Screen Shots and More
When KSB Pro first starts up you'll be presented with an
opening screen that allows you to create or select an existing
song book. KSB Pro allows you to create unlimited
songbooks and has the ability to easily move data between
them. You can even create song books for other KJ's or
your friend's CD collections.
To create a new song you simply click the Add button and
Enter a name. That's it! The new song book now
exists. Your next step is to add some CDs to it...
Oh yeah, notice the Help button. KSB Pro has context
sensitive help for every form it displays. Anytime
you're wondering what a feature does or how something works,
just click the Help button for useful information concerning
the form you're on.
KSB Pro offers several ways to populate your song books
with CD Titles and they're all easy! Of course you
can always type in new CD Titles and then type in the song
titles, but why?! Unless you're entering a CD of songs
that's never been published you'll almost certainly find it in
our song database.
From this page in the program you can manage your discs. If
you want to sort the list, click the column
heading. If you want to see the song list for any
CD, double-click the CD Title. Want to change the ID
Number of a CD, well... just change it, then tab out of
the ID field or click the "Save CD Title" Button.
The CD Title will be changed and all the songs associated with
that CD will be changed as well. KSB Pro even has a special
feature that will automatically re-number all your CDs using a
sequential number and you can switch back to the original
CD IDs with the click of a button! More
on this later!
Ok, just how easy is it to add CD titles to a KSB Pro song
book? Let's walk through the process... First,
from the CD Titles form above, click the "Search Song
DB" button. The form below will display...
In the search field, enter some aspect of the CD Title
you're looking for. This can be the CD Number, some part
of the CD Title or even song titles. KSB Pro even has a
special search called, "Full CD Song Title Search"
that can isolate almost any CD Title even if you don't know
the name or ID of it!
In the sample above we searched for the word
"karaoke" and of course found a multitude. As
you click each CD Title, KSB Pro will display the songs on
that CD. It also instantly retrieves various statistics
and displays them in the upper right-hand corner of the
form.
Notice the hi-lited song titles. These are songs
that already exist in your song book. This can be very
useful if you're shopping for a CD with a certain song.
You might want to keep on shopping if you already have several
of the songs on a particular CD.
To add the title to your song book, just double-click
it! That's all it takes! One more thing, If
duplicates are found, KSB Pro will ask if you want to
"In-Activate" them as they are added. This
keeps duplicates Song Titles from appearing in your song
book. Of course, you can always manually in-activate any
title using the Song Titles form. More
on this...
What If My CD Title's Not in the Master Database or I
have a Custom CD?
Well, let's walk through that... First, click the tab
that says, "Create A Custom CD"...
Now enter a Unique ID and Title for your custom CD in the
fields in the upper right-hand corner.
KSB Pro uses "Quick Search" technology to
quickly find and isolate song titles... In the Search
Box, type the first letter of the song you want to add.
In the sample above, we typed the letter "T" and the
right hand column displayed all the songs beginning with the
letter "T". Two letters later and we've located the
song "To Be With You" KSB Pro indexes all the
pertinent fields to make this feature very fast. Using
this technique, a ten song CD can be entered in about 2
minutes or less.
Many collectors of karaoke buy entire sets of karaoke CDs
and while it's not that hard to add them one by one, the KSB
Pro Master Song
Database has many of them already
"flagged". Using the "Find/Add CD Sets"
feature allows you to locate a set of CDs and with a single
click add them all to your song book.
And oh yeah... don't forget about that context sensitive
Help button on every form. Anytime you run into a
question you can probably find the answer you need right
there.
Using CDDB
The KSB Pro "Master
Song Database" contains only Karaoke CDs. If
you should want to create a song book of Audio CDs there's one
more way to add CD Titles and that's using CDDB. CDDB
access , the (Compact Disc Database) is incorporated into KSB
Pro's feature set. The CDDB has over 500,000 CD titles
available, a small part of which are karaoke titles.
This feature is used by inserting your CD into your CD-ROM
drive where KSBP scans it and then retrieves it's song
information. Once you verify it, a single click formats
the data and adds it to your song book.
KSB Pro makes it easy to manage your song books. If
you add songs manually, you can designate whether they are
Vocal Tracks, Duets or one of your favorites. (Of
course, Duets and Vocal Tracks are already flagged in the KSB
Pro Master Database) You can also store
a key-step setting for your favorites.
You can also specify whether they are active or not.
An in-active song will not be printed in your song
books. The best use for this feature is to make sure
your song book doesn't have duplicate song titles. It
may also be important in some situations to in-activate R or X
rated songs in your song books.
Of course, if you have a 100 CDs it might be difficult
locating all the duplicates. Well, KSB Pro does that for
you, either automatically as the CD titles are added from the Master
Song Database or later by using one of KSB Pro's
"canned queries". These built in queries allow
you view your song book data in different ways.
To use the "canned queries" just
click the drop-down to the right of the "Retrieve"
button and this list will appear...
When you make your selection the Song Titles
form will display your choice. This is great for finding
duplicates since not all songs with the same name are
duplicates. Sometimes two songs with the same name can
be completely different and neither should be in-activated.
One really great feature is the KSB Pro search
engine. Unlike most database search engines, KSB Pro can
search all relevant fields in a single pass. This means
you can locate any song in seconds by entering the Author/Band
name, the Title, the Category, etc. Once you've found
the song you're looking for, just double-click the title to
see all the songs on the CD. One more thing, you can
sort by any relevant field by clicking it's Column Headings.
KSBP also has the ability to search relevant
fields individually. This allows you to make a more
concise and specific search. You can even specify that
searches are "fuzzy" meaning that they will match
words within phrases or "exact" meaning the search
will find only exactly what you type in.
Favorites?
What are Favorites?
Everyone that collects karaoke from the pros
to the hobbyist loves to sing! We know! We like to
sing too! Because of this we added a feature that allows
you to "flag" particular songs as your own personal
favorites. We also added a feature that let's you set a
key-step value and to top it off we created a report that
prints your Favorites List along with the key-step info.
This is perfect for printing out and taking to
your next karaoke get-together, especially if you're one of
those people that often needs to change keys to sing
comfortably.
KSB Pro offers a multitude of Song Book
styles and formats. In addition, you can print Request
Slips, Inventory Lists, Favorites Lists, CD Labels &
Update Lists. Rather than try to explain all the
possibilities, just look over the options available and
consider all the different combinations.
The best way
to see what can be done is by using the Print Preview in the
Demo version of KSB Pro, to actually create a song
book.
Note the
"Configurations Button"... KSB Pro allows you
select all your options, then store them under a Title you
assign for later recall. This means you can store one
configuration suitable for your Song Books and a different one
for your Disc Labels. You can have an unlimited number
of configurations. When you select a configuration, KSBP
will recall all your settings so you don't have to!
Note too, the
Print Preview Screen. Any time you change
reports, sort order or style, you can use the refresh button
see the effect your changes make. The preview has a full
screen mode and allows you to view up to six pages at
once. It even allows the searching of rendered song
books.
Check
out the various Print Options in the screen shot below...
Sample Song Book Styles...
 
And
the various Style Options in this screen shot...
You even have full individual font
control on every song field.
KSB Pro now has the ability to set any font
attribute for any song book field. This means you can
create song books in different colors using different fonts in
different sizes and even use different attributes such as
underline, bold and italic. The combinations are
endless!
There are several dozen other combinations
that can be created using Style Option as well. The best
way to see what can be done is to download the Demo and use
the Print Preview to try different combinations.
KSB Pro has the ability to export a
rendered song book to any of the following
formats...
PDF
(Adobe Acrobat)
HTML (Internet Hypertext)
RTF (Rich Text)
XLS (MS Excel).
PDFs
are particularly useful as they give a secure format for
making your song book available for download via a website.
In
addition, KSB Pro provides Full Import/Export to CSV
(Comma-Delimited Text) for moving data between
applications. This feature makes a perfect
"Backup" file too! More
on this...
A lot of people who collect karaoke tend to store their CDs
in 50, 100 or even 200 disc cases. These work great as
long as you don't have too many CDs or if you store your CDs
in alphabetical order so you can locate them easily. Of
course, the next time you buy a new CD and need to insert it
into the middle of your case so your CDs remains alphabetical,
the shuffling can get old. KSB Pro offers an alternative
to this.
With KSB Pro you can instantly re-number all
your CDs using a sequential number and then print matching
songbooks and CD labels. (KSB Pro has two disc label
styles. Both are industry standard AVERY formats that
can be purchased at any office supply store.) You
can even switch back to your original CD identifiers anytime
if you choose to. Using this feature, when you obtain a
new disc, you simply print a label for it, then add it as the
next CD in your case. Because they're sequential,
they're always easy to find!
If you already have a custom number system
you'd like to preserve, KSB Pro will always allow you to enter
CD Identifiers manually. Because KSB Pro actually stores
two complete numbering schemes for each song book, you can use
either one for your custom numbers and preserve the other in
case you ever need to go back.
Here's a screen shot from our Label / Request
Slip Setup... You can even print partially used sheets
of labels and labels for individual or selected CDs. The
program also allows you to adjust the alignment of labels to
match the slight differences found between all printers.
A Few More Report Samples...
 
 
As mentioned before there are a multitude of
style features that can be combined to create hundreds of
different reports.
KSB Pro has a powerful, flexible CSV export facility.
Using a simple interface you can easily save an entire
songbook or any part of it you choose to a CSV file and then
import it under a different song book name.
This allows you to easily move song data between song
books, create "copies" for modifying or sharing and
create backups of song books. (As with all software, we
highly recommend that you create and keep current backups of
all your data.)
The KSB Pro Master Song Database is used to create your
song books by allowing you to locate a CD title and
automatically add all the song titles and relevant data without
typing. Our database also contains Category, Duet,
Vocal Track and whether or not a CD is part of a
"Set" information. This database is probably
the most important feature in KSB Pro.
Our database is editable, which allows you to make global
changes. We even provide search and replace tools to
make such changes easy. (Great care should be taken when
making automated changes since once made, they are not
reversible without re-installing.)
Because KSB Pro creates and orders song books using Song
Titles and Author/Band names, we have developed special
databases and propriety software that processes all our song
data to make these fields consistent.
For example: One karaoke company may call the
Backstreet Boys, "The Backstreet Boys", another may
go with, "Backstreet Boys, The" and yet another may
say, "The Back Street Boys" and the list goes on and
on when you consider typos and misspellings. With over
220,000 song titles in our database, there were
thousands and thousands of inconsistencies.
You can imagine what this would do when trying to remove
duplicates or to sort your song book by Song Title or
Author/Band names. So to do the job right, we compiled
the data and created the utilities to correct these
inconsistencies. Sound's like a lot of work doesn't
it? It is a lot of work! It took months of labor
to create this one feature and maintaining it never
ends. But fortunately, you don't have to deal with this
since we already have!
Automated, Background Updates!
The times they are a changin'... so we have to keep
up! Updates to the KSB Pro Master Song Database can be
obtained two ways. The best, is by simply connecting to
the internet and clicking "Check For Updates
Now". The lesser, is by downloading a file and
manually importing it.
Our automated update process really doesn't get any
easier. You simply click "Check For Updates
Now", then KSB Pro will check for an internet connection
and if found, compare your local database to the update
database on our website. If anything newer than what you
have has been added, you'll see the message above.
At this point, just select Yes and carry on with what ever
you were doing before. KSB Pro will download and process
the updates while you continue working. As you continue
working, a status bar will display to let you know how things
are progressing. (Note: On older (slower) machines the
back ground operation may create a noticeable slow-down in
other operations.)
Using proprietary transfer protocols, we make sure you
never miss anything, even if some thing bad should happen like
losing connection or tripping over the power cord in the
middle of a transfer! KSB Pro will simply take up where
it left off the next time you connect!
There are many more features and screen shots we could
show you, but at this point you're much better off downloading
the Demo and going for the real
thing. Check out the Demo and decide for yourself if KSB
Pro satisfies your needs.
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