Favorite Features

[Karanight]

I know It ain't easy, but if you had to name Just ONE favorite feature in kJams, what would it be.
Mine at the moment is, The small button next to the forward track button (I don't know what Dave calls it) that puts the track playing to the beginning of the track.

Len

[jfbiii]

Shift-Command-F

Being able to search my library in less than 2 seconds for whatever song I'm being asked about is the best time saver ever. I can give people an answer by the time they're done asking the question a lot of times.

No less important than this, but less-used, is the power of set-and-forget that's built into individuals and the songs they sing. To drop a song into someone's playlist and have the software remember that they like the song 1 or 2 steps down is awesome.

[Sedge]

Since you asked, right now it is the "Skip silence at start of song", as it nailed me a gig last night - the club I was at has two regular music DJs, along with the KJ, and one of the big problems they were having was dead air between the music playing from upstairs in the DJ booth to downstairs where the Karaoke was going. Skipping the silence made me look like a wizard of the karaoke, as all they would have to do is fade down a bit to cue me, I'd hit the magic play button, and they could continue to fade out. Worked wonderfully.

One little hiccup in this process, though. As they were playing a full song between just about every singer, I would have kJams pause between songs automatically, and leave the rotation list up. This would cue the singers, but more importantly, would cue the DJs, who were usually announcing the next singer as well (as they have control of all volume levels, they could fade down music easier to do this). This works great, unless 1 of 2 things happened. 1) the rotation goes empty, or at least stops (stop button) - or 2) I make changes during the break, and want to refresh the rotation list. What happens is the next singer's (or first singer's) song loads, goes 5 seconds into it or whatever to skip silence, and anytime after that song loads, the rotation no longer shows them as next to sing. From an empty rotation, if I put a few songs up for different singers, I don't get a rotation list until I hit play on the rotation list and switch back to display rotation, which then loads (cues) the first singer's song, and drops them off the list. For me, this just meant I couldn't display the most current rotation on the screens all the time, and occasionally I'd have to run upstairs to the booth and tell the DJ who the first singer was, as it wasn't on the list.

Easy? way to fix this would be to not count a song as sung by the current singer until it's 20 seconds in, or something like that. There's not much with 20 secs of silence at the beginning. I thought it already did something similar for purposes of rotation order (so you can skip somebody and come back to them next time, same song) but I might be wrong there, as that happened too, and I had to re-load the song onto that singer. I suppose you could also just force the rotation list to start with the current singer instead of the next singer. However, that was so minor - the DJs were blown away that there was even a list for them to cue off of.

>>Eric

[dave]

Easy? way to fix this would be to not count a song as sung by the current singer until it's 20 seconds in

a very excellent point, i'll try to get that in right away.

[Sedge]

Thanks Dave! You're a champ!

[dave]

okay so i'll set the default at 15 seconds, cuz in my test the "skip silence" can skip more than 10 seconds. but you'll be able to set a secret pref to whatever you want seconds, in case you need to.

-dave

[Sedge]

Update on skip silence / rotation list issue - tried newest version at last night's show, worked flawlessly. Great job on a fast fix!

[dave]

JOY!