Ableton Live does not have built in CDG support. But since Live 6 it lets you import Quicktime videos and play/manipulate them. There are some big limitations, but you can do the basics of KJ’ing no problem. The hard part is converting your CDG tracks to a video format Live can work with.
Here’s a quick guide on how to do that: How to covert karaoke files to video (Mac, Windows, Linux)
Pick one of the methods above (the one I can vouch for is kJams, see:Best Karaoke software for Mac) and try a test video. Once you’ve converted the video, import to Ableton Live by dragging it into the main window, where it says “Drop Files and Devices Here”.
If the file appears in the list of clips, you’re good. Now hit the “TAB” key to switch to Live’s “arrangement” video (more on this later) and drag the video into the main middle space (in this view, it isn’t marked “Drag Files… etc”).
The video should appear as another colored rectangle, and if you hit “Spacebar” in Live (or press play in the top row of buttons) a video window should appear and the track should start playing.
If you can’t drag the file into Live. Or if the video is garbled, that means the file is in a format that Live can’t work with. Go back and try one of the other tools in the guide above, or try tweaking that tool’s options. (The goal is a an h.264 video file in an .m4v wrapper. If the video plays in iTunes, it should work in Live.)
Note: Live 6 lets you work with video, but only Live 7 and later let you export your work. So you can perform with Live 6 but you will need Live 7 for making Youtube videos, etc. Since Live 6 was the last version with a stable crack for Mac (at the time of this writing) this is important to remember.
And Live is not a KJ application, it’s a universal music swiss army knife. So lots of basic features for queueing singers are not things you’ll find in Live, or you won’t find them in the obvious place.
Here are some tips that will let you run a karaoke night using (exclusively) Ableton Live:
- To keep track of requests: Create a track in the session view called “playlist” and list your requests there, searching and copying them from your bookmarked folder of karaoke videos using CTRL/CMD-C and CTRL/CMD-V for copy and paste respectively.
- To queue a song: Copy it to the arrangement view. Use the “CTRL/CMD-F” key (”Follow”) to skip ahead to where the playback position is.
- Don’t always use Warp: If warp doesn’t work, or if the song is a dramatically different tempo, don’t bother using it. But remember, if you don’t use it you won’t be able to segue to the next song.
- Don’t worry about mixing everything. Lots of times end-to-end is totally okay.
- To minimize stuttering in the video: See this post on Dealing with large libraries in Ableton Live
- To change the key of a song: Find the “transpose” knob in the “Sample” section of “Clip View” and tweak it!
Live gets even more useful when you run your microphones through Live. Keep reading: Running mics through live for compression and live recording.
There are lots of good tutorials, some of the best come with Ableton (the manual, and the included tutorial files that demonstrate basic concepts in the app itself with instructions).
Definitely read the manual, particularly sections on Concepts, Session View, Arrangement View, Clip View, and Tempo Control and Warping. And here are some tutorial’s I found with a quick look around:
They’re both pretty basic, so have a look, try some stuff out, and then dive into Ableton’s own tutorials. The things you’ll need to get a handle on are:
- warping
- crossfade
- zooming / moving around in the clips and the arrangement.
- adding effects
- moving between clips in session and arrangement views
- recording
(this is part of a my upcoming tutorial on KJ’ing in Ableton)
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:
- Click on one of the 3 numbered folder icons in the upper half of the left sidebar.
- Browse to the directory where your karaoke tracks are
- Click the down arrow next to the directory name, and select “Bookmark Current Folder” from the dropdown menu.
- Click the “search” icon to the right of the folder name
- 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.
- 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.
There are two karaokecrime events coming up this week.
karaoke-in-a-library@ the Olneyville Library in Providence, RI Wednesday the 1 from 5:00pm to 7:30pm
karaokecrime megamix blastoff@ The Firehouse Eastern Ave, WorcesterSaturday July 4 (USA!) after all the other bands
Hope to see you there. The thing on Saturday will be mindblowing. And the thing on Wednesday will be karaoke in a library! Sssh!
I’m working on putting together a tour for this summer. June, July, August. Anywhere east of Chicago including Canada.
I’ve played small house shows, electronic indy-pop shows in coffee shops, packed club nights, big providence loft parties, and the opening of a clothing store in Sao Paulo Brazil. So it’s really flexible and always fun and screamy/dancey.
I’ll have a backpack and laptop. I travel light and sleep best in hammocks. If you know a band, a scene, a house, a city, a club night, or a party I should know about, let me know.
kj at karaokecrime dot com
It’s dark, it’s 3am on Friday night. Picture me being smooshed into that monitor by a roaring brazilian mass.
From a karookecrime set at Neu in São Paulo, Brazil. Thanks Dago Donato and Quinn for setting this up! Dago was afraid everybody would be “too cool” but he believed in me, and everybody got stupid! My friend Paula almost got into a physical fight for the microphone!
I met this Canadian lady Quinn, and her friend Dago (above) got me a Karaokecrime set at his Friday night party in one of the funnest São Paulo clubs: Neu.
The place is a big house, on a street next to a park where all the houses were rented as offices, so they can make tons of noise at night. The place was pretty packed when I went on. Coincidentally a band from Boston who knew my ex-Garrison friends was playing that night. That was pretty nuts.
I didn’t use a projector, just my laptop and the big widescreen monitor I’d used for the Cachalote Party. The start was a little choppy, since the latency of the mics running through ableton was waayyy to high. But everybody was drunk and yelling enough not to notice. The highlight was either Umbrella or Kids / Stand by Me.
Somebody has videos of a million Brazilians smashing into me and singing along, but I’m still waiting on that. I hope they’re good!
Proud to announce KaraokeCrime #1: Brazilian Girls Sing Karaoke Hits.
Recordings from last month’s party in Sao Paolo. I find it surprisingly listenable, and completely awesome. Favorite track.
photo credit
