Moving your whole karaoke collection into Ableton Live

Once you have a video playing in Live, you can start converting your whole library (it will take a while). If you just want to make mashups and megamixes for performance later, I would recommend converting the videos as you need them.

But there’s no practical way to convert videos on the fly during a set, because Ableton’s video window disappears when you change focus (by far the most annoying limitation for people using video in Ableton). So if you want to run your karaoke night out of Ableton Live, or have your whole library available for use in a live performance, you’ll need to convert the whole thing.

Some tips:

• The best tool for this is kJams for Mac, but you’ll have to register it to convert more than 3 files at a time.
• Annoyingly (due to the disappearing video window constraint) you’ll have to browse your karaoke collection within Live, and Live will only see the video file names. So make sure all your filenames are consistently “Artist – Title – Album”. kJams is a good tool for this.
• Test songs as you’re going, since it’s possible your converter tool will have better success on some songs than others.
• Time how long each track takes to make sure conversion is practical. If it takes about 1 minute per track, 60,000 tracks is 1000 hours! If too slow, try a different tool or find a faster computer.
• Check the average size of each video to make sure you have enough space. Videos are about the same size as the unzipped CDG and mp3 file.  

Once you’ve got your whole karaoke collection converted to video, it’s time to tweak Live so that your collection is easy to access. First, for a basic primer, read the section “Managing Files and Sets” in the Ableton Live Manual (no seriously, read the manual, it’s one of the best ones I’ve ever seen and not the least bit intimidating).

To see your karaoke library:

1. Click on one of the 3 numbered folder icons in the upper half of the left sidebar.
2. Browse to the directory where your karaoke tracks are
3. Click the down arrow next to the directory name, and select “Bookmark Current Folder” from the dropdown menu.
4. Click the “search” icon to the right of the folder name
5. Start typing a search term, and hit enter. On your first search, it will take a while as it indexes the folder. After that it will be faster.
6. Drag a track into your “set” (Ableton’s name for your working document) and you’re good to go.

Important: One of the drawbacks in working with video in Ableton Live is that, while Ableton is super-optimized to never interrupt audio playback, video is not a priority. So sometimes when displaying or searching through very large lists of files (like a karaoke collection) or when adding a new file to the set, the video playback window will temporarily lock up. This sucks for karaoke situations, because 99% of singers will just pause and look dumb–even when they know all the words to a song by heart. In my experience, this problem is worse in Windows XP than on a Mac, and Ableton 8 seems better than in 6 and 7.

Here are some tips to avoid video playback lockup in Ableton:

• When adding tracks to your set, use your copy/paste keys rather than dragging. When dragging, the video playback problems happen as soon as you start hovering over your set with the file you’re going to add.
• When Ableton displays a huge list of files (50,000 karaoke tracks, say) video will lock up. Avoid this by bookmarking one directory and putting karaoke files in a subdirectory. That way, if you accidentally close the search window, it won’t display the full list and lock up video playback.
• In the preferences, under “File Folder”, make sure “Automatic rescan on each search” is turned off. Only rescan when you add new songs, since scanning/indexing is one of the things that locks up video playback.
• Try using a later version of Live, or a different OS. Mac is better than Windows on this stuff, and I would guess that Vista is better than XP.