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).

Open up Terminal. Type “cd Music/Karaoke/CDG” or whatever to get into your karaoke folder.

To copy to one folder:

mkdir ../onefolder/

find . -exec cp “{}” ../onefolder \; -print

To unzip all:

cd ../onefolder/

find . -exec unzip -o “{}” \; -print

To delete all (careful with this! If you’re not careful you could delete your entire hard drive!)

find ../onefolder/ -name “*.zip” -exec rm “{}” \; -print

If you don’t understand how terminal commands work, just use Finder and Spotlight to do the last step.

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.

1. It’s slow and bulky
2. Importing a large library crashes my karaoke laptop
3. Having more than a certain number of songs in the playlist crashes it too.
4. The download store uses a proprietary format (.kfn)
5. 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.

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.

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.

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

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…

Setting up Winamp:

1. Download Winamp  
2. Do a full install, but uncheck everything on the “Get the Most out of Winamp” screen. Choose “Winamp Classic” skin.
3. Close the EQ, click the menu button in the top left corner and click “Media Library”
4. Close the various media library panes until you just have a search field and a list, and attach it to the side of the player (see below)
5. Unzip your music to .cdg & .mp3 (winamp)
6. Drag your karaoke music folder into your library.

Install the CDG plugin:

1. Quit Winamp
2. Download the CDG plugin
3. Run the installer

When you restart Winamp and play a karaoke track, a window should show up, like this:

If you right-click on the video window, you can make it bigger, or make it full screen.

Now, go to Menu -> Options -> Media Library and change the dropdown from “Plays Selected Item(s)” to “Enqueues Selected Item(s)”. Now you can add songs to the playlist by double-clicking or hitting enter, and it’s harder to interrupt the song that’s playing.

Bonus Trippiness: Go to Menu -> Options -> Plugins -> Visualization and under “Fullscreen Settings” choose your second monitor as the display adapter and in the bottom left check “Desktop Mode”. Then if you set the lyrics window to partially occupy the screen, Winamp trippiness will display around the borders. Eat it, Karafun!

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.

The iTunes innovation

iTunes’s central innovation as a player was to move away from the playlist-centric interface pioneered by Winamp. When mp3s were a novelty and you had a few hundred random singles, listening to your mp3s meant making a playlist, so the first mp3 player was built around on-the-fly playlists. As people started listening to all of the music on their computer, the more conventional sorting (by artist, and by album) reasserted itself. iTunes recognized that, and built everything around the listbox. What Ian Rogers wryly calls the “spreadsheet that plays music”, works great for 95% of people 95% of the time. The other (funnier) innovation that iTunes made was “oh yeah, normal people won’t give a fuck about skins”, but that’s another story.

iTunes moved away from on-the-fly playlists

iTunes keeps playlists of course, but recasts them as something you use sometimes, not something you do every time you listen to music. And since you can assume the user likes their music, it’s no big deal if iTunes just keeps on going when it gets to the end of the album. Like, whatever. It’ll just play the next album by that artist, or go from Queen to Queensryche.

But for Karaoke nights, that’s the whole game!

The thing is, when you’re doing a karaoke night, the old Winamp interface is a much better fit to the task. First, a karaoke night is all about making a new playlist every time. People want a particular song. And after that song’s done, it’s better to have silence than to have the wrong song, or a song nobody wants (which is a jarring fuckup)..

Second, seeing the playlist is just as important as being able to add to it easily. People always wanna know who’s next. You always need to change somebody’s song or tweak the order (e.g. somebody’s out smoking a cigarette). So two side-by-side windows, for two equally important tasks, makes perfect sense.

KJams, and hoops.

KJams takes the iTunes road, and has to jump through hoops to address these basic tasks. On the one hand, it recognizes the importance of on-the-fly creation, so KJams lets you designate a “Target Playlist” where when you double click on any track it gets added to the target playlist. Okay, so this saves you having to drag and drop every time, but you still can’t *see* the playlist without switching to it.

And when you go up to the search field to find a song, you end up searching just the playlist instead of your whole library, so you have to click on the library and reenter the search. I’ve seen people do this hundreds of times, and I do it myself quite a bitThis is annoying in iTunes too, but in iTunes you spend less time making on-the-fly playlists. Come to think of it, when I’m DJ’ing out of iTunes I’ll open up my playlist in a separate Window to solve this problem. But in KJams you can’t do that yet.

So you could fix that by having searches always search the full library, but then you’re introducing another conceptual break. And you’d still have to close out the search to make the playlist reappear. Ugh.

Conclusion

Dave, you gotta switch to a two-window interface a la Winamp or PyKaraoke. Sure, being the “iTunes of Karaoke” for Mac makes the app familiar and gives it a certain cache. It might make some of the music-management UI better.

But it is such a ball-and-chain around your neck when you’re doing a karaoke night. When I first started using Winamp it was like walking on air, everything was so fast and required so few keystrokes.

Seriously, first purchase.

Here’s why:

1. More crap to carry around.
2. Sometimes you won’t have it on you.
3. You need a power supply or two USB ports and a special cable.
4. Which you’ll leave at home, or lose (or live in constant fear of this).
5. One more thing to set up / break down.
6. One more thing to accidentally unplug during your set.

$120 gets you a 500GB internal drive. You won’t have to lug an external to your set, and if you have an older laptop, your computer will just run faster.

On all Macbooks and the new (silver & black) Macbook Pro’s the hard drive is user-serviceable and it’s super easy to switch it out. If you’re nervous any mildly computer savvy friend could help.

On the old Macbook Pro you have to buy a special screwdriver and take apart your computer, but it’s not too hard. I followed this guide and it worked great: Upgrade Your MacBook Pro’s Hard Drive.

On Macs just use your external HDD and Time Machine to backup your stuff and move it over, just like you’d do with a new computer (you’ll need the DVD that came with your Mac too). It’s super easy.

After years of constantly having like 1GB free on my laptop, I finally did it, and it totally changed how I use my computer.

1. I never think twice about downloading something.
2. I’m not always needing to delete stuff.
3. I have all my music and karaoke stuff on me all the time.
4. Set up and break down is that much simpler.
5. Got a free USB port (I only have two).
6. I use my old external drive for Time Machine so I’ll never lose more than a few days of data ever again! When I think of all the awesome stuff I’ve lost from hard drive crashes, lost DVD backups, and stolen laptops it’s boggling.

So yeah, if you have $120, just get a big ass hard drive.