Help me figure out this Korean karaoke manual!

July 11, 2009 8:01 AM

Can you or anyone you know read Korean? Our favorite dive bar bought a Taijin Media Ziller TKR-880 karaoke machine, but the manual and menus are entirely in Korean and we can't figure out how to transfer songs to the unit via USB. Here's the manual. Rick Astley needs your help!
posted by eamondaly to technology (8 comments total)

The word usb only appears once in the manual, where it says, underneath, "mini-hard [drive] or smartcard." Does anything happen when you plug into the drive?
posted by Busoni at 10:28 AM on July 11

Nope. The USB card has an LED that lights on activity, and it does blink for a couple of seconds when inserted, but nothing happens on-screen and the songs don't appear in the songlist.
posted by eamondaly at 10:31 AM on July 11

I should add that the USB stick has both MIDI and KAR files on it. If there's any mention of file types in the manual, that'd be helpful to know, too.
posted by eamondaly at 10:32 AM on July 11

One last thing: this is the product page. Note that the second section, item 6 highlights the USB port, so it's got to be good for something.
posted by eamondaly at 10:47 AM on July 11

Did you happen to see the bit of English at the bottom of the third page of the manual?

Regardless, I'll see if I can get someone else with better Korean to look at it, though. The product page does list the USB port as one of its features, and it says you can update content through it.
posted by Busoni at 12:50 PM on July 11

I've already emailed you about this, but it looks practically impossible to transfer songs into this unit outside of Korea. Hence the big warnings in both English and Korean that this unit won't work outside of Korea.

The company's more recent models (e.g. Ziller S20) do not come with that warning, and have instructions on transferring MP3 format songs via USB port, although you still have to know enough Korean to navigate the Korean language menus.
posted by needled at 1:17 PM on July 11

Lacking time, I've only skimmed the manual, but it looks like you use a network connection to load songs on and off the machine. I can take a more thorough look later on, but it doesn't look good, sorry.
posted by smorange at 5:15 PM on July 11

After convincing the owner to let me take the unit home, I was able to read the internal hard drive and discovered that all the music is in a proprietary format unique to Taijin. End of the road, sadly.
posted by eamondaly at 12:15 PM on August 10