Thinking big about karaoke. Democratizing tools, breaking rules.
I just found what looks like a karaoke mp3 blog: freekaraokemusic.blogspot.com. Right now they’ve only posted torrents, but it seems promising.
Since it’s really the only good karaoke source I’ve been able to find so far, I just added it as a sidebar widget (to your right).
How do Karaoke DJ’s share songs? When I started this, I was baffled.
The karaoke scene is small enough that it almost seems like internet hasn’t hit it yet. You can’t find karaoke tracks on Gnutella (using Acquisition) or Soulseek. There aren’t any mp3 blogs for karaoke (yet–more on that later). You can find karaoke torrents on the Pirate Bay but it’s not at all comprehensive.
But the case for filesharing is so compelling it must be happening somewhere.
I was working off this even more baffling comment from a determined but non-tech-savvy friend of mine along the lines of “oh yeah, I paid $40 for this program that said I could download any karaoke song, and it was really hard to set up, but when I got it working it worked great.”
It sounded like one of those scams where they sell Limewire for $40, but I had no notion what it was they were bottling and selling.
Anyway, some Googling later and I found kmp3s.com, a site made by the karaoke community on the #karaoke+mp3s IRC channel. Turns out people are using a bunch of scripts for the old-standby Windows IRC client into a napstery arrangement where everybody can search everybody else’s library. Bootleg as all hell, but it works and it’s totally free (though if that company can get my friend Nancy up and running with this rickety setup they deserve every penny).
Folks in the IRC channel (#karaoke+mp3s on Undernet) even went to the trouble of putting together good tutorials. So one day I fired up my Windows laptop, left my low tolerance for figuring out bullshit at the threshold, and pushed through to the other side. Here goes:
mIRC works great for finding individual tracks, but because most people will only let you download 50-75 songs per day, you’ll need to use Bittorrent to get all the classics.
Here’s what to do:
If anyone knows of other good sources for karaoke torrents, feel free to post in the comments.
Karaoke download stores are useful for finding individual tracks. All these stores use standard formats (zip/mp3g) and are DRM free. They are faster, and much easier to set up than downloading songs the free way.
They’re also reliable enough for use “live” during a karaoke night when you don’t have a song (just hit the singer up for a couple bucks). You could even use online stores to run a karaoke night with no library at all. Reviews after the jump.
This guide will show you how to download virtually any karaoke song for free, using MiRC and Omenserve/Autoget. I owe a huge thank you to all the folks on the #karaoke+mp3s channel for making kmp3s.com–that tutorial is the foundation for this one.
These tools are pretty old-school, and setting them up is a pain. But it’s worth the trouble to download karaoke tracks on demand. For KJs, this is a must.
MiRC is Windows only, but Mac users can run it in Parallels (that’s what I do) and this guide will cover that.
Free Karaoke Music