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.

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.

For running a karaoke night, PyKaraoke is better. But you probably have VLC already, and it’s available for Mac.

PyKaraoke

PyKaraoke is a super simple karaoke client written in Python. There’s an installer for Windows but on Mac you have to build it yourself, which isn’t worth trying. On linux just install it however you install stuff; it’s packaged for ubuntu.

The interface is aggressively simple, with the perfect two-pane interface. PyKaraoke will look inside zip files, making it more convenient to maintain than Winamp (see “Best free karaoke software”). It doesn’t feel as fast and indestructible as Winamp, and I’m sure it has more bugs. But it does everything I need, and the developers are nice and responsive if you have a problem. Thanks to its simplicity, I’d use it over KaraFun any day.

Also, PyKaraoke plays .kar files, so if you’re planning on using those, it’s a better bet than Winamp, where .kar playback uses something other than the CDG plugin.

VLC

VLC is the fuck-all-yall-ima-play-anything media player made by French university students. Through the magic of open source software, some pleading on the VLC forum piqued a programmer’s interest and they added it to the latest release. VLC has an okay system for managing playlists and libraries, but it doesn’t look inside zip files. VLC doesn’t play .kar files (MIDI files with timed karaoke text) but it plays every video format under the sun.

I wouldn’t use this to run a karaoke night. But it’s available for Mac, Windows, any flavor of Linux, and you probably use it already anyway! (If not, you should!)