The plug-in is made for Winamp (version 2.xx & 5.xx). Make sure Winamp is installed
on your machine and is working correctly. To play CD+G disks, you must have a
CD-Rom / DVD drive compatible with CD+G. Not all drive can do that. Click here to find
a list of the most popular drive that supports CD+G. The list is not exhaustive. If your
drive is not on the list, you can try the plug-in to see if it works.
Click here to download the current version of the plug-in. The installation program will
try to determine where your Winamp is located and it will install its files accordingly.
Running the program
Open Winamp and put a CD+G disk in your drive. Click on open in Winamp (the eject-
like button) and browse the drive that contains the disk. You should see a list of .cda
files named track01.cda, track02.cda and so on for each track on the disk. Double click
on a track. If your drive is CD+G compatible, you should start hearing audio and a
window with the animated graphics will popup. That is! You are in business!
If you get a message telling that your drive seems to support audio only, it is probably
the case. However, keep in mind that there is drive out there that reports to be not
CD+G compatible but that can do it. This is especially true for Sony drive. To make sure
your drive is not supported, try to force different methods of extraction (check the
configuration section below)
While a CD+G track is playing, you can resize the CD+G window as you wish. You can
double-click it to switch between normal mode and full screen. If you right click in it, you
can choose predefined size. You can also enable the “always on top” feature. There is
also a sub-menu to select different channels if the disk supports it.
When a new disk is inserted, the plug-in will try to find the title of the tracks in the
cdplayer.ini file. This file can be edited with the windows CD player. If the CD is not
recognized, it will check on freedb web site. This site has a huge database of CD titles.
All key pressed when the CD+G window has the focus are sent to Winamp, except for
window’s shortcuts itself. This allows you to adjust the volume or change tracks while
the window is in foreground.
To change the pitch/tempo/speed of a song, I recommend using the pacemaker plug-
in. Check the following web site for more information: http://sky.prohosting.
com/oparviai/pacemaker/.
Configuration
You can press control-P in Winamp to open the preference window of Winamp. Go in
the input plug-in section then select the CD+G disk player plug-in in the list. Press the
configure button. This will show you the dialog box to configure the plug-in.
The upper section of the config screen list the name of the drives found on the
systems. For each drive, an auto detection routine is run to determine capacity of doing
karaoke. If the drive supports normal subcode extraction, the status column will say
“karaoke”. If the drive supports only raw subcode extraction, the status will be marked
as “karaoke (raw)”. In both case, your drive should play a CD+G without any problem.
The third column offers different methods of extraction to access the drive. Most of the
time, “generic” and “generic raw” are the preferred. If they don’t work, you can try the
others one to see if one works well for you.
If your drive is identified as “audio only”, this mean that the auto detection has failed
and that probably your drive don’t support the extraction of the graphic part of a CD+G.
However, we have seen some drives failing the auto detection routine but that play
karaoke disk. Some Sony’s drives belong to this category. You can try the different
methods of extraction to see if one is working for your drive.
On NT/XP family of OS, you can check the “force spti” check box to try and alternative
way of “talking” to the CD controller. This can solve some problems if your ASPI stack is
corrupted or bugged.
You can uncheck the freedb checkbox to prevent the plug-in of accessing freedb site to
identify the CD. In that case, the plug-in will only look in the cdplayer.ini file. This file is
shared with the CD player program from Microsoft.
The timing factor is used to fix a drift in timing engine of Winamp that happens on most
versions. You should leave this to the default value. If you see the lyrics going faster
than the music as the song play, you should replace the value with “1.0” instead.
The horizontal and vertical margins define a border around the lyrics. The borders are
scaled as the window is resized. The auto-hide feature hides the cursor after 3
seconds when the cursor is inside the CD+G window in full screen. The full screen
monitor selection list allows selecting a specific monitor when going to full screen
mode.
Registration
When you install the program, you’re running as an evaluation version. The songs are
limited to play for the first 60 secs. This allows you to verify if your drive is compatible
with CD+G. If the program satisfies your need, you can register it online. The
registration process is done securely with paypal. Once you’re registration will be
confirmed by paypal to us, we will send by email you your personal code to unlock the
software. You can click here to go to the registration page.
