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.