The first official karaokecrime.com show happened in Providence last Thursday at Matthewson Street. The Dance Troupe raised a ton of money for their tour, and the danceparty / performance was awesome.

I’m posting the karaoke megamix exactly as I ran it last night. Ableton crapped out on me yesterday before the show, so I didn’t even have time to mix it. But whatever, I’m posting as is while I’m excited. My favorite part is the “Go DJ” verse over “Love is Gone”.   

Makes me teary. Still lookin for a good way to post 10 minute plus videos that are fair-use heavy. In the meantime:

KaraokeCrime Megamix 1 (Quicktime)

Here’s how–for Mac, Windows, and Linux;

With kJams (Mac): Right click on videos, click “Export QuickTime” and choose a destination folder. You need to register ($40) to convert more than 10 videos at a time. Video quality is great.

With Power CD+G to Video Converter (Windows): Also costs $40 to register; not useful in trial mode.

With cdg2video (linux): you’ve got to build it yourself, no Ubuntu packages, only Gentoo ebuild. Free as in freedom, baby.

With PyKaraoke (Windows and Linux): There’s a “convert to mpg” option. Haven’t tested it, but if it’s broken they’ll fix it.

Now, there should be a way to do this for free on all platforms with VLC. VLC is supposed to be able to transcode any format it can play into a range of formats (including Quicktime, h264, etc). Plus it’s scriptable, so if you can convert one file, you can convert a whole library.

But I tried all the options I could think of and couldn’t get it to work. The resulting videos would play in VLC, but with errors in iTunes. Ableton Live must’ve picked up on those errors in its pre-analysis and wouldn’t even try to import them.

Right now I’m happy with kJams, so if anyone finds the magic parameters, let me know.

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!