Your rig should never need the internet

Ask a working KJ about venue Wi-Fi and you will get a story. The router behind the bar that reboots at 10pm. The captive portal that logs you out every hour. The pub with one bar of signal in the corner where you set up. The night the whole street lost internet and the show went on anyway because nothing you were doing needed it.

That last one is the design goal, and it is the single decision everything else in FireballKaraoke hangs off.

The rule

The plugin never requires a connection, and it never requires us.

Not for a licence check. Not for your song library. Not for the rotation, the singer profiles, the saved keys, the audience screen, the party features, or the sound board. You can install FireballKaraoke on a laptop that has never been online, run karaoke on it every week for a year, and never notice we exist.

That is not a limitation we are working around until we get to the good bit. It is the good bit.

Why it is written that way

Software that needs a network to work has quietly borrowed something from you: the assumption that the network will be there. In an office that is a fair bet. In the back room of a bar on a Friday, it is a bet you lose several times a year, and you lose it in front of a room full of people who are waiting on you.

The moment your rotation lives on somebody's server, a bad router becomes a bad night. And it stops being a technical problem: it becomes you, standing in front of forty people, explaining why nothing is happening.

So the show state lives on your machine, in files you can see, and is written to disk as it changes. If your laptop dies, the show is on disk. If the internet dies, the show does not know or care.

Then what is the cloud for?

The parts that genuinely cannot work any other way.

A singer's phone cannot talk to your laptop across a bar without something in the middle. A remote in your pocket needs a route to the rig. Singers who want their history to follow them between venues need somewhere for that history to live. Backups are worthless if they are on the machine you are backing up.

Those are real problems and they need a network, so they live on FireballKaraoke.com. And they are all additive: switch them off, or lose them mid show, and what you are left with is exactly the plugin, still working.

What that looks like when it breaks

Say the venue's internet drops at 9:40, mid rotation.

The music keeps playing. The rotation is untouched. The audience screen carries on. You keep approving, reordering, and running the night from the laptop exactly as you would have before you ever subscribed. Requests stop arriving on your phone, because they physically cannot, and the request page tells singers to see the KJ instead of pretending everything is fine.

When the connection comes back, the rig reconnects itself. Nothing is lost, nothing needs restarting, and nobody had to think about it.

The incentive nobody talks about

The commercial temptation in this business is obvious: make the software need the service, and the subscription sells itself. Plenty of tools work that way, and it is very good for the people selling them.

It is a bad deal for the person holding the microphone. The failure mode of that design is a host standing in front of a room apologising for a router, and no host should ever be put in that position by a software decision made in an office. So the plugin is free and offline forever, and the cloud has to earn its money by being genuinely useful rather than by holding a Friday night hostage.

Take the plugin. It costs nothing, it works with the Wi-Fi off, and it will never ask you for anything.