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 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’
If you want to do karaoke in linux, or using only free software, you’ve got two options, PyKaraoke and VLC.
For running a karaoke night, PyKaraoke is better. But you probably have VLC already, and it’s available for Mac.
Continue reading ‘Free, open source karaoke software’
