Published on
January 1, 2009 in
Karaoke Setup and Karaoke Software.
Tags: advice, cdg players, free software, Karaoke Software, karaokenight, kj, kjams, linux, mac, pykaraoke, setup, winamp, windows.
I’ve got three posts on the subject. But the winners are kJams (Mac), Winamp + CDG plugin (Windows), and PyKaraoke (Linux).
If you use both Mac and Windows, t’s a tough call between kJams and Winamp. If you’re going to be actively updating your library and your song books, kJams is it.
If you want to set things up once, never think about it again, and spend your karaoke night hitting on people, use Winamp.
Now, without further ado, the verdicts:
The best karaoke software for Mac OS X: kJams
The best karaoke software for Windows: Winamp
The best karaoke software for Linux: PyKaraoke
Winamp isn’t even karaoke software. That’s probably what makes it so awesome.
Battle tested in the dormitories of our youth, on the Pentiums of yesteryear, Winamp + CDG plugin is lightning fast and un-fuckwithable. Also, everybody knows how it works, making it easy to enlist helpers (or let singers browse on their own). Here’s how to get it running…
Continue reading ‘Best karaoke software for Windows’
This is an easy post. If you want to run a karaoke night off a Mac, kJams is the best way to do it.
You’ll need to register for $40 to create playlists of more than 3 songs. In a pinch, you could always keep the playlist on slips of paper, I suppose. But the developer is a great guy so it’s money well spent.
Continue reading ‘Best Karaoke software for Mac’
The Mac karaoke player kJams is amazing, I depend on it all the time, and the guy who makes it has been extremely nice and responsive ever since I got in touch.
But, its iTunes-like interface makes the most basic part of running a karaoke night awkward and annoying. iTunes is great, but for karaoke the Winamp-style interface is better.
Continue reading ‘The one problem with kJams’
Published on
January 1, 2009 in
GETTING STARTED!, Karaoke Setup and Karaoke Software.
Tags: ableton live, abletonkj, Karaoke Software, kj, kj as vj, live, mashup, vj, vocal effects.
Coming soon… oh god, it’s so good.
If you want to do karaoke in linux, or using only free software, you’ve got two options, PyKaraoke and VLC.
For running a karaoke night, PyKaraoke is better. But you probably have VLC already, and it’s available for Mac.
Continue reading ‘Free, open source karaoke software’
External hard drives are a pain. If you’re a laptop musician, or if you use your external HDD for anything other than automated backup, you should buy a huge internal hard drive as soon as you have $120 in your pocket.
Seriously, first purchase.
Continue reading ‘The first thing every laptop musician should do with $120 (buy a big internal hard drive)’
For the past couple years I’ve been somewhat obsessed with karaoke.
The problem is, part of me gets bored with it really quickly (beers, bars, kids, songs) and I want to fuck everything up a bit and take it to the next level. One thing leads to another, and we get progressions like…
Karaoke mashups…
Sing like glue for contest, win contest, learn like glue like really, really well and combine with other buy out riddim songs (like red red wine or two princes / nuttin no go so) into a sort of mainstream buy out medley. Start learning other dancehall verses for karaoke mashup purposes (like soul survivor / gun session or cham’s ghetto story over what happened to that boy or stupid stuff like Stay Fly over Ghostbusters). Then I worked out a super fun solo performance and was on the verge of going on tour with it.
Ableton Live – driven karaoke dance party…
Started with karaoke night in a fun bar. Songs like We’re in Heaven spur short, violent dance parties but there’s no way to cue or mix songs. So, I convert a bunch of CDG’s into videos and make a megamix in Ableton Live. Then you can do a fun DJ set that is built around people in the crowd singing, and maybe even rock Autotune.
KaraokeCrime will be an umbrella for exploring these threads and others, with videos and howtos. Hopefully I’ll be able to involve some other karaoke explorers, and it’ll never stop. Uau!
The first reason is that I love performance. I love performing solo. I would love being a singer in a band. That is, I *have* been a few times and I *did* love it. But for a few reasons I know about and some I don’t it’s never been something I’ve done in a sustained way. Enter karaoke.
(Karaoke haters will eat this up—“Hah! It’s performance without originality!”—but fooey. Performance is always original, and never original. If you’re on stage, somebody else carved that nitch out for you, and you’re just filling it—kicking ass hopefully.
The second reason, is that I love pop music, and Karaoke is an advanced ritual for extracting and purifying pop’s poppy essence and shooting it into my veins. 
Pop songs don’t exist in an artist’s vision, they exist in the collective mind of a mass audience (dig?). So if that’s true, pumping pop songs through a combination of a timed text file, a drunk person’s memory, and the musical imagination of outsourced studio musicians on a tight budget isn’t distortion, it’s a filter!
The classic notion of karaoke is of people mangling songs. But while this happens sometimes, it isn’t the norm. More often, people pick music they love, and while they might forget half of it, their synapses start firing like crazy in the parts they love the most. This energy shows through, and it’s like going over all the song’s juiciest lines with an emotional highlighter.
I’ve seen mangled songs. But it’s happened so many more times that a karaoke performance has showed me what I love about a song.
