Video Hoster^® Obsolete Versions 5.34 - 5.0

1. NEW - Sync Adj Column - Now you can set the Live Sync Adjustment ahead of time. The new Sync Adj column is editable, so you can change it to any value between -5.00 and +5.00 (in quarter-second increments).
2. FIXED - Crash bug - If you experience a crash when attempting to open an existing Playlist, or when you first launch Hoster, then this fix might be what you need. The crash happens because Playlist file is unwritable (read-only or damaged in some way).

1. NEW - Sync Adjust - Now you can set the Live Sync Adjustment ahead of time. If you have a song that is out-of-sync between the music and the lyrics, you can set the Sync Adj permanently for this song and forget it. To set the Sync Adj value:
   • open Tools > Edit Songs...
   • select the song
   • change the Sync setting to any value between -5.00 and +5.00 (in quarter-second increments),
   • click the button
2. NEW - Swap Title & Artist - We added a tall, narrow button to the Tools > Edit Songs... window. This button will allow you to quickly swap the Song Title and Artist Name, in case the song was indexed incorrectly. If you click it twice, they will go back to where they started.

1. NEW - Added New Genre: Northern Soul
2. UPDATED - Merge Duplicate BookIDs - If the button is active in either the Import & Index Songs Database window or the Build Songs Database window, when you click this button, the Merge Duplicate BookIDs window will appear immediately, and you'll see a Progress Bar that will indicate that Hoster is gathering the necessary information needed to complete the Merge process.
3. FIXED - Crash bug - This bug was caused by older versions of Hoster^© Lite. Customers who upgraded to version 5.33.01 would crash when opening the Index Song Files or other Songs Database dialog windows.

1. FIXED - Marquee Restarting Too Often - The Marquee will now continue its cycle while you are adding songs, moving them around in your Playlist, etc.

1. NEW - Fade Out/In for Pause/Resume - Pausing and Resuming songs in both Hoster and the Background Audio Player will now Fade Out and back In depending on the Fade settings for that player. To check the Fade setting for Hoster, go to Tools > Audio Controls.... For the BA Player, go to Settings > Fade In/Out....
2. NEW - Mark Songs as Played - This new feature will give you a visual cue when a song has been played in the current show. Played songs will be displayed in red with a strike-thru line. They will appear in your Search, Singer's List and Edit Singers windows. You can set this in one of four ways:
   • None - Turn this option off.
   • BookID - Mark only the exact BookID as "Played".
   • Title Only - Mark all songs with the exact same Title as "Played".
   • Artist & Title - Mark songs with the exact same Artist & Title as "Played".

   You make this selection in the Tools > Options... window. This feature works whether you Keep Songs After Play or not. When you close and reopen Hoster, this information is reset to start anew.

   Along with this change, you can also Reset any Played Song to be displayed normally. To do this, simply right-click on the song in any of the three windows listed above, and select Mark As > Available.

   Note: Since this feature uses the Red font color, if your background color is Red, you will not see the marked songs in the windows listed above.

3. CHANGED - Playback Offset - This setting is now in the "Audio Controls" window instead of the "Options" window. It has no other changes.

1. CHANGED - Find Same... - The search results that you get will no longer contain the song that you clicked on in Hoster's Playlist. This was done because you are either going to replace the selected song with a new song, or you are going to add a new song (probably not a duplicate).
2. FIXED - Find Same... - If you replace a "PLAYED" song in the Playlist, that song will now show up as "READY", and you can play it immediately.
3. FIXED - Ctrl-Space to Start Play - When your Show Display is in fullscreen mode, and Hoster is hidden behind it (single monitor, e.g.), you can Start and Stop the songs by pressing and holding a "Ctrl" key and then pressing the "Space bar".

1. FIXED - Enter Key - Clicking the "Enter" key when your cursor is in the Singers box will open or update the Singers List window, instead of adding the selected song(s) to Hoster's Playlist.

1. CHANGED - Remove Folders - If you are Removing multiple folders, Hoster will prompt you only once to choose whether the .KMH files should be deleted as well, instead of repeatedly for each folder.

1. NEW - BA Player Option - You can now set your Background Audio Player to Pause the currently playing song when you start playing something in Hoster. Then when that song ends, the BA Player will Resume the same song that was paused. You also have the option to Stop the current song when Hoster starts, and Start a New Song when Hoster stops.
   
   Set this using the BA Player Settings > When Show Starts... menu option.

1. FIXED - Errors Launching Hoster - If you have ever had difficulty opening Hoster stating that your Songs Database could not be opened, this will fix your situtation.
2. FIXED - Duplicate DiscID & Track - If Hoster finds two songs with the same DiscID & Track but different BookIDs, the second one found will be Quarantined, as there is no way that it can be successfully Merged into the Songs Database.

1. CHANGED - Automatic Marquee Update - The Marquee and SND will no longer automatically update every minute. This should make your Marquees flow a little better.

1. CHANGED - Double-Click to Fullscreen - If you have more than one monitor, the Show Display will now be set to Fullscreen on the monitor that does not have the main Hoster window. In other words, you can now control which monitor gets the Fullscreen Show Display by placing Hoster onto the other monitor.

1. CHANGED - Double-Click to Resize - If you have set your Preview Sizer to anything but None and double-click on the un-docked preview window, you will be unable to move or resize it until you double-click on it again.

1. NEW - Show Display and Preview Display - If you open Hoster, and either of these windows is currently off the screen (either you had moved it off before closing Hoster, or you disconnected an external monitor, for example), then they will be "snapped" back onto the visible display.
2. FIXED - Crash Opening Some Playlists - In Hoster v 5.31.01, if Hoster crashed while opening a Playlist, this crash has been fixed.
3. FIXED - Audio Issues on Slower PCs - A change made in v 5.31.01 to speed up the Marquee when a song is playing caused issues on slower PCs. This has been resolved. If you weren't experiencing any problems, you still should be OK.

1. NEW - Find Same Title/Artist - This new feature will allow you to either Add a new song to the Playlist or Replace an existing song. It will list all other songs in your database that match either the Title or the Artist of the selected song. To use this, right-click on either the "Title" or "Artist" column in the Playlist.
2. NEW - Drive Speed - When importing a track from a Singer's Disc, you can now set the Drive Speed directly from Hoster's main panel. Whatever you change it to will be reflected in the Import CD Tracks window as well (i.e. there is only one setting for this value in Hoster).
3. CHANGED - Live Sync - Now, the Live Sync can be set from -5.00 to +5.00 seconds. This will allow you to play those songs that are produced out of sync by more than 2-3 seconds.
4. FIXED - Mark Song - We found a problem in Mark Song, where it would log the wrong BookID and Title. This has been fixed.
5. FIXED - Wrong Artist - When adding an MP3+G via the K-oke button (for example), if the Artist is blank within the ID3 Header, Hoster would erroneously use the Artist that is currently displayed in the "Add Singers & Songs" area above. Now, it will be left blank, and you can fill it in yourself, if this is important to you.

1. NEW - NEW - Preview Sizer - When you go into the "Tools > Show Display" and click on "Preview", you will notice a new control in the upper right corner. Set this from "None" to any other value, and you can quickly resize your Preview Display to 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of your monitor screen by double-clicking on the window. It snaps back when you double-click it again.
2. NEW - 24-hour Clock - If your system is set for a 12-hour clock, you will see "AM/PM" in the lower left corner of the Show Display setup window. But if you set your system to use a 24-hour clock, you will see "24HR" instead. The four areas that are affected by this are:
   
   • Playlist "Time" column
   • Singer Name Display
   • Marquee (%p1 thru %p9)
   • Marquee Time Field

1. NEW - Countdown - Countdown the currently playing song's duration in the "Dur" column. This will allow you to quickly spot which song is playing when you select a different song.
2. CHANGED - Disallow Duplicate Songs - There is no need for duplicates, so we now have a check in Hoster's Background Audio Player to detect these. If you drag-and-drop a song from the Search window to the Background Audio Playlist, and that song is already in the BA Playlist (duplicate), you will receive an error messsage to this effect.
3. FIXED - Recognize Sorting - If one of the column headers has been clicked, sorting that column, you will now be prompted to save your Playlist when Hoster closes.

1. FIXED - Artist & Title- Clicking on the text when editing the Title or Artist is now allowed, and it won't end your current editing session.

1. FIXED - Artist & Title- - Clicking on the text when editing the Title or Artist is now allowed, and it won't end your current editing session.
2. FIXED - Index More Songs w/ Same DiscID- - If you have a DiscID with just a few Tracks used, you can now easily add more songs to this DiscID by entering it into the DiscID field before clicking the Add Files button. The list at the bottom will show the new songs with the free Track #s. Click Index Files. This can be repeated until all 99 Tracks are filled in.

1. FIXED - No Dates- If your Songs Database has absolutely no dates (zero) filled in, then the "From Date" and "To Date" will be hidden when you open the Song Book generator tool. We fixed a bug in this case that was still using those fields, even though they weren't made available to you. In this case, you would end up with zero (0) entries in your Song Book.

1. FIXED - Several crash bugs - Unexpected crashes may have occurred. These have been resolved.
2. FIXED - Resizing Windows - With the display set to anything other than 100% (for easier visualization), or with the display's "Border Padding" set to something wider than the system default, some windows were allowed to be sized such that some buttons, sliders, etc. were covered up. Also, some of the controls might have overlapped others. These have all been fixed to recognize the differences in display setting prefereneces.
3. NEW - Version Number - The current Hoster version number will be displayed on the window's Title Bar, e.g. "def001 - Hoster v5.31.01".

1. NEW - UAC Level Test - In Windows Vista, 7 & 8, the User Access Control (UAC) should not be set to the highest level. Hoster will now check the UAC setting and warn the user if it's set too high. The User Management panel will also be presented to the user, so that this change can be made.
2. NEW - Check for No Songs at Startup - If Hoster has no songs in its Songs Database, then the user will be informed of this, and the "Import & Index Songs Database" window will opened and available to assist in adding the first songs to the database.

1. NEW - Tool Tips to the Play, Stop and Abort Buttons - As a quick reference to the ability to set a song to "Played" status, we added tool tips to these buttons.
2. FIXED - "Error" when Playing - A very small percentage of your .kma files may have an issue when playing. If you have some .kma files that always stop right away and show "Error" in the status column, this fix may be what you need.
3. FIXED - Print Playlist - Enabled only if there are one or more songs in the Playlist - This is obvious.
4. FIXED - Playlist Report:
   • Unexpected blank lines were causing problems in Hoster 5.30.01. This case is now handled gracefully.
   • We found and fixed a situation where some reports would skip entries in the tracking file.
   • Fixed a bug with "Include" and "Date Range" together - When one of the three "Include" check boxes (Karaoke/Audio/Video) was un-checked and the user was also requesting a Date Range, our Playlist Report generator was not handling the request properly. This has been cleared up.
5. FIXED - Editing Singer, Song, Key, and Tempo - When editing any of these fields, if you clicked above the Playlist in Hoster, the edit field would not clear. Now, it closes up and clears with a click anywhere in Hoster's window.

1. FIXED - Using - If the Show Display is hidden during Intermission, when the song began, the graphic lyrics would not show . This has been resolved.

1. NEW - Select Mulitple Songs - When dragging or deleting songs, you can now select multiple songs to work on at the same time. Do this in one of two ways:
   • To select a block of songs: Click on the first selection, then press and hold either "Shift" key and click on the last selection. All songs between the first and last will be highlighted
   • To select individual songs: Click on the first selection, then press and hold either "Ctrl" key and click on each song that you want to highlight, one at a time. Click on a song a second time to deselect it.
2. NEW - Auto Scroll - When dragging songs up and down the list, the list will automatically scroll to the top or bottom so that you can drop the song in the desired location.

1. FIXED - Singers List no longer always on top of Search window- Now, the Search window can be placed on top of the Singer's List window (and vice versa).
2. FIXED - Handle single character searches - "Word" searches like "forever g" will now return valid results.
3. FIXED - Accept first click in Search - When Hoster is being re-focused (i.e. desktop or another window has focus), the click that brings it back in focus will now be recognized.
4. FIXED - Screen resolution other than 100% - The placement of some of the buttons needed to be adjusted for screens that are set to 125%, 150%, etc. for better visibility.

1. FIXED - Screen resolution other than 100% - The placement of some of the buttons needed to be adjusted for screens that are set to 125%, 150%, etc. for better visibility.

1. FIXED - Key & Tempo - When adding multiple songs to the Playlist from the Edit Singers dialog window, the Key & Tempo would take on the values from the first song selected. Now, the Key & Tempo for each song will be reflected properly in the Playlist.

1. FIXED - Auto select next free BookID - When "Index Files" was clicked, Hoster would pop a message up telling the user that he/she needs to select a free BookID Root. Now, the next free BookID Root will be automatically selected, saving the user an extra click.
2. FIXED - Brand Name - If you enter a Brand Name, or if the Brand Name can be determined by the DiscID (either part of the file name or found within the audio file header), then this Brand will be used when indexing new song files. Otherwise, the Brand will be set to "*Unknown Brand*".

1. NEW - CD/DVD Drive - Click this button to select a different default CD/DVD drive without having to close the Import CD Tracks window and come back in.
2. NEW - Drive Speed - This setting is available if importing CD tracks at the maximum speed using your CD/DVD drive results in some "fleck" errors in the Karaoke graphics. You can slow down the import speed, which usually will give you better results.
3. NEW - Verify Imported Tracks - After importing any number of tracks, you can now Play them directly from this dialog window. You can verifty that the Artist and Song Title are correct, and also check the import quality. If the quality is not perfect, usually you can get better results by reducing the Drive Speed and importing again.

1. NEW - Auto Scroll - When dragging items up and down the list, the list will automatically scroll to the top or bottom so that you can drop the line in the desired location.
2. NEW - Hide in Preview Only - Open "Tools > Show Display...", click on the "Preview" button, and then check the "Hide" box in the upper left corner.
3. ENHANCED - Marquee Singers, Song Titles & Times - The Marquee has been enhanced to allow up to nine (9) Singers, Song Titles and [new] Times. The new designations are "%s1" through "%s9", "%t1" through "%t9", and "%p1" through "%p9", respectively. "%s1" is the current singer, "%s2" is the next singer, and so on. You can also choose to use the Font Color that you specify in the "Tools > Show Display..." settings. The Time fields will display either the amount of time until the singer sings or the actual time (using the "am/pm" selection). The "Help" menu has been updated to reflect these changes.
4. CHANGED - Change Text - You can now change the text font and color while songs are playing in Hoster.
5. FIXED - Resizing -When resizing an un-docked Preview window, the Marquee would only scroll for the previous width of the window (when it was created).
6. FIXED - Changing Marquee Font Size - Increasing or decreasing the size of the Marquee font did not cause the height of the Marquee to be adjusted.
7. FIXED - Speed - While playing songs in Hoster, the Marquee would noticeably slow down. With this fix, the Marquee will continue at its desired speed.

1. NEW - Auto Scroll - When dragging items up and down the list, the list will automatically scroll to the top or bottom so that you can drop the line in the desired location.

1. FIXED - Video Hang - If you have a Modal window open when a Video finishes, even closing the window would not allow the next song to play. You would have to click "Stop", or select another song and click the yellow "Play" button. Examples of Modal windows include the Open File dialog windows when you click "K-oke", "Audio" or "Video", or the Marquee Setup dialog window. Now, when you close these windows, the next song will proceed without any action required.
2. FIXED - Volume Bug - If your Fade-In value is anything but zero (0), Videos that have no audio track would leave the Volume set to zero (0) when they ended. The Volume slider would still be set to whatever you had it set to, but no sound would come out for the next song. This fix resets the Volume to the desired level at the end of these types of Videos.

1. NEW - SLIDESHOW! - We're excited about this change! Follow these steps to set up a Slideshow:
   • Click on "Tools > Show Display..."
   • Click on "Intermission"
   1. Click on the "Image..." button in the Graphics Area
   2. Choose a folder with the desired images (recommended same size/dimensions)
   3. Recommend choosing "Fit" for the Position
   4. Check the "Rotate" checkbox
   5. Choose a "Delay" time (in seconds)
   6. Choose a "Transition"
   7. (Optional) Choose "Random" ordering
   • Repeat steps 1-7 for "Audio DJ"
   • Click "OK"
   • Enjoy the show!
2. NEW - Allow "Setup Display" when playing Audio - This allows you to dynamically change the photo (or slideshow folder) while an Audio song is playing. We have discovered that if you switch to Visualization during this time, the display will not change. Likewise, if you are viewing Visualizations and switch to another view, the Visualizations remain. If we can fix this, we will. Otherwise, it will be a documented limitation.
3. NEW - Marquee Time - A field containing the current time has been added to the Marquee. You can enable/disable it using the "Show Display..." settings or by clicking on the "Marquee" button.
4. CHANGED - Always On Top - This has changed from a check box to a dropdown list. It has also changed from applying only to the Preview Show Display to applying to both Show Displays. You have three choices: Normal, Always on Top, and On Top when Playing. This will give you full control over when your Show Display windows will have "top-most" presence.
5. CHANGED - Show Display stays put - If you happen to minimize Hoster during your show, you no longer have to worry about the Show Display being minimized as well. A side-effect of this change is that your Show Display now appears in your Launch Bar as a separate window. This is not a bad thing. It allows you to bring it to the foreground (for example) if that is what you want to do.
6. FIXED - Reset Singer Name Display - When opening an existing Project file or when you click "File > New", the SND will be repopulated correctly.
7. FIXED - Resize Lyric Window if Marquee and/or SND is Hidden - If you set your Show Display to "hide" the Marquee and/or SND areas when playing a song, the graphics area will now be stretched to use the whole window.

1. NEW - Insert Singer's Name & Song Title in Marquee - If you wish for the current Singer or Title, or the next Singer or Title, to be in your Marquee stream, use %S, %T, %s, and %t for the Current Singer/Title and next Singer/Title, respectively. Also, there is a new checkbox on the Marquee dialog that allows you to use the colors that your Singers Names and Song Titles are using in the Singers Name Display (SND). Totally optional.
2. NEW - Marquee Dialog "Help" - This dialog now offers a "Help" panel that can remain on the screen while you define your Marquee. It can be closed manually, or will close when you close the Marquee dialog window.
3. NEW - Marquee Refresh - You can now instantly refresh your Marquee by simply right-clicking on the Marquee button on Video Hoster's main window.

1. NEW - Search Improvements - We have enabled search with and without apostrophes in certain locations. You can now search for "dont" as well as "don't" and you'll get the same results. Also, "dannys" and "danny's" will return the same results.
2. NEW - Search Persistent Settings - If you open Search, and click Show Fields, then close Search, the next time it is opened it will open with the Show Fields showing. This goes for Hide Fields, so whichever is the last you have showing, is what you will see when you open it the next time.
3. FIXED - Bring Singer List to the Front - When you click on the Folder icon in the Search window, the Singer's List window would stay behind whatever was hiding it (Show Display, Edit Singers, etc.). Now it will pop to the foreground.
4. FIXED - "Word" Search Starting with a Single Character - Now doing a "Word" search for a string like "I Love" (without the quotation marks) or "Bust A", will return the proper results.
5. FIXED - Special Characters - You can now have the following characters in your song titles and artist names: "*", "?", "#" and "[". Before this change, these special characters would cause unpredictable results.

1. NEW - Playlist Updates - Right click on the Title Bar in the Playlist, where it shows Status, Dur, Title, etc.... as shown in the below Image, and you can now Turn ON or OFF any fields you do not wish to see! You can turn them on or off while playing. Also, we have now added the Artist field, so any new Songs you add to the Playlist, will show the Title and Artist instead of Title only!
2. NEW - Generate Playlist History Reports - Access this via "File > Playlist Reports...". This will allow you to generate printable reports using your PlaylistTracking.csv file. The resulting tables can be sorted by clicking on the column headers, and the columns can also be resized (left and right). Along with this, we added saving of the Playlist Reports to the Backup/Restore feature in Hoster.
3. NEW - Play Directly from CD Disc! - When you click the "Singers Disc" button, you'll see a new button that says "Play from Disc". You enter the same information as you would for a Singers Track Import (Track #, Title, and Singer's Name), and then click this button. It takes no time to add to the Playlist. And when it's that song's time to play, it'll spin the disc drive up and play the requested track.
   Note: You cannot click "Add" to temporarily import a Singers Disc track while playing another track from the CD.
4. NEW - Get Artist & Title from Online DB for Singer's Disc - When you add a song to the Playlist using a Singer's Disc, it will now get the Artist & Title from the Online CD Database, if available. If not, then you'll still see "Unknown" for Artist and Title.
5. NEW - Dropdown List showing Track numbers - When you click Singers Disc, we now read and display a dropdown with the tracks for you to select from.
6. NEW - Ask for CD when Drive Not Ready - If the CD/DVD Drive is not ready when the time for the Play from Disc song to play arrives, you will be prompted for the Singer's Disc ... by Name!
7. NEW - Print Playlist - Under "File" is a new feature: "Print Playlist...". This will generate a table view of your playlist that you can print using your Browser window. You control what gets included in the printout. The columns that are visible will be included; those that are hidden will be omitted (See item #1 above). Also, we added a left-most column to number the songs. The font face and color, as well as the background of the HTML page, can be set by going to "Tools > Set Fonts > Set Print Font...".
8. NEW - Allow Delete & Drag/Drop while Importing from Singer's Disc - This was an old restriction, but changes to the overall design of Video Hoster now allow these.
9. NEW - Instabutton Persistent Settings - If you Double click on the Title bar, to Show or Hide the Instabuttons, it will remember your preference the next time you open Hoster.
10. NEW - Detect Drive Arrival - When a new external Hard Drive or USB drive is plugged in or turned on, songs in the Playlist that are marked as "UNAVAIL" will be checked to see if they are available on the new drive. If so, the will be marked as "READY". This is true for songs that you have added to Play directly from Disc. If you start Hoster and the song is unavailable, simply plugging the drive in, turning it on, or closing the CD/DVD drive door will make those songs become available to play.
11. NEW - Set Song to "UNAVAIL" -If a song is in your Playlist that is a Play from Disc song, and you attempt to play it with the drive open, it will prompt you for the disc. If you click "Skip", the song will be marked "UNAVAIL". This change goes hand-in-hand with the previous item.
12. NEW - Message in Preview Window when Video playing - When a Video is playing in the Playlist, it does not display in the Preview window. Now, a message will be displayed in the Preview window, letting the you know that this is as designed.
13. NEW - Help > Help Videos - We have a YouTube.com page, that you can now get to quickly using the Help menu's new "Help Videos" selection.
14. IMPROVED - Import Singer's Disc - This process now takes much less time when a song is playing in Hoster. You should see drastic improvements here.
15. CHANGED - Delay populating InstaButtons until window is Maximized - For those of your with many, many, many InstaButtons, you may have been receiving a warning message to the effect of "Too many InstaButtons defined". As long as you close your Hoster window large enough to hold your InstaButtons, this will not happen any longer.
16. CHANGED - Pause is now Available for Audio Songs - Video Hoster was hiding the Pause button when you played an Audio song that you had added with the "Audio" button. Audio songs from the database allowed Pause/Resume. Now all Audio songs do.
17. CHANGED - Leave Selected Song Selected in Manual mode or if you manually stop a song - If you have chosen any other song in your Playlist (scrolling up or down), and the current song stops, it works as follows:
    • In Auto mode, the next "Ready" song after the one just finished will begin playing (same as prior releases).
    • In Manual mode, the song you have selected will remain selected.
    Likewise, if you click "Stop" (in Man or Auto), the currently selected song will remain selected. Manually stopping your "Auto" show is considered the same as being (temporarily) in Manual mode. This is a check box option at the bottom of "Tools > Options". Leaving it unchecked will cause Hoster to behave as before this change. Checking the box will provide the new behavior.
18. CHANGED - Sung By & Edit Song - These two items in the dropdown menu for the Playlist have swapped positions. This is because when a song is playing and you right-click on it, "Stop" and "Sung By" were too close together. Now, "Edit Song" will be between them (and disabled).
19. CHANGED - Singers Name Display - Now, when you turn off the Singer Name Display using the button on the main Hoster panel, that portion of the Show Display is reallocated to the Graphics area.
20. FIXED - Disc Change will update Singers Disc Tracks - If you have Singers Disc clicked, and you open your drive, the Track #'s listed should clear out. Then when you reinsert the disc (after a brief spin-up time), the tracks should reappear.
21. FIXED - Skip - If you clicked the Skip button, while a Video was playing, it would only change the first skipped song to the correct Red Skip status. Any Videos you clicked Skip on, while Playing after the First one, it would show Ready instead of being set to Skip.
22. FIXED - Use Filename instead of "Unknown" for Title - When adding a song using the K-oke, Audio or Video buttons, the file is interrogated to see if the Artist and Title are part of the ID3 Header information. If not, then the filename is parsed using your "Define Field Order" settings. If the Artist still cannot be determined, it will be set to "Unknown". If the Title cannot be determined, it will be set to the song's filename.
23. FIXED - Drag Preview to Move - When the Show Display is in Full Screen, the un-docked Preview could not be dragged around to move it. Now, it can be.
24. FIXED - Singers Name Display in the Preview - If you launched Hoster with the Show Display in Full Screen mode, the un-docked Preview window may have been missing a line of the SND. This has been fixed.

1. NEW - Mark IMPORTED songs in Index Hard Drive Song Files - When listing songs in a folder, if you un-check the "Hide Indexed Tracks" checkbox, you will see songs that have already been Indexed. If the DiscID and Track are not part of the filename, then we now go one step further to see if a song has been Indexed: If the .kmh path is found in the Songs Database, then mark the song as "Imported".
2. NEW - Enable/Disable CD/DVD and Import CD Tracks - If your CD/DVD Reader drive goes missing (removable), Hoster will disable the "Tools > CD/DVD Drives..." feature, and you will not be able to click on the Import CD Tracks button. Likewise, if you insert or power-on your CD/DVD Reader, Hoster will reenable these features.
3. NEW - Add Option to Delete KMH When Removing Folder - When you take this action, you may or may not want your KMH files to be deleted also. Because of this, you now have the choice. A message box will appear, asking you if this is what you want to do. The results are obvious. In either case, the "ImportedFiles.txt" file will be removed from the folder.
4. CHANGED - Import Songs > Build Song Database - This feature will now only be used for:
   • Rebuilding your Song Database
   • Adding new Folders & Subfolders that have new KMA/KMH files
   • Rescanning Folders for new KMA/KMH files
   • Removing Folders from the list and Maintaining the "Exclusion List" of folders
5. CHANGED - Updated Warning when Rebuilding Songs DB - Because this can take some time, and might also uncover (or create) duplicate BookIDs, we felt it was necessary to add a little more text to the warning message that appears when you click "Rebuild Database".
6. CHANGED - Remove the Define Field Order from the Hard Drive Import Panel - This function was duplicated in its own dialog (Tools > Define Field Order...). Because of this, we decided to centralize these settings, and add a button to launch the DFO window from here. Also, we now change the small box below the list to "pink" if you have chosen a file that doesn't meet the DFO template criteria.
7. FIXED - Duration for Imported Songs - An invalid value was being used to calculate the duration. We are now getting the actual duration from the audio file itself.
8. FIXED - Faster Indexing - Importing new songs should be about 4 times faster than previous versions.
9. FIXED - Bug when indexing WMA+G - Not many people use WMA+CDG files. But we found a small bug when you tried to index these. It has been fixed.
10. FIXED - Crash in Merge Dupes - We found and fixed a crash in the Merge Dupes function.
11. FIXED -Incorrect Date Stamp on indexed files - The code was looking at the Creation Date/Time stamp of the .kma or .kmh file (as this is when the song was initially imported or indexed). Unfortunately, that is in GMT-relative time. If you happen to index a file after 7PM EST, or very early in the morning if you're ahead of GMT, then the Date Stamp in the Songs Database would have been incorrect.
12. FIXED - Duplicate Video Files - In "Index Song Files", when you selected "All Video Files" and had .mov files in the list, the list would contain duplicates for each .mov file. This has been resolved.
13. FIXED - Bypassing "Surrogate" Folders - Thanks to Windows Vista, 7, & 8, folders like "C:\Documents and Settings" are still "present" in your PCs. They don't appear in any Windows Explorer views, but they are presented to the software (like Hoster) and have to be bypassed. We are now handling these folders correctly.

1. NEW - Singer's Appearances - Both the Singer's List and the Edit Singers dialogs now display the total number of songs sung by a given Singer in the title bar.
2. FIXED - Stay Put when Edit Singer "Save" clicked - If you are scrolled down in your Singer's list of songs, and you make a change to any of the settings (key, tempo, etc), when you click "Save", the list will remain at your selected song.

1. NEW - Drag-And-Drop from Search to Background Audio - You can now drag song files from the Search list to the Background Audio Playlist. These files must have .mp3 or .wma source files. Because of this, it is recommended that you select only "Audio" for your searches in this situation. Also, we have added a ToolTip to the Search list box to let people know about this new feature.
2. FIXED - Volume Sliders - Allow volume sliders in Background Audio Player to be changed while playing a song in the playlist.
3. CHANGED - Open Background Audio Player Faster - Now you can set your BA Volume all the way to zero if you wish.
4. CHANGED - Save & Save As - If the Playlist is empty or unchanged, the Save and Save As menu items are disabled.
5. CHANGED - Audio Priority applied to Background Audio - When you set the Audio Thread priority in the "Audio Controls" dialog, this value will also be applied to the BA Player's play thread.

1. NEW - Automatic Manual Updates - If you are on-line when you open the Hoster manual file, Hoster will first look on the Internet for an available update to the file. If so, it will be downloaded to your computer. Then the Hoster Manual will be opened.

1. NEW - DFO has "Look in audio files for Artist & Title" - You can now choose to have the .mp3 or .wma file scanned for Artist & Title in the header data.
2. CHANGED - Always show Define Field Order when Scan Now clicked - It used to depend on whether you had a folder defined on the DFO panel as to whether you saw the DFO or the Build Songs Database dialog when you clicked "Scan Now". Now, the DFO will always be presented, and in order to Scan Now, you will need to choose a folder.
3. FIXED - Replace "_" with blanks - We found some problems with this. If you have that checkbox checked in the DFO, then you should see all Underscore characters changed to blanks.

1. FIXED - Edit Search String allows more than 13 characters - You can now enter more than 13 characters in the Search field in the Edit Songs dialog window.
2. FIXED - Special Characters - You can now have the following characters in your song titles and artist names: "*", "?", "#" and "[". Before this change, these special characters would cause unpredictable results.

1. NEW - MP3+G Support for Import - The Import CD Tracks dialog was rearranged to flow easier. We also added the ability to import from CD as .kma, .wma+g, .zip(.wma+g), .mp3+g, .zip(.mp3+g). You can import up to 320k compression ratio for MP3 Files.
   
2. NEW - Backup/Restore Command - This is a new feature to help you transfer all your files and settings seamlessly from one computer to another one.
3. IMPROVED - Search Speed - This was accomplished by moving the SORT of the results from our code to the Database request. If you time an old version of Hoster doing a "*" search against this version, you should see a marked improvement.
4. NEW - Abort button - This shows up beside Pause, to cancel the Song and display "Thanks For Singing!" Use this when you have an extremely drunk singer(s) and you want to gracefully lead them off stage.
5. IMPROVED - Reuse the BookID dropdown list whenever possible - When changing from Brand to BookID, the time taken to repopulate the BookID list can be sizable. The only time this happens now is if songs are Imported, Indexed, Merged, or Deleted.
6. NEW - Right Click\Play/Stop - We have added a new Menu Item to the Right click Menu in the Playlist. You can now Right click on a Song, and select Play. If the song is playing, then this menu item will Show Stop. This makes it a bit quicker to Play a song on Touchscreen, or with the Mouse without having travel all the way to the Play button.
7. NEW - AutoScan Dialog on Opening Hoster changed to Scan Now - We changed this to Scan Now button in the Import Songs\ Dialog. When you select your Folder to be scanned, you can now click the Scan Now button to bring that dialog up. This will allow you to save time, as you do not have to close and reopen Hoster to do this.
8. IMPROVED - Sort by The "Limit From" date in the SongBook - will now get the actual oldest song date from your Database, ignoring any Empty or NULL dates. The NULL dates are still an unknown to Hoster, so those files will be treated as having been added on Jan 1, 2013. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to ask.
9. IMPROVED - Playback Offset - Allow -2.5 to 2.5 seconds for the Audio/Graphics Sync value in the "Tools > Options" dialog. This matches the Live Sync on the main Hoster window.
   
10. NEW - Preview ANY Song - In the Search dialog window, if you have NO songs selected in the list, you can now click the Play button to select any file on your system. When you click the button, an Open File dialog window will appear, allowing you to select any .kma, .kmh, .mp3, .wma or .zip file for Preview Play. Just as before, if you select a song from the list, that one will be chosen for Preview Play. If you select more than one, the Play button will be disabled (greyed-out).
    
    The Play/Stop button in the Search dialog will turn Turquoise when no song is selected in the list - This will indicate to the user that a song file from the PC can be chosen to play using the Search Audio Output.
11. NEW - New Tool Tips - in Edit Songs for "Hide in SB" and "No S-E" (Top Right) -These items needed Tool Tips to explain it better.
12. NEW - Search Persistence - We took into account, your request in the New Features request forums, and these items will now be Persistent. The text in the song list below, was beefed up to give you more information as to why you didn't find any songs.
    
13. NEW - Search Field Font - You can now change the Font Size, by selecting Tools\Set Font\Set Search and Singers Font. This selection will change these fields, including the Singers Name now. It will only change them from 8 point to 18 point, anything of that will only change the results windows.
14. NEW - Limit Singers Names showing on Search Dialog - By Right clicking on the Folder icon in the Search window you will see Limit Search Dialog now. What this will do, is limit to anything you put in the search so if you had a venue name of it will only show you those singers, instead of all of them. Open it up again and leave it empty, hit Ok to see all your singers again.
15. NEW - Search on Singers Database Dialogs - This will allow you to search through a Singers List for a Song/Artist etc.... When you type in a search term and hit the enter key it will Find the First item, if you hit enter again it will find the next item and so on.
16. NEW - Double Clicking on a song in Background Audio Player - If you have songs in Background Audio Player, Double click on a song, it now Adds it directly to the Playlist, starts Playing in Background Audio, both or nothing at all. You set what it does under the Background Audio Player's "Settings\Double click" Menu item.
17. NEW - Title/Artist tags are now written to the .wma part of the .kma file - When importing from a disc in Hoster, we now write the header information into the Wma audio file portion of the kma file. This will allow keeping the information if you were to extract the files from kma to wma+g using Songverter.
18. NEW - Singers.mdb Backup - We now automatically Backup your Singers.mdb every 7 days and keep 10 Backups, they will be named Singers_backup0.mdb (newest) - Singers_backup9.mdb (oldest). You can still do this manually, by clicking the Backup Db in the Edit Singers Dialog (Singers View).
19. NEW - Include # of matches in the Search and Edit dialogs' title bar - Include # of matches in the Search and Edit Songs dialogs' title bar - Now when you search it will give you the Number of Songs at the top in the title bar. If you want to know how many songs you have by a specific artist, you can now easily find out.
20. NEW - Search for specific folder(s) in the Build Songs Database dialog - This allows finding an Indexed folder quickly to remove, or rescan it.
21. NEW - Search button - This is now in front of the Search Field on the Search Dialog. You can still press Enter to search or click this button to start the search.
22. NEW - Search messages use the Balloon message (no beep) - This should no longer cause a beep that some were hearing when searching.
23. NEW - Audio Devices - If Hoster detects a mismatch in the Audio Device settings, then the user will see the "Audio Controls" dialog with a bubble message telling them they need to make a choice and click "OK". I tested this by plugging and unplugging my USB Audio Device. I didn't test this with Breakaway, so please tell us how you like this.
24. NEW - Sizable List Boxes - Search and Edit Singers dialogs now have sizable Singers Name drop-down lists.
25. NEW - Lower limit for the Play Volume in the Search dialog - The new value is 10. The previous lower limit of 50 seemed like it could be too loud for some headsets.
26. NEW - Search Volume is now Persistent - This will save you from having to change the volume in the Search dialog each time you open it
27. NEW - Allow Upper/Lower Case for Singers - This change will allow you to enter exactly what you want for Singers' names. If you want to shorten a name, change the upper/lower case of a name, this is now allowed. For example, if you have "Sheila" in your Singers' list, you can now enter "She", or "SHE", or "SHPD" (and it won't change to "ShPD"). There is a Option to enable/disable this change under Tools\Options..." dialog, the bottom check box will allow you to enable the upper/lower case change. This was done to keep the previous operation working the same for people who are used to how it worked before.
28. NEW - Add multiple K-oke, Audio, & Video - Using the "K-oke", "Audio", and Video" buttons on the main window, you can now add more than one song at a time to the Playlist. This should save time & effort when populating your Playlists with these types of files. Note: You always have the option of indexing Karaoke, Audio and Video files into your Songs Database and using the Search function to add multiple songs with one click of a button.
29. IMPROVED - Installer was redesigned - We had some problems with our Programs installing under some Windows 7 systems and a lot of newer Windows 8 systems. You would get an error such that it could not copy some files to the System directory, and it would not install. This was fixed and will now allow installing without any issue.
30. IMPROVED - Create Song Book using BookIDs - When you select this option, we now display both the "Start" and "End" BookID fields right away. You used to have to select the starting BookID value before the ending field was displayed. Along with this change, now you can also select only one BookID (same Start and End value), if that is all you need.
31. FIXED - Build Songs Database issues - When upgrading from older versions of Hoster, we found customers could have had a problem. We found and fixed the items that could cause this.
    
32. FIXED - Included vs Excluded Folders - In Build Songs Database, if you click "Add Folder" and the folder you choose is in the Excluded Folders, then songs in that folder will be processed, and the folder will be removed from the Excluded Folders list. However, if you "Add Folder w/ Subfolders", and any of the Subfolders are in the Excluded Folders list, they will be skipped over.
    
33. FIXED - New Release Count - This was not being incremented correctly, under certain situations. It now will work as it should.
    
34. FIXED - Dialogs Must be Closed - K-Oke, Audio, Video Dialogs must be closed before doing anything in Hoster - Some users were having issues with these dialogs being open in the background. Now you must close them to do anything else in Hoster.
    
35. FIXED - List Boxes not behaving correctly with different font sizes - In an attempt to keep the selected item(s) in the list boxes used by Search, Singers, Background Audio, Instabuttons and Marquee, some previous features were broken.
36. FIXED - Installer works on 64-bit Operating Systems - Our last attempt to install on Windows 7 and 8 still had an issue with 64-bit OS's. The problem has been averted, and this release should install on all PCs running Windows XP and above, on both 32- and 64-bit. Please let us know if you see anything strange related to the files or their locations.
    
37. FIXED - "Thump" at the end of Fade Out - We found the thump and fixed it. So this should no longer happen during fade out.
38. FIXED - Crash on Videos - We found a crash that could happen in certain situations at the end of Playing a video, so this should now work correctly
39. FIXED - Crash when updating Singers.mdb from OLD versions such as 4.32 - There was an issue that could cause a crash, when customers with older versions of Hoster upgraded to Version 5.10. This has now been fixed.
40. FIXED - Video Issues - All Video Issues where you may have seen the small white box are now fixed. This includes Instabuttons, Visualizations and any other video issues.
41. FIXED - Adjust End Play in Edit Songs - This code now works. It will loop continuously, allowing you to hear the audio that you are trying allow, removing the maximum silence.
42. FIXED - Preview Play Hang - Hang in Search Play if an error is encountered. If the attempt to play comes back with an error, then we get out immediately and don't cause the hang. This error condition wasn't being tested for in the past.
43. FIXED - Preview Play Crash - Crash in the Search dialog associated with the Preview Play function. You shouldn't see any more crashes in this area.
44. FIXED - Audio output device selection - Several of you have noted that the Audio Controls dialog opens every time you start Hoster. This change should alleviate this. However, you may find that you are able to select a device that doesn't work. For example, if Breakaway is controlling one of your audio output devices, this device may still appear in the list of available devices. If you choose it, you will most likely get errors when you try to play any song through that device. You should choose Breakaway for that device, and all others should work as expected.
45. FIXED - Edit Singers Dialog - Bring the Edit Singers dialog to the foreground when you click on the "Singers" button in the main window. This was pointed out as a missing feature.
46. FIXED - Background Audio Player - Crashing under Certain Situations.
47. FIXED - Scroll Bars - The screen was being cleared and the scroll bars were appearing. You shouldn't see them any longer.
48. FIXED - Column Sorting - Properly sort BookID column in Search and Edit Songs
49. FIXED - Crash - When launching Hoster with no songs.mdb file it could cause a crash.
50. FIXED - Full Screen - When switching to (or from) Fullscreen - Don't restart Video or Audio songs, CDG files still must be Restarted.

1. Fixed - Installer Program - Customers using 64-bit Windows PCs reported errors when installing Keyrite. We have found and fixed these errors. You would see an error message such as <winsys>xxxx.xxx.

1. FIXED - SongBook - The SongBook would not build correctly, unless you had rebuilt your database. This was due to the New "Added Date" Field in the Database. This could also affect your Searching for songs with no date in this field in the database. This now functions as it always has.
2. FIXED - Edit Songs Dialog - We enlarged this dialog so that it shows more songs.
   
3. FIXED - Importing Zip Files - When importing .zip files you could fill up your hard drive with Temporary Files that were not correctly being deleted. This is now fixed and will no longer happen.
   
4. FIXED - End of Song Crash - This should now be fixed, it would only occur under Certain Situations.
5. Added - Export Singers List - Sort by- We added a drop down list to allow sorting by your choice.
6. Added - New Language - We added "Danish" as a new selection under languages.
7. Added - New Generes - We have added these new selection's under Genre:
    
   

   Anthems - National, Anthems - Sports, Alternative Pop, Alternative Rock, Blues - Classic, Blues - Contemporary, Boy Band, Brit Pop - 1960's, Brit Pop - 1970's, Brit Pop - 1980's, Brit Pop - 1990's, Brit Pop - 2000's, Brit Pop - 2010's, Brit Rock - 1950's, Brit Rock - 1960's, Brit Rock - 1970's, Brit Rock - 1980's, Brit Rock - 1990's, Brit Rock - 2000's, Brit Rock - 2010's, Bubblegum, Christmas - Non-traditional, Crooners, Euro, Explicit, Folk - Classic, Folk - Contemporary, Funk, Glam Rock, New Wave, Old Skool, One Hit Wonders, Pop - Japanese, Pop - Korean, Pop - 1960's, Pop - 1970's, Pop - 1980's, Pop - 1990's, Pop - 2000's, Pop - 2010's, Pop - Brit, Pop - Scandanavian, R & B - 1950's, R & B - 1960's, R & B - 1970's, R & B - 1980's, R & B - 1990's, R & B - 2000's, R & B - 2010's, Rap - 1980's, Rap - 1990's, Rap - 2000's, Rap - 2010's, Rock - 1950's, Rock - 1960's, Rock - 1970's, Rock - 1980's, Rock - 1990's, Rock - 2000's, Rock - 2010's, Rock - Indie, Rock - Soft, Rock - Prog, Southern Rock, Vocal Group

1. FIXED - Right Click Menu\Add to "Singers Name" Songs - This was not working correctly in 5.09.01. It is now working as it should.
2. FIXED - Edit Songs\Multiple - We found an issue in this dialog, that under certain cases if you pressed the Enter key, the song would start to play. You were then not able to get out of the program.
   
3. FIXED - Opening Hoster Splash Screen - On some systems, this Dialog would cover the Tempo, Volume, Sync Sliders, and leave remnants of the splash screen.
4. FIXED - Default Marquee not showing correctly in Preview Screen - The Trademark sign has been removed next to Video Hoster in the Marquee. It will now show correctly.
5. FIXED - Instabutton's Cutting Short - There were a few types of .wav files that would not play the correct duration. They will now play correctly.
6. NEW Installations - Audio Dropping or stuttering - We updated our Hoster Audio Player code in version 5.09.01, but defaulted to use the old code. This is now defaulted to use the Tempo Mode, which includes our new audio code. You should manually change this on your system, as this will only be changed on a Brand new Install. To change this you go to the Tools Menu\Tempo Mode\ Select Tempo Play Mode.
7. NEW Installaitions - Default Fonts - We have changed the default Fonts for Hoster to a larger point size. This will make it easier to read. This can be changed to anything under Tools\Set Fonts.
8. NEW Installations - Default Marquee to Always On - Marquee will always be defaulted to on for new Installations.

"This is a rock solid release with some great new features and a few tweaks and improvements to existing features" Roy Dennis

"This is a very mature, solid and reliable product and it shows in the amount of attention to detail that has gone into this release." MikeP

"Hoster keeps getting better and better. It is very stable and offers a multitude of features. Some features are not offered by others and if they are it is at an additional cost! Hoster makes running a karaoke show a breeze. I've been using Hoster along with other products offered by MTU since 2003 and I am amazed how this program has progressed over the years. It is a great program and in my opinion the best offered. Keep up the great work MTU!" WaltR

"The last 9 ratings for Hoster, as can be seen in CNET, gives the last version, 5.08, FIVE STARS! This new version, 5.09 and Tech Support should be rated with SIX STARS!." Ken Kelley

1. NEW - Background Audio Player  - This received a major update. You can now create/add/edit playlists in the Player. 
2. NEW - Much easier Installation - We have streamlined our install process to make it faster for the customer.
3. NEW - Updated Audio Code for Dropouts - We have changed the Thread Priorities for audio drops/stutters. There are 2 settings under Tools\Audio Controls
   at the bottom of this Dialog there is a Drop Down, the defaults are set to Above Normal for Audio and Display.
4. NEW - MTU Hoster Power Setting  - When you open Hoster, it will change your power settings to our new MTU Hoster power scheme. This only will occur while Hoster is running. This will minimize the risk for audio drops. If you wish to use your own Power Scheme, which we do not recommend, you can by going to Tools\Options and Uncheck "Use the MTU Hoster Power Scheme".
5. NEW - Dual Display - We made a change to make this more reliable. If your Video Card shows your primary monitor as number 2 and the TV as 1, prior versions would not go full screen on the correct monitor. It would jump back to your Desktop. You would then have to drag the screen to the Tv, and stretch it out to fill the screen. You now can double click and we will match the Primary screen so that we always find the intended singers monitor.
6. NEW - Marquee Scrolling - This now scrolls much more fluid like. There are three new files added to your C:\programdata\mtu.com\Hoster Folder. These files are gistfile1.js, jquery-1.9.1.min.js, and jquery-migrate-1.1.1.min.js. We also changed the text from "Amount" to "Speed" and got rid of "Delay" in the Marquee dialog.
7. NEW - Opening Hoster - When you have a large database, Hoster can take time to open, and would not let you know it was doing something. Now you will see a splash screen pop up as soon as you click the Icon. This will let you know that Hoster is doing something.
8. NEW - Drag and Drop  - You can now drag any file from the Search field and once dropped on the Playlist, it will be added to the bottom.
9. NEW - Open Search, Click on Show Fields, “Whats New?” - This will allow you to select a number of days, and anything you have imported within that time frame, it will search for. If you have a TON of songs it will take a while, as it does a * search when you click the selection in the drop down.
10. NEW - Open Edit Songs Dialog, "Whats New"?  - This will allow you to select a number of days, and anything you have imported within that time frame, it will search for. This is the same as we added on the Search Dialog. If you have a TON of songs it will take a while, as it does a * search when you click the selection in the drop down.
11. NEW - Search Speed - We have optimized our Search, which has made it much faster. If you have alot of songs and use * for a wildcard search, depending on the amount of songs you have will depend on how long it takes. Quick searches should be much faster. If you do the * search, results will show up quick, once the list is built you will see it sort the list. You can watch this, by moving your Scroll Bar from the bottom to the top, then you can watch it move up higher as more songs are listed.
12. NEW - New database Field "TimeStamp" added - This field will now let you do is sort by the Add Date in the following Dialogs: Search Dialog and Edit Singers Dialog. You can now sort the search by this column to show the latest songs added to your database. Should greatly help with finding those new downloads you have put in Hoster. I do not think this date will get populated until you have rebuilt the database or added any new files.
13. NEW - Programdata folder created to follow Microsoft Standards - We have had some problems of not being able to write to the C:\MTU\Hoster directory on some Windows 8 systems, this should clear it up.
    This version will MOVE your C:\MTU\Hoster Folder under Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8 to the new location at C:\ProgramData\mtu.com\Hoster. Under Windows Xp it is MOVED to c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\mtu.com\Hoster
    
14. NEW - Tools Menu\Hoster Data Folder\ - This will take you directly to the New Hoster folder in My Computer
15. NEW - Help Menu\Performance Changes  - We removed the mandatory changes from the Installation of Hoster, so you no longer have to do this during install. This allow for streamlining the installtion. We moved this to the Help Menu, which then opens a webpage located at http://www.mtu.com/upgrades/hoster/hoster-changes.htm 
16. NEW - Weekly New Songs Dialog Box  - We receive a list of New Songs from All Star Karaoke on Tuesdays. We have a Webpage that shows the New Songs for that week. A dialog box will pop up to check this page, once a week, or you can ignore it so it does not ask you again. It will link you to this page to check for new songs. http://www.mtu.com/buysongs/new-songs-2013.htm
17. NEW - Singers Name Display Font - Fonts are now selectable in the Singers Name Field of the Display Options. (Tools Menu\Show Display Options)
18. NEW - Edit Singers Database\Export - Redesigned in what you can export for the Singer. All the information is now converted to a HTML instead of .rtf format. You can then do whatever with it. You can select which items are written to the file. You can change the Background Color/Font size and feel!
    
19. NEW - Ability to turn Columns On or Off - Under these three dialogs you can now do this. If you right click on the Column, such as BookID or anything on the Table for Search, Edit Singers Dialog, and Edit Songs, you will now see a list of the Items in this Table. You can uncheck each of these items to hide/show the Fields.
    
20. NEW - Hot Keys Added  - We have added two new Hot Keys. If you press CTRL + S+ Buttons, then the it will only add the Song to the Singers Database, not the playlist. So if you are in search and see a song you want to add to someone’s list, but do not want it to go in your playlist, you can now press CTRL to add it. If you Press CTRL in the Playlist, then Right Click, Mark As.. This will now set every song in the playlist to what you select.
21. NEW - Tool Tips - Added a Tool Tip to the "S+" button in the Playlist, and expanded text in the "S+" button on the Search dialog.
22. NEW - Right click Features - You can now Right Click on a selected song in Either the Search or Playlist Windows. 
23. NEW - Right Click Menu\Add to "Singers Name" Songs - This will only show up in the Playlist Window. If you have added a Singers Song, to the play list, then decide you meant to put this song in their database, you can now do so very quickly.
24. NEW - Playlist\Double click on the Menu Bar on Title/Artist - This will show or hide your Instabuttons. If you have multiple lines of Instabuttons, if you double click they will then shrink up, just as the Show/Hide Fields button does in the Search Dialog.
25. NEW - Importing .zip files  - Most .zip files now have more than just the audio and cdg file in the .zip, we were not able to open/use this type of .zip file. We now open and use these files, by ignoring any file inside the .zip, other than the audio and cdg files.
26. NEW - No Sound Card - We found that if you did not have sound card installed/attached, when Hoster opened it would show a Red Error on any song in the Playlist. We now will give you an error message when you open Hoster, there is No Sound card in the system, and exit out of Hoster.
27. NEW - Tools Menu\Audio Controls\ - Added a button "Manage Audio Cards" in black, which will bring up the dialog from Control Panel to Manage your Sound Card's
28. NEW - Help Menu\Ask the MTU Community\ - This will take you directly to the Forums, to ask any questions you may have.
29. NEW - Help Menu\Visut us on Facebook\ - This will take you directly to our Facebook page.
30. NEW - Playlist.csv File  - This now includes the artist, which caused us to change the format that the lines are written out in.  
     
    The new format is: 
    
    "Wed","2013/03/06","17:53:32","Bryan","Take A Little Ride","Jason Aldean"
    "Wed","2013/03/06","17:59:23","Zoe","Blown Away","Carrie Underwood"
    
    The Old Format was
    
    Wed, 2013/03/06, 10:19:50, John, Wagon Wheel-Vocal
    
    To add the Artist name in, we had to add the " " in case an artist showed up as Underwood, Carrie or Aldean, Jason.
 

31. FIXED - End of Song Crashes - We are confident this version does has fixed all known Crashes. This should be the most reliable version of our software in years.
32. FIXED - Audio Clipping before Song Ended -This could occur on any audio file in the playlist, background audio player or Instabuttons. These file types mp3+g, .zip, wma and.mp3 would cause the song to end early..
33. FIXED - Songs hanging at Played  - Some customers reported that a song in the playlist would get stuck at Play, instead of changing to Played.
34. FIXED - Sped Up Remove Silence  - We found some issues in the code that were causing this to go slow or hang at times. This should now be much faster
35. FIXED - Remove Silence  - Before Hoster could not handle 48khz files, now it does.
36. FIXED - Sped up Build Songs Database  - We optimized the Build Songs database code, it now runs about 4 times faster.
37. FIXED - Merge Dupes  - We optimized the code for merge duplicates, this is now much faster. Also files that were getting put into quarantine should now only be put there if they are actually damaged, bad or exact duplicate files..
38. FIXED - Skip Checkbox in Search Dialog  - This checkbox is now only persistent while the dialog is open. If you click the Checkbox, it will add a song with the status of Skip. Before this would stay set until you unchecked it. If you close the Search Dialog, it gets unchecked by default.
39. FIXED - Skip Bugs - 1)When you mark As Skip, and later use the skip feature to "unskip" it as you would have done and may still do to skipped songs, the status bar shows nothing(pure blue), but the song still plays as if marked as ready. 2). Also, referring to the above condition, although the song WILL play as if marked Ready it will NOT show up on the SND Display as "Next".
40. FIXED - Background Audio\Random - This will now play through all the songs in the list, before it repeats songs.

Discontinued

1. NEW - Buy Songs Menu Item - We have partnered with AllStarCustom to allow purchasing songs through our software. You can get all the latest songs from here!
2. NEW - Automatic Indexing - Hoster now provides a new "Auto Index" feature. This allows you to select a folder (and its subfolders) for automatically adding new Karaoke and Audio songs to your system. If you select a folder using the "Browse..." button, each time Hoster starts, it will look into that folder, and its subfolders, for any new songs to index into the Songs Database. The file types that are scanned are: .kma, .kmh, .mp3+g, .wma+g, .zip, .mp3 and .wma (the last two are purely audio, no Karaoke graphics .cdg files). If you are presented with a message box announcing this new feature, you have the option of running it or bypassing it until later. You can also check a box to say that you do not wish to be asked again.
3. NEW - Search and Singers Dialogs - When you open the Search window, it remembers if the Singer List window was open previously. If so, both open. If not, only the Search window opens. When you can click on the "folder" icon to open the Singers List window. You can minimize and restore each one separately. Then when you close the Search window, it will automatically close the Singers List window if it's open.
4. NEW - Background Audio Search - A search feature added to this dialog will search through the list and highlight the first song it finds. If you hit enter, it will go to the next song it finds, and so on. Ddouble click the song to start that song playing. Left click a song too drag and drop it to any location in the list.
5. NEW - Background Audio Features - Two features added in the Back Ground Audio Player, Random Play and countdown timer.
6. NEW - Background Audio Dialog - MP3/WMA tags show when a folder is selected to display the Title and Artist.
7. NEW - Added * back in for Wildcard search - Tthe * in the search to list all of the songs in your database. This does slow the search, so you will need to be patient if you have a large database.
8. NEW -Run Two Copies of Hoster - If you open two copies of Hoster, it will allow you to use them both simultaneously.
9. NEW - Tools Menu\Tempo Mode - Some customers computers computers were having issues with the Audio, when in Tempo Mode. The default for Tempo mode is now "disabled". You can enable it under the Tools Menu\Tempo Mode.
10. NEW - Tools Menu\Set Fonts\"Set Playlist Font" - Allows changing font in the Playlist window. This should help with touch screen monitors.
11. NEW - Tools Menu\Set Fonts\"Set Search & Singers font" - Allows changing font in the results list for Search and Singers dialogs. This should help with touch screen monitors.
12. NEW - Removed Hoster Prior - This was to save your prior version of Hoster.exe, this is no longer needed.
13. NEW - Review Song in Edit Screen - If you have a file that you had run Remove Silence on, you could only preview it in the Edit Screen when you were in Remove Silence Mode. You can now preview the song in either Normal Play mode or Remove Silence Mode.
14. NEW - Can't close Hoster while video instabuttons are playing - To prevent crashing, Hoster cannot close without first stopping the Video Instabutton first..
15. FIXED - Random Crashes - We fixed ALOT of random crash issues in this version.
16. FIXED - Reading of MP3 Header Tags - Import HDD files/ Indexing did not read the .mp3 tags correctly - We found that the Artist and Title tags were not being read correctly, so this has been fixed. This should make importing .mp3+g and .zip files much faster. (if they have the correct mp3 tags)
17. FIXED - Installshield was installing the incorrect version of Visual C++ 2005 redistributable - This only has to be installed on your computer one time, so brand new systems that did not have it would get an error message when trying to install our software. The error was Error: "Unhandled Exception OX80040702, Description failed to load DLL:_IsMtu"
18. FIXED - Remove Silence - Some customers had Audio drops, stutters when Keep Silence Before was set below 2. So we have changed new minimum is 2. We removed 0 and 1, to make sure this would not occur.
19. FIXED - Unzipping Program updated - On certain systems you could get an error message such as "Unexpected error processing the zip file 0x00000200 c:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\MTU_Hoster\auout-x.zzz"
20. FIXED - Temp Folder not clearing correctly - The temp folder that Hoster uses when unzipping files, located at c:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\MTU_Hoster\ was not correctly being cleared. This is now emptied every time you close Hoster.
21. FIXED - Preview Screen Bug - The preview screen would turn White under certain circumstances.
22. FIXED - Crashes on Video - Some customers were seeing a crash, when playing two videos back to back with Background Audio turned on.
23. FIXED - Database issues - Some customers would see it take up to 2 minutes to start playing a song in Hoster. We were able to fix this, by changing the calls into the database. It also should have a bit faster search now.
24. FIXED - Background Audio Sliders Not showing - Under certain Background colors, such as Grey, the sliders would not show for Talkover and Vol in the Background Audio dialog. These should now show correctly under all background colors.
25. FIXED - MUX not working corectly - This was fixed and should now work correctly to play the audio on the selected channel.

1. NEW - Install Leaves Prior Version - If the 5.07 Installation program finds a Hoster.exe installed, it renames it to HosterPrior.exe, creates a new Desktop Icon for it and then installs the new Hoster.exe version using the current Desktop icon.
2. NEW - Added "Hawaiian" in the Genre List.
3. RESTORED - Search and Singers Buttons - Too many people requested we make them separate buttons again, so we did.
4. RESTORED - Search Dialog "Singers Open Folder Icon" - You can again select in the Search dialog to display the Singers Songs dialog. It now also can minimize, and clicking the "X" icon in the top right corner hides it. Your selection saves when Hoster closes, appearing the same when Hoster runs again.
5. CHANGED - Tools Menu - Options Dialog Reset Displays Button - All Screens & Dialogs now reset to appear on the Playlist Screen. Before, if you moved some to Display #2, then disconnected it they were stuck out there.
6. CHANGED - Prevent Clicking Controls With Fade Until "Second Fade" Ends - Clicking Stop, Skip, Restart or the yellow Play button all stop the playing song (even when done while it is fading out) and trigger a new Fade Out. If any of these are clicked, clicking another or the same one multiple times is prevented until the first "Stop" Fade Out is done.
7. CHANGED - Word Search Now Allows 1-Character and Multi-Character Searches - In the 5.06 Search Dialog a single character plus a multi-character string (2 or more word search) was ignored. This was because we had special code that only looked for a single character at the start of the selected fields (Title,Artist, Brand, DiscID, Genre, Language, etc.). Now, for example, searching on ;"lady g;" will find "Lady Gaga;".
8. FIXED - Volume No Longer Goes Silent - The cause of this was found and fixed.
9. FIXED - Fade In/Out Now Works Correctly - A conflict between Hoster and the Background Audio Player fading in/out was found and fixed.
10. FIXED - Background Audio Fades Could Take 10-30 Seconds - The volume could extend beyond 0% to 100%, causing long delays to eventually correct.
11. FIXED - Hoster No Longer Locks When Background Audio Closes - Stopping a Background Audio song and immediately closing Hoster would hide the Screen yet leave Hoster.exe running. We found and fixed the problem. A change now prevents clicking the "X" icon in the BA dialog top right until the OFF button is clicked. The X does now work when the BA is still playing a song (ON state).
12. FIXED - Starting Audio Garbled with Remove Silence & Key Change - This is a complex problem that seems to only involve CDG songs with animation in the Title page graphics, and when Remove Silence is enabled. Tempo and Key change applied to the song makes this worse. One work-around is to click the Restart button when you hear the garbled audio, or see the lyrics out of sync. This will disable Remove Silence for that song only, and it will play correctly. In addition, it has been proven that adding 2 seconds as a "starting delay" in Remove Silence solves the problem. Thus, 5.07 defaults to 2 seconds for this variable used only when Remove Silence is enabled.
13. FIXED - Tools Menu Audio Control "Prevent Audio Dropouts" Default - This now default to "10" when first installed. In 5.06 it could set to "0". Upgrading to 5.07 will NOT change your setting so you should make this change.
14. FIXED - Remove Silence Detects New Indexed Songs Again - We found and fixed the reason. Now newly indexed or imported songs are detected by the Remove Silence command and processed.
15. FIXED - Prevent Running Two Copies of Hoster - Hoster 5.07 now prevents running 2 copies at the same time because some actions on one can crash the other. You can still run a 5.07 and a prior version together, but this too can cause crashes and may damage your Songs and Singers Databases.
16. FIXED - Songbook "&" No Longer Causes Duplicate Phrases in Artists - The Songbook no longer generates a duplicate second name following an "&" in an Artist name. Thus, "Brooks & Dunn" becomes "Brooks & Dunn and Dunn", and "Marly, Bob & The Wailers" becomes "Marly, Bob & The Wailers & The Wailers".
17. REMOVED - Tools menu "Edit Singers Database" Command - This function is again run by clicking the Singers button.
18. REMOVED - Processor & RAM Check When Run - These checks have been removed as processors today are fast enough with sufficient memory to run Hoster.

V5.06 - Released March 15, 2012

Version 5.06 is a MASSIVE upgrade with many long asked for New features, Changes and bug fixes. It started out to only prevent dropping audio, but expanded to include TEMPO, instantaneous search results, a new "Words" search mode, and more. Many bugs were fixed, some in code written in 2000, but now showing up as crashes and lockups. This promises to be a very stable version! However, due to the massive changes, we are ready to fix any reported problems ASAP!

1. FIXED - Prevent Audio Dropouts - Microsoft Windows changes and Laptop "Power Management" settings caused audio dropouts while playing songs from the Playlist. Read the Tools menu Audio Controls Dialog Prevent Audio Dropouts. If you hear audio dropouts change the factory default from "10" that should work for all computers, to a higher selection (12, 14... 20).

Search & Singers Dialog and Edit Songs Dialog Changes

2. NEW - Archive Singers Database Made When 5.06 Installed - This is titled C:/MTU/Hoster/singersBackupPrior5.03.mdb before a singers.mdb (created before 5.03) is converted to the new indexed format. If anything damages your database you can rename singersBackupPrior5.03.mdb to singers.mdb and use it. However, it does not contain changes made since it was created.
3. NEW Active Singers Database Backup Maintained - This is titled C:/MTU/Hoster/singers2.mdb. It is automatically created, and updated while Hoster is running when 50 changes have been made to the singers.mdb. You can rename it to singers.mdb if the original is ever damaged, and a new singers2.mdb is automatically created.
4. CHANGE - Playlist "Search" and "Singers" Buttons - These are now combined as the new Search & Singers button. It displays the prior Search dialog that now also shows a redesigned Singer's Songs dialog that appeared in prior versions when you clicked an "Open Folder" icon. Operations between both dialogs are fully integrated, making it much faster and easier to search for songs, or select a Singer's Song, change Tempo and Key and add it/them to the Playlist.
5. NEW - String -vs- Words Search Mode - Prior Hoster versions only allowed "String" search. A new and extremely powerful "Words" search mode is now available in both these dialogs independently settable of the other. The last selection in each appears when Hoster runs again.
6. NEW - Instantaneous Searches - The search code used in both dialogs was totally rewritten to instantly find matching songs, displaying them in the Results window.
7. FIXED - White Screens - Due to the more efficient search code, dialogs no longer appear "whited out" when many search results are returned.
8. CHANGE - Search Fields Defaults - Whenever Hoster runs, the search Title and Artist fields are enabled, but the BookID and other fields are disabled, can be enabled while Hoster runs, but disables when closed.
9. FIXED - Triple Clicking to Add Song to Playlist - Now double-clicking adds a song to the Playlist from Search & Singers button.

Tempo Change

10. NEW - Adjust Range - Songs can now can adjust Tempo from 80% to 120% in ±5% steps by mouse or keyboard.
11. NEW - Search & Singers Dialog Tempo Slider - This allows adjusting to preset a Tempo change when adding a Song to the Playlist and/or to the Singers Database.
12. NEW - Edit Singers Database Dialog Tempo Slider - This allows adjusting to preset a Tempo change when adding a Song to the Playlist, and/or saved to the Singers Database.
13. NEW - Edit Playlist Tempo Field - Double-click and edit this new field to change Tempo on a Song before it plays. When play stops or ends, if the Song was added from the Singers Database, its record updates.
14. NEW - Change Hoster Screen Live Tempo Slider - This allows adjusting the Tempo change live while playing. When play stops or ends, if the Song was added from the Singers Database, its record updates.

Singers Button in Playlist is Now Edit Singers Database

15. CHANGE Renamed as Tools Menu Edit Singers Database... Command - This command dialog allows editing records in the Singers Database. It operates the same as before and can be open to edit Singer's records during a show, and add Singer's favorite Songs (example: the Host's favorite Songs) to the Playlist. However, the Search & Singers dialog upgrades make it much easier to add Singer's favorite Songs to the Playlist.
16. CHANGE Export and Refresh Buttons Disable - These operations now disable while Songs are playing to prevent audio dropouts and other problems.
17. CHANGE - Edit Singers Database - The Singers drop down list field does not allow entering a new Singer's name. It did before, but it would not allow adding a Singer with this field, which now only allows selecting existing Singers.
18. FIXED - Triple Clicking to Add Song to Playlist - Now double-clicking adds a song to the Playlist from Edit Singers Database button.
19. FIXED - Invalid Songs in Singers Database Don't Lock Hoster - Trying to add a Song to the Playlist that is not in the Songs Database now shows a message, then allows adding other Songs.

Songbook Changes

20. CHANGE - Removed Mux "Both" - When preparing Songbooks, if you enable the Mux field to appear, only Left or Right appear; no longer showing Both.
21. FIXED - Artist Names Like "10,000" - "10,000 Maniacs", which contains a "," that is used to separate Lastname, Firstname, would appear as "00 Maniacs 10". It now appears alphabetized and appears as "10,000 Maniacs".

Build Songs Database

22. FIXED - Damaged Indexed/Excluded Folders - The Indexed Folders list and Excluded Folders list were both stored in HosterInfo.ini file in version 5.05 and prior. This sometimes caused problems when rebuilding the Database. When Hoster 5.06 first runs, it converts HosterInfo.ini file into separate HosterInfoIndexed.ini and HosterInfoExcluded.ini files to be safe.
23. FIXED - Rebuilding Songs Database Halting - While songs were indexed into the Songs Database, if a bad file was found it halted rebuilding and wouldn't go further. Hoster now quarantines all bad files and continues indexing.

Remove Silence Operations

24. FIXED - Remove Silence Command Lock Up - In this dialog when scanning Karaoke files to set start-stop pointers, files with newly identified problems found while processing would lock Hoster. These are now added to the C:\MTU\Hoster\SetStartEndErrors.txt file and ignored, continuing to the next Song.
25. FIXED - Edit Songs Command Remove Silence Locked Hoster - This dialog also could cause Hoster to lock up when bad files were encountered. Bad files are logged, ignored now and in future, and processing continues to the next Song.

Miscellaneous Changes

26. NEW - #Times Fields in Singers.mdb Database - We added a Singer #Times field and a Song #Times field. These increment by one each time a Singer sings, or a Song is performed.
27. NEW - Report Shows Every Song Performed - Hoster now saves each Song name played from the Playlist (added from any source) into the C:\MTU\Hoster\PlaylistTracking.csv file including; date, time, Singer name, Song name.
28. NEW - Slider Tic Marks - These now appear in Tempo, Volume, and Lyrics Sync sliders.
29. CHANGE - Tools Menu Options Command "Keep Songs After Played" Checkbox - The default shipped state now is ENABLED (checked). In prior versions it defaulted to NOT Keep, which deleted each Song after it played to the end.
30. FIXED - CRASH In Auto Mode When Playing - Playing MP3 Audio or Karaoke Songs didn't report it was finished as WMA files do, and Hoster could lock up. This is fixed.
31. FIXED - Playlist Highlighting No Longer Erases - In the Playlist, if you clicked in the area below all songs, it would erase the current highlighted Song. Highlighting now remains.

V5.05 - Released December 12, 2011

The primary reason for 5.05 is to restore merging duplicate BookIDs, which was omitted in 5.00. Additional changes are listed below.

1. RESTORE - Merge Duplicate BookIDs Function - This is now in "Import Songs" menu - Import & Index Songs Database dialog, and the Build Songs Database dialog. If any duplicate BookIDs are found when using the Add Folder or Refresh Folder buttons, those songs are added to the BuildSongDBLog.txt file. Clicking either Merge Dupes buttons shows a dialog to select the starting BookID or let the next unused be assigned, and then the Merge Now button renumbers the BookIDs.
2. FIXED - Preview Display Wrong Size or Disappears when Floating - When the Preview Display is undocked in the Tools menu - Show Display command, Preview tab, it randomly would take on the size and location of the Show Display, which usually appears in the second monitor. This made it appear that the Preview Display disappeared. We found a bug causing this and the Preview Display should now keep its own size and location settings.
3. CHANGED - Import CD Tracks Screen - Whenever a CDG Disc is changed in the drive, Hoster now clears the Brand and DiscID fields. This insures users don't accidentally reuse the wrong Brand or DiscID for multiple discs.
4. REMOVED - Edit Songs Dialog Edit BookID - We no longer allow editing a BookID. The Singers Database uses BookIDs to add Songs under Singers. Thus, changing a BookID used in the Songs Database causes problems that are very hard to diagnose. Once you assign a bookID to a song, it is permanent.
5. NEW - Genre Additions: Reggaeton, Cumbia, Ranchera, Tejano, Norteno, Shotiz, Bachata, Romance.
6. NEW - Detect URL in a Message While Installing - Multiple messages can appear during installation to guide you. We can now include web page URLs that the Installation program now detects and launches your browser for more details to show how to fix this error.
7. NEW - Detect URL in Check Version Upgrades Message - If we include a web page address (URL) in an "Check for upgrade message", Hoster will launch your default Browser to show that page. This allows us to give you more information about upgrades, newsletters, etc.

V5.04 - Released October 1, 2011

1. NEW "Hard Drive Missing" Message - When Hoster runs, the last opened Playlist automatically opens. If any songs in the Playlist are on a drive(s) that is not found, a message now appears showing the missing drive letter(s) so you are aware of this. Hoster then opens and shows UNAVAIL status for songs in the Playlist from the missing drive(s). You can close Hoster and plug in the drive(s) or continue without the drive(s) available.
2. CHANGED Playlist "UNAVAIL" Songs Not Deleted - If an external hard drive wasn't plugged in with songs in the Songs Database and Playlist, AND your Tools menu > Options command > "Keep songs after played" was not checked (i.e. songs delete after they play), when Hoster opened it deleted all missing songs in the Playlist. In 5.04 UNVAIL status files are NOT deleted, ignoring the "Keep songs after played" selection.
3. FIXED Build Database Will Not Run - If there are no folders in the Build Database dialog's "Indexed Folders" list so no KMH or KMA files are indexed, an error message appears when you try to add KMH or KMA files stating "Incorrect Parameter". This was fixed so you can now add folders to the "Indexed Folders" list as expected.

V5.03

503.09 - Released September 19, 2011

1. NEW Songs Database Now Indexes Three Fields - Searches on the BookID, Title and Artist fields now run much faster. Running 5.03 requires allowing it to rebuild this Database, which does so at 20 to 30 songs/second as KMH and KMA files already exist.
2. NEW Singers Database Has 5 New Fields - Since the Singers button dialog shows Title, Artist, Brand, DiscID and Dur(ation), these fields are now saved in this Database. This significantly speeds up searches with a larger Singers Database.
3. NEW Singers Database Now Indexes Two Fields - The , Title and Artist fields are now indexed so searches for these will run much faster. Running 5.03 requires allowing it to rebuild this Database, which is so fast the progress bar usually doesn't appear.
4. NEW Singers Button Dialog "Refresh DB" Button - Now that Title and Artist fields are saved in the Singers Database, if you change these in the Edit Songs dialog, these Singers Database fields do not update. This new button will copy your Singers Database as a backup, then rebuild it with the current Title and Artist names.
5. NEW Search Button Dialog Layout - With indexing of the BookID, Title and Artist fields in the Songs Database, searching only for these is much faster. Using the other fields takes as long as before.
6. NEW Installs on Windows XP 64-bit Computers - Hoster now installs on XP 64-bit systems with Service Pack 1 or higher.
7. NEW Faster Performance on Windows 64-Bit - Hoster now follows Microsoft's recommendations to run on 64-bit XP, Vista and Windows 7.
8. NEW Singer Dialog Songs View "Duration" Field - A Dur column now appears at the far right that shows the Songs playing times.
9. NEW Instabuttons Allow More File Types - Audio and Video MP4 and Audio M4a file types are now selectable for Instabuttons.
10. RESTORED Singers Field Drop List in Playlist w/Auto Scrolling While Typing - We removed this field in a prior version to prevent editing that would crash Hoster. This field turned out to not cause the crash so we restored it.
11. CHANGED Search Dialog Search Field - Following a search, the text cursor now returns to this field, making it faster to change your search text when a prior search did not find the song you want.
12. CHANGED Search Button Dialog - The field selection buttons were moved and "Fast" and "Slow" added to make it clear selecting some fields will take longer to search the Songs Database. The Skip checkbox was moved to make room for a new slider control in an upcoming version.
13. FIXED Build Database Locked Up With MP3 Files on Win7 64-bit - Microsoft changed Windows 7 64-bit so it no longer worked as with prior versions. We replaced the failing code so MP3 files index as expected.
14. FIXED Remove Silence Command and Edit Songs Remove Silence - These changes were made: 1) Audio and Video files that were never processed are now excluded in the number of files to process, 2) The number of files to process and that have been processed now stay correct throughout processing so the estimated time to complete is more accurate, 3) it should no longer crash while processing.
15. FIXED Build Database Could Renumber BookIDs - This happened to one user. This operation is now prevented from renumbering BookIDs.
16. FIXED Instabuttons WAV Files - The new "compressed" .wav format files are now prevented from being added to an Instabutton as they do not play correctly. We are shocked that the QUALITY STANDARD .WAV format has been ruined by allowing compression, which is what MP3 and WMA provide.
17. FIXED Copying Songs Deleted "Remove Silence" Data - Run the Tools menu - Remove Silence command and any songs with bad Remove Silence data are repaired.
18. FIXED Filenames With 5-Digit or Higher Track Numbers - In the "Index Hard Drive Files" screen, if a file has a Track number with 5-digits or more, it would create a bad BookID. Hoster now logs these filenames in the "C:MTU/Hoster/ImportErrorLog.txt" file and does not index them in the Songs Database. Open this log file with Notepad, find the bad files path/filename, and manually change each file with Track numbers with more than 4-digits. Note: SCDG discs with 4-digit track numbers will be indexed in a future Hoster version.
19. FIXED Pause Button Could Fail With Audio and Karaoke Songs - In prior versions it was possible to click the Play button and then quickly click the Pause button before the lyrics drawing code was running. Clicking the Resume button then showed the lyrics ahead of the audio. The Pause button is now disabled until all play components are running.
20. FIXED Language Now Defaults to English - In 5.02 Dutch became the default selection.
21. FIXED Fade In/Out Durations Could Reset to "0" - This happened following a crash during Remove Silence processing. Fade durations now will restore to their prior values when reopening Hoster after a crash.
22. REMOVED Pop-Up When Search Dialog Returns No Match's - If no records are found, the text cursor is placed in the Search field and the entry is highlighted to edit or change, and a message appears in the Results window.

V5.02

502.09 - Released September 1, 2011

502.08 - Released August 12, 2011

502.07 - Released July 05, 2011

502.06 - Released June 30, 2011 this bug fix installs if you have 5.00; has the 5.00 Import Database.

1. NEW Language Additions - Italian, Dutch.
2. NEW Genre Additions - Opera, Musicals, Traditional, DooWop, TV, Disney, Country,Old.
3. CHANGED Undocked Preview Display "Always On Top" - We added a new checkbox in the Tools menu > Show Display dialog > Preview Display tab to allow those who want the Preview Display to always be on top to click it. When unclicked, the Display does not appear over other application screens.
4. CHANGED Search Dialog Default Focus - After doing a search, the focus is now set back to the search string, which is highlighted so you can quickly do a new search or modify the existing string.
5. FIXED - Random Crash in Auto Mode When Song Finishes Playing - This happens every 3-4 hours playing time in 5.01. It was caused by the "audio player" shutting down before the last buffer was played. This also caused the end of the audio to not play. It is fixed, and the audio seems to sound better.
6. FIXED Remove Silence Didn't Work When Song Added From Singers Dialogs - Adding songs to the Playlist from the Singer button dialog, or the Search button dialog using the Singer "Open Folder" icon to see the selected Singer's songs list, the song data added to the Playlist did not include the Remove Silence Start/Stop pointers. This is fixed.
7. FIXED ZIP Files Would Not Preview Play in Search Dialog - ZIP files will now play with Preview Play (when a second audio card is installed and linked to Preview Play).
8. FIXED Adding Multiple Files From Singers Dialog With Key Change - If there was a key change on the first selected song, when multiple songs are added to the Playlist they all received the same key change as the first song. Now each song is added with its own key change setting if changed.
9. FIXED DUR Field Counted -10 to -15 - This happened in Auto> mode with Remove Silence Mode enabled. Now the DUR field (showing the Auto Play Delay) counts down from the Auto Delay value to zero between songs.
10. FIXED Audio Files Would Not Play - We fixed a bug that caused indexed KMH Audio files to not play when Visualization was enabled in the Tools menu > Show Display > Intermission view.
11. FIXED Songs Added By Singers Button Close Hoster - Songs loaded to the playlist using the Singers button dialog would play, but closed Hoster when each finished. Also, they appeared with "Unavailable" Status the next time Hoster ran.
12. FIXED Consecutive Videos Failed to Play in Auto Mode - If you put 2 videos in the playlist to play one after the other it crashed when the second one started playing.

V5.01 - Released May 9, 2011

1. NEW Genre - Merengue, Soca, Chutney.
2. NEW Language - Hindi.
3. FIXED Random Crashes Due to Editing Playlist Fields - We discovered that the basic Windows "Fopen" command randomly failed when the Singer Display or Marquee Display control files were opened to rebuild them after Playlist changes. Our fix should prevent crashing in the future.

V5.00 - Released April 25, 2011

This release contains 17 New, 11 Changed, 10 Fixed, and 2 Removed features. Due to Microsoft changing the way Windows work, which has never happened before, your existing 4.32 or prior version may experience problems when you upgrade Windows. We have fixed all the problems that have been reported.

Hoster 5.00 is ready for use. Since November 3, 2010 we released 19 Beta Test versions for our international testing team, with a total of 232 changes made over the past 5 months. Bugs were reported and all were fixed. Features were added, polishing suggestions made, and the final "elegance" applauded. Our testers are now running their shows with it. However, because any major software release from any company can have bugs, we are including Version 4.32 (Full or Lite). If a bug should appear in 5.00 during a show, you can run 4.32 in seconds, then report the problem in the Video Hoster 5.00 Bugs and it will be fixed in V5.01.

Hoster Screen Changes

The screen has minimal changes from V4.32 to add new features you asked for.

1. NEW "Sync" Slider - While playing, adjusting this slider changes the lyrics sync with the music.
2. NEW Background Color - Choose any background color for all screens and dialogs used during a show.
3. NEW 99 Instabuttons - When the Instabutton line above the Playlist window is full, new rows are created and buttons move to them. Adjusting the screen width adjusts the button rows.
4. NEW Playlist Columns - BookID, Brand and DiscID columns were added.
5. CHANGED "Key Change" Buttons - The -5 to +5 buttons change the key with one mouse click.
6. CHANGED Preview Display - When docked into the Hoster screen other applications appear over it. When undocked and floating it is on top of other applications.
7. CHANGED "Disc" Button - Renamed to "Singers Disc" to better describe its function.
8. FIXED Crash Editing Playlist Singers Field - This field is now edit only with no drop-down "names list". Editing the field corrects the Playlist, but not the Singers Database. It no longer crashes Hoster.
9. FIXED Playlist Dur(ation) Field Counted Negative - This happened only in Remove Silence mode. It now counts down and ends at zero.
10. FIXED Enter & Tab Keys - These and other keys now work while a Video plays.
11. FIXED "Singers Disc" Dialog - When adding a track from a Singers Disc, if you selected a Key change, the Track and Title fields would clear. They now remain as you set them.
12. FIXED Crash On Startup with Windows XP - In the Show Display Intermission View, only in Windows XP with the latest Windows upgrades, if this was unchecked Hoster would crash. It is fixed.
13. FIXED Crash Randomly During Shows with Windows XP - We believe the "Always On" problem above was causing these random crashes during a show.

Songs Database Related Changes

1. CHANGED Import Songs Menu - Instead of showing its menu of 3 commands now shows the Tools menu Songs Database dialog with a button to run every function that changes the Songs Database.
2. CHANGED Index CD Tracks Screen - Folders in the Excluded Folders list in the Build Database dialog cannot be selected.
3. NEW Index Files as either KMH or KMA - In the Index HD Files Screen, you can now select to index files using the KMH or KMA format. Clicking either button activates the Type buttons below that they can index. Both can index MP3+G, WMA+G, ZIP, MP3 and WMA. KMH cannot index BIN, WAVG or WAV files, while KMA cannot index Video files.
4. CHANGED Table & Artist Drop Down Lists - These lists are used in the "Index HD Files", "Import CD Tracks", and "Edit Songs" dialogs. In prior versions they were created when the dialogs opened by merging your Songs database with the Import Database tables. This could take minutes with 20,000+ songs in the Songs Database. We now only use the Import Database tables. The dialogs now appear instantly while the tables open in background.
5. REMOVED Index Hard Drive Files Screen "Auto-Complete Lists" Checkbox - This enabled/disabled the Artist and Title fields drop down lists, which are now always enabled.
6. FIXED Crash in Import HD Files - In this screen, when the Import Files button was clicked it would show the "Hoster has encountered a problem..." error and shut down. We found and fixed the cause.

New Build Database Dialog

Some users were confused how to "index" their songs into the Songs Database, instead adding them with the K-oke, Audio, Video buttons. Others found it difficult to create a Backup Computer with a Songs Database identical to their Show Computer. This new dialog automates the indexing for you, while preserving existing assigned BookIDs in KMH and KMA files.

1. NEW Build Database Dialog - This allows you to select a folder and either index only its songs into the Songs Database, or index songs in it and all sub-folders below it (recursive scanning). It allows selecting what Karaoke, Audio and Video file types to index. For example, selecting E:/ drive indexes all folders that contain one or more selected song types (ignores other file types) and their sub-folders. When done, your Songs Database contains all selected song types on E: drive. You can index other whole drives, or only folders with your songs.
   
   It adds all indexed folders into the Indexed Folders list just like the prior "Build Songs Database list, and skips all folders in the Excluded Folders list.
   
   Indexing in this dialog creates a KMH file for each found selected type. These files hold the Title, Artist, Brand... song parameters as well as a unique BookID. For those with custom BookID number schemes, this dialog allows you to manually control the numbering range assignments.
2. NEW Excluded Folders List - Since the unattended Build Database operation can index folders that may include audio or video files you don't want (such as tada.wma, or other system sounds), after indexing you can select and "exclude" folders to skip over in the future. The Excluded Folders list and its controls appears by clicking the "Excluded Folders" button.
3. NEW Opens MP3 and WMA Headers - When these selected file types are indexed, their headers are opened to obtain Title, Artist and other fields. If the header Title field is blank, the filename is added into the Title field. You can index selected Karaoke (MP3+G, ZIP, WMA+G), Audio (MP3, WMA) and Video (13 types) files at the same time. To preserve BookIDs in existing KMA and KMH files they are indexed in a first pass, then all other file types are indexed and assigned new BookIDs in a second pass.

Edit Songs Dialog

1. NEW BookID Root and Track# Fields - You can change a songs BookID and Track number in Single view. Clicking "Apply Changes" verifies your entries and makes the change or warns to enter different values.
2. NEW Remove Silence On Selected Songs - Start and End points can be set only on selected songs, as well as adjusting existing points.
3. CHANGED Dialog Height - This now runs on Netbooks and Laptops with 600x800 display resolution.
4. CHANGED Title and Artist Instructions - "?" buttons beside the "Title" & "Artist" fields give formatting examples to follow.
5. CHANGED Type Field - The prior green on black Type field is now a column in the Results window.
6. FIXED Brand Field - Clicking the Apply Changes button once now changes the Brand, not twice as before.

Search Dialog

1. CHANGED Size and Appearance - The smaller size is easier to keep open beside the Playlist. You can resize it vertically and horizontally to see all the columns.
2. NEW Preview Play - You can now select and play a song when a second audio port is installed.
3. NEW Dur: Field - This field is now a column showing the song durations.
4. NEW Double-Click a Song - This new function adds the song to the Playlist.
5. CHANGED Match Field - Just enter some characters, then press the Tab or Enter keys or click outside the field to trigger the search.
6. CHANGED Key Change - The -5 to +5 buttons are back. After adding a song to the Playlist, the Key Change returns to "0".
7. FIXED Brand Field - The Brand field is now included when songs add to the Playlist.

New Singers Dialog Launched from Search Dialog

1. NEW Singer Songs Dialog - This appears when you click the new icon to the right of the Singers field in the Search dialog. It shows songs added for that Singer in the Singers Database. It can resize and move.
2. NEW Add Songs to Playlist - Double-clicking a song adds it to the Playlist, in addition to the Add button.

General Changes

1. NEW Windows DPI Resizes Dialogs - For those with challenged eye sight, changing the Windows Dots Per Inch (DPI) resolution changes the text size in all dialogs.
2. NEW Genre Additions - 2000's, Ambience, Background, Cha Cha, Classic Rock, Fox trot, Funeral, Gospel, Hymn, Inspirational, March, Mood, Party, Quickstep, Rock, Tango, and Modern Waltz.
3. NEW Unhide Messages Command - This resets dialogs and messages "Don't show this message again" checkbox so you see them again.
4. CHANGED "Add Track" Buttons - In all dialogs this is now "Add" allowing smaller dialogs.
5. CHANGED Audio & Video File Remove Silence - Trying to remove silence on these file Types now shows a message. Earlier it would not process these files nor tell you why.
6. REMOVED "Include Songs Database" Checkbox - This was removed from the; Import CD Tracks screen, Import Hard Drive Files screen, Edit Songs dialog, and the Tools menu Options dialog. The Import Database Artist and Title tables populate the drop down lists in these screens and dialogs.