Karaoki is PCDJ’s stand-alone karaoke show hosting solution for professional karaoke hosts, and this pro tip will show you how you can use a simple M3U playlist generator to build your background music cases (filler music player).
Karaoki is the most feature-rich karaoke software we’ve ever had the pleasure to produce, and one of the most utilized and sought-after automation functions is the background music player (BGM).
The BGM allows you to create and save “cases” (AKA playlists) for automatic playback in-between singers and/or sets. You can right click in the track area (where you see your songs) in the BGM section and “save” or “load” background music cases. (WATCH HOW TO CREATE AND SAVE BACKGROUND MUSIC CASES IN KARAOKI).
When you start hosting you simply load the background music case you want to use for the gig and click PLAY on the BGM player. That’s it. Exit the BGM section and background music will automatically play when you stop or end a karaoke track – and fade out when you load/play your next karaoke tune. There are also a number of settings for how you want the BGM to work: Start a new track every time the BGM begins playback, continuous play or fade back into the same song at the same position it faded out at.
Creating cases in playlist format for the BGM is fairly easy in Karaoki, but predicated on scanning in entire directories of music or manually importing tracks a few at a time. For those KJs that have tons of directories and sub-directories, this can be admittedly cumbersome to do.
Enter in this simple and free M3U creation software: M3U-Maker
How-To Use M3U Maker To Create Background Music Cases For Karaoki
- First, you need the goods. Click HERE to visit SourceForge to download M3U Maker to your Windows computer.
- Run M3U Maker (double click from within zip file, the software will open up immediately)
- Browse your hard drive for your music directories from the navigation pane on the left side of M3U Maker. Simply click any file to add it to the “sidelist” (far right side list area in M3U creator) to start building your custom M3U playlist. NOTE: Try to keep playlists under 300 tracks total for background music cases for optimal performance.
- Once your playlist is built on the right sidelist, click “SAVE LIST“
- Now, select the directory you wish to save your M3U playlist to (I suggest creating a folder within documents for M3U playlists).
- IMPORTANT: When you name your playlist be sure to also apply a “.m3u” after the playlist name. This may not be the case for all users, but under Windows 8 during my testing M3U Maker was not automatically applying the file name extension — thus it was necessary to apply a “.m3u” after typing in my playlist name for clicking “SAVE“.
- Now, open up PCDJ Karaoki.
- Click The BGM Button to access the background music case section of Karaoki.
- Click “ADD SONGS” -> “IMPORT M3U“
- Browse to the directory/folder you saved your M3U playlist to and double-click it to load – you should now see the songs populate the BGM area!
- You can now save this playlist by right-clicking in the track area (Where you see the songs) and select “SAVE BACKGROUND MUSIC CASE AS” and name it – “SAVE“.
- Now you can clear the BGM area and repeat the steps above to create and import another M3U — wash, rinse and repeat.
Watch How To Create And Save Background Music Cases The “Regular Way”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkkwQqxfGdU]
