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:
