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.
Karaoke players (like Winamp or VLC) can’t read inside .zip files, so you need to unzip all your karaoke to use them. Turns out, if you have a big library there are just too many files to use the unix wildcard *.
And you get an error like: -bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long
Here’s how to move your huge library of karaoke songs to one folder, and unzip them. It’s well worth the trouble to be able to use Winamp (which is super-simple and solid for karaoke nights).
Continue reading ‘How to unzip a ton of karaoke tracks (Mac / Linux)’
I bought a cheap USB sound card (the Behringer U Control) so that I could queue songs in Ableton while another song was playing (a basic move when you’re DJing). The trick is to use it at the same time as your internal output, using ASIO4ALL for Windows or Aggregate Device Editor for Mac.
Audio interfaces with more than one output are way more expensive, so this is the cheap way. .
ASIO4ALL in Windows worked awesome. But on Mac in it kept crapping out after a few minutes. I’d get a hideous crackling sound out of the audio interface.
The solution: set your internal soundcard as the “Clock” (whatever that means) and go into the Sound Preference Pane and set the Aggregate Device as your audio output. The second part is important.
Also, I noticed that setting your internal line-in as an input in Ableton helped, or at least it reset the problem when it occured. And once I fixed it, I still noticed temporary distortionwhen other applications (like Firefox, iTunes, Mail) were active.
General observation: It shocks me, when Mac is the platform of choice for so many audio professionals, that this shit is so janky. Seriously.
Karafun is one of the most popular karaoke players for Windows. Here’s why it sucks:
- It’s slow and bulky
- Importing a large library crashes my karaoke laptop
- Having more than a certain number of songs in the playlist crashes it too.
- The download store uses a proprietary format (.kfn)
- Songs cost 3 euro ($4.50 once this funny currency crisis blows over).
The only fun thing about it is that it plays funny video effects behind the karaoke lyrics. But with winamp you can run your favorite visualizations from 1998 around the lyrics, so whatevs.
Published on
January 4, 2009 in
Karaoke Setup.
Tags: advice, cd, cdg, discs, history, lowtech, mirc, old, oldschool, painintheass, plastic, torrent, torrents, waste.
CD+G’s are karaoke CDs (see wikipedia entry). Moral of the story: don’t fuck with them.
You’ll just want everything on a laptop anyway, and many CD-ROM drives (like the ones found in most Mac laptops) won’t even read CD+G’s.
You still see lots of karaoke DJ’s using CDs out of habit. But requiring singers to write down disk and track numbers on pieces of paper is such a drag.
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that even if you inherit a large collection of discs, you’re better off selling them to some schmuck (or microwaving them one by one) and hitting the torrent sites and/or setting up mIRC. It might seem like a waste, but you’ll burn more time in the long run dealing with CD+G’s.
Unless you know somebody who has one, getting a big karaoke library will take time. But in a pinch, you could run a perfectly good karaoke night with no library, downloading songs on the fly.
The easiest way would be using a Mac with kJams and its built in store (powered by Tricerasoft). Songs are $1-$2. Just hit up each singer per song (in some places, like Brazil, most karaoke is pay-for-play).
On Windows, the options aren’t as rosy. You could use the Tricarasoft player and its built-in store. Or you could use the Tricerasoft or Buykaraokedownloads web stores with Winamp or PyKaraoke.
There’s a free option too: download using mIRC. Set up is tricky, but I made a step by step guide: Free karaoke music (using mIRC). Downloads won’t be as fast, but they’ll be fast enough. The selection will be just as good if not better–there are a few people with huge libraries sharing consistently.
The only hitch is that the wifi router at the venue will need to have UPnP turned on, or you’ll need to use your own 3g card. Make sure to test first.
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’
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’
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)’
