. The industry standard format that is supported by nearly all karaoke software is called MP3+G. Each MP3+G song is made up of two files which are an MP3 audio file and a CDG graphics file. The two files can be zipped together to form a single zip file... hence the term "karaoke zips".

Standard audio CD ripping software is not sufficient for ripping CDG discs to MP3+G files. You must have a specialized ripping application like Power CD+G Burner. This program will rip the songs directly to MP3+G files or karaoke zips if you prefer. It can access an online database of karaoke discs to automatically name the song files. All the disc data is user submitted so you need to watch for misinformation although for the most part it is pretty accurate.

You're probably thinking that this is going to be a time consuming venture and you're right if you have hundreds of discs. Plan on three to four minutes ripping time per song. Some disc brands are multi-plex which means that they have two versions of each song, one with lead vocals and another without them. Many people choose to only rip the lead vocal free versions which saves a lot of time.

You only want to have to go through this process once so it's a very good idea to have at least one backup of the songs either on another hard drive (preferably) or on archive quality DVD discs. Every hard drive is going to fail someday... it's just a matter of when. I personally have my songs stored on two separate external hard drives. If something happens to one I will copy all the songs to a new one. External USB hard drives have become very inexpensive and even a small one (under 500 GB) will hold tens of thousands of songs.

You will want to choose a software player that has database creation with a song search feature. Most free players will not have these features. Even some paid programs have only playlist creation which is not the same thing. To be safe you should opt for a karaoke hosting program like the pros use. Some of them, like JustKaraoke for example, are very user friendly. It has all the cool hosting features like song search, singer history, filler music, etc..

So there you have it. If you are willing to invest a little money in software, and a lot of time (initially) to rip the discs, you can perform your karaoke from now on without ever having to load another disc.